Inside the four walls of therapists’ offices, patients are supposed to feel safe and at ease as they open up about their innermost feelings.
Anne Craig wasn’t exactly a therapist, yet she still gained her clients’ trust and allegedly “brainwashed” them into believing they were abused as children.
The Irish woman worked in Camberwell, located in South London, and was a self-proclaimed spiritual healer serving as a personal development coach.
Unlike others in her field, though, she offered her clients “the promise of healing.” Then, she allegedly manipulated them, took growing control over their lives, and falsely convinced them they’d suffered childhood trauma so severe that they cut off their own families.
One such client was Huey, who spent two years attending therapy sessions with Anne. By the end, she stopped speaking to all her friends and relatives, and the silence dragged on for six years.
“She had a God complex. She convinced me that my mother was taking photos of children with a camera for a [child predator] ring. I just broke down. I just remember going into this total space of collapse. I stopped being able to function,” Huey recalled of Anne.
How could a personal development coach pull off such a rouse? Apparently, Anne became enmeshed in her client’s lives, searching for (or planting) seeds of distress that weren’t really there.
In Huey’s case, she called her day-to-day “bonkers” when Anne was involved. She was instructed to write down all of her dreams as soon as she woke up each morning and spend hours analyzing them.
“By this point, I wouldn’t have had breakfast yet. So, I’d call her and ask her permission to eat. If it was a ‘no,’ it would be because I was ‘trying to use food to block my emotions,’ which would, in turn, block my ability to heal,” Huey explained.
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“So, I would carry on working for another hour or two.”
The interdependence between Huey and the life coach only grew, with her looking to Anne for advice on every little thing, as simple as when to sleep. She also claims that Anne made her fearful, saying she’d get cancer or even be assaulted if she failed to abide by her teachings.
Huey isn’t alone in her experiences, either. Another young woman named Fipsi was recommended to Anne, and initially, the personal development coach sounded “magical.”
“Anne Craig was a sort of healer-slash-counselor. From what I heard, it was all positive. ‘She’s amazing. She’s spiritual, and she can see things in us which we can’t even see in ourselves.’ It sounded magical and alluring,” Fispi detailed.
Then, after one of Fipsi’s friends, who was a client of Anne’s, mentioned her in a session, Anne supposedly had a dream about her and asked for the message to be passed along.
At that point, Fispi was intrigued and visited Anne for her first session, which lasted for hours in a pink room inside Anne’s townhouse.
“She told me she worked with the spirit world, and that she could see words floating above her clients’ heads that would be prompts for her from the spirit world and inform what we would be speaking about,” Fipsi said.
“For example, it was not unusual for her to fix me with those big brown eyes and say, ‘Today, we’re going to talk about your mother, Fipsi.’ And that was it.”
Upon leaving her first meeting with Anne, Fipsi actually felt levels of joy and hope she hadn’t experienced in a long time. This kick-started their string of sessions, which took place every couple of weeks and included some interesting techniques.
According to Fispi, the pair would speak for two hours at a minimum while she scribbled on paper using her left hand. Anne stated that it was important for her to use her left hand, as it was directly linked to her heart.
Meanwhile, the coach would ask her questions. And following their sessions, she was told to email Anne about all of her dreams, even if she had dozens per night.
“The sessions were always about the trauma that members of my family would be carrying in their DNA, like all humans in the whole world,” Fipsi remembered.
“This was her ethos. My family, like everybody, was carrying darkness in their DNA. And so the endless aim was to try and unburden ourselves from this trapped trauma.”
It took Fipsi about 12 hours of sessions with Anne before she finally revealed what she’d truly been struggling with: her orientation.
But while Anne was “kind” and non-judgmental about Fipsi’s feelings that she may not be straight, the coach later flat-out told her, “You’re not gay.”
Instead, Anne suggested Fipsi might’ve been questioning her orientation since she was a victim of childhood abuse.
“I would say, from that moment on, was really the beginning of the brainwashing into her entire belief system,” she noted.
Another client, Victoria Cayzer, tells a similar tale. While in her early twenties, she spent seven years seeing Anne, who allegedly said she could help “fix” her eating disorder.
Then, while interpreting one of Victoria’s dreams, Anne convinced her that she’d been abused by a close relative. This led her to cut contact with her family for a decade, and when they finally reconnected, the return was “painful” as Victoria worked to peel back all the lies.
It was early 2014 when Victoria’s parents hired lawyers and argued Anne had manipulated their daughter. Soon, the police also got involved and, after going to Anne’s home in October 2014, she was charged with fraud, administering a noxious substance, and occasioning psychological actual bodily harm.
Nonetheless, Anne strongly denied that she’d gotten her clients to believe lies about their childhoods. And in the end, all charges against Anne were dropped.
“The most horrendous thing was that at one point she said, ‘Mum, I know these things didn’t happen to me, but they might as well have, because Anne made me believe it.’ She made her life through it. What happened to Huey was coercive control,” Huey’s mother, Sarah, stated.
Still, Anne’s counsel, Daniel Jennings, told Metro that his client believes the “nefarious allegations” against her are meant to “cause her harm and damage.”
“These allegations, and those of a similar nature, have continuously been presented to Ms. Craig but, to date, have failed to be substantiated with any factual evidence. For the avoidance of any doubt, Ms. Craig vehemently denies all allegations that have been presented to her, and it is her position that there is no truth in any of the allegations,” Jennings said in his statement.
By Katharina Buczek
Katharina Buczek graduated from Stony Brook University with a degree in Journalism and a minor in Digital Arts. Specializing in... More about Katharina Buczek
