Harvey Weinstein’s “False Memory” Defense and its Shocking Origin Story

How Powerful Sex Offenders Manipulated the Field of Psychology

Last week in the Harvey Weinstein rape trial, the defense called to the stand expert witness Elizabeth Loftus, a researcher on the phenomenon of so-called “false memory.” This legal tactic, explicitly designed to discredit the testimony of sexual abuse survivors, has a sordid and astonishing history dating back to the 1980s and 90s, an era known to the psychology field as the “memory wars.”

The “memory wars” were essentially a war on sexual abuse survivors who dared to speak out in an era before #METOO. More specifically, the “memory wars” targeted a particular group of sexual abuse victims: Incest survivors.

Incest is one of the most common forms of sexual abuse, and yet — despite the gains of the #METOO movement — it remains conspicuously missing from the conversation. This is largely because the “false memory” defense that was created to silence incest survivors has somehow persisted, both in the public consciousness and in the field of psychology itself.

This essay will examine the history of the “false memory” defense and its far-ranging impacts. To fully explore the issue, readers will have to open their minds to the possibility that the field of modern psychology is entrenched in pseudoscientific propaganda created by alleged child abusers, that some of Freud’s most enduring theories were based on protecting incest perpetrators, and that during the Cold War, the CIA engaged in widespread sexual abuse of children. It sounds fantastical, I know. But, so did the Weinstein case when it first broke. I hope you’ll bear with me.

History of a Movement and a Countermovement

The silencing of sexual abuse survivors — and incest survivors in particular — is as old as time, but we have to start somewhere. Let’s begin in the 1960s and 70s, the era of Women’s Liberation, when women gathered in consciousness-raising groups to talk about their lives. In doing so, they discovered that they were not alone in their individual experiences, and that the condition of being female in a male-dominated world brought with it some common patterns of oppression — including sexual violence.

One of the branches of activism spawned by Women’s Lib was a revolutionary movement of incest survivors who began to come out and speak their truth — in feminist journals, in public gatherings called “speak-outs,” and eventually in legal actions. Every progressive movement triggers a backlash, as we saw when Trump rose to power after Obama’s tenure as the first black U.S. president. And in the 1980s and 90s, when incest abuse lawsuits began to gain steam, a furious and powerful backlash erupted and took the media by storm.

At the center of the backlash movement was an organization called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). Founded in 1992, FMSF was on its surface an “advocacy group” created by and for parents who’d been accused by their children of sexual abuse. The group’s supposed agenda was to provide support and fellowship to families that had been “destroyed” by accusations of incest. They launched a well-funded media campaign purporting the existence of an epidemic of “False Memory Syndrome” — not a scientifically researched condition, but rather a slogan concocted by accused parents to discredit the testimonies of their children. The campaign was highly effective, and the media eagerly gobbled it up. It eased the dissonance between an image of the “perfect American family” and an emerging consciousness of staggering rates of child sexual abuse (CSA) across the U.S. and worldwide.

Looking at FMSF literature now, their tactics are as transparent as Trump shouting “Fake News!” whenever he’s accused of wrongdoing. On their website, FMSF recounts how the foundation chose its name:

“…since the parents were convinced that what their children thought were memories were really incorrect beliefs, the term ‘false memory’ seemed appropriate.”

In other words, the accused concocted a scientific-sounding way of calling their accusers liars — a ploy so blatant it’s laughable.

But in the 1990s, the public was still very much conditioned to disbelieve victims of sexual abuse. Think of how the media handled Anita Hill’s testimony in 1991, just one year before FSMF was founded. Even up until the mid 2010s, men like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby seemed immune from the accusations that women had been making for years before anyone would listen. And still today, powerful men like Trump remain impervious to sexual abuse allegations.

Once “False Memory Syndrome” was launched into popular media, the phony condition rapidly made its way into academic discourse in the field of psychology. Numerous respected professionals and institutions adopted the propaganda as scientific truth. It may sound improbable, but looking back just a few years to the early stages of the 2016 presidential race, how many of us thought that the entire Republican Party would fall in line with Trump’s reign of bald-faced lies?

The strategies by which FMSF infiltrated the psychology profession share much in common with Trump’s methods. The foundation used a carrot-and-stick technique to coerce the mental health field to fall in step with their agenda. The carrot was an impressive list of researchers, psychologists and academics that the accused parents of FMSF had recruited to be on their Scientific and Professional Advisory Board. The stick was a far-ranging assault of well-funded lawsuits aimed at discrediting, disbarring and suing therapists who dared to support incest survivors and validate their memories.

Psychologists and therapists were threatened with professional ruin if they sided with survivors and were tempted with professional reward if they aligned with the powerful forces behind the anti-survivor backlash. This created a rift within the psychology field that became known as the “memory wars.” In actuality, it was a war against incest survivors and the therapists who supported them. And it was so effective that the field of psychology has not recovered still to this day.

The Lasting Imprint of the “False Memory” Defense

I began researching this piece while I was in graduate school at New York University (NYU) obtaining a Master’s in Mental Health Counseling and at the same time completing a certification training in Somatic Experiencing (SE), the therapeutic method developed by world-renowned trauma expert Peter Levine. To my dismay, I discovered that “false memory” rhetoric is still used by educators in both of these programs — exclusively in relation to sexual abuse, of course. In both my NYU classes and SE trainings, students were admonished to avoid “implanting false memories” of sexual abuse — a classic FMSF-invented myth. Even Dr. Levine’s book Trauma and Memory, considered by many to be the authoritative tome on its topic, contains a section titled “Memory Wars” that essentially regurgitates the FMSF narrative — despite the fact that this narrative contradicts the neuroscientific principles of traumatic memory that are espoused elsewhere in the book.

So how did a group of parents accused of sexually abusing their children gain so much influence? As with many stories about power, abuse and taboo, there is more than meets the eye. You may want to take a bathroom break at this point, because things are about to take a wild turn.

The CIA

The FMSF origin story that is widely told by pro- and anti-survivors alike is that the organization was started by Peter and Pamela Freyd, parents of Dr. Jennifer Freyd, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Oregon. In her 30s, Jennifer began to recall childhood memories of her father’s abuse, and Jennifer’s husband privately confronted her father. In response, Jennifer’s mother, Pamela, publicly refuted the accusation in a published journal article, and from there Peter and Pamela connected with other parents similarly confronted by their children and formed the foundation. That Peter Freyd was reportedly an alcoholic and a survivor of childhood sexual abuse himself, and that Jennifer’s account of abuse was supported by other family members, did not seem to make an impact on the public’s reception of the “false memory” campaign. Which makes sense if you think about the tone of the time and the emotional process by which people choose whom to trust. It’s like Trump said of his own sway over supporters: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

But as with Trump, one has to ask oneself: Were Peter and Pamela Freyd truly leaders of a movement, or were they convenient and willing frontmen for an even more wide-ranging and powerful web of corruption?

Let’s take a moment to look at FMSF’s Scientific and Professional Advisory Board. At first glance, you may notice the names of such luminaries of psychology as Aaron Beck, the father of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and Elizabeth Loftus, supposed preeminent expert on memory research (more on that later.) There’s something else that’s noteworthy about this board. It was largely assembled by Harold Lief, Pamela and Peter Freyd’s personal psychiatrist, in conjunction with his colleague Martin Orne. Orne, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, is known for having conducted research funded by the CIA as part of MKUltra, a cold-war era project that lasted roughly from 1953–1973. MKUltra aimed to use psychological methods to obtain information from Russian spies and create a Manchurian or “puppet” candidate — the kind Trump denied being during a 2016 presidential debate.

According to Newsweek (2018):

“Project MKUltra was an illegal program of human experimentation undertaken by the CIA to discover methods, both pharmacological and psychological, for controlling the human mind, particularly in interrogation settings. Amphetamines, MDMA, scopolamine, cannabis, salvia, sodium pentothal, psilocybin and LSD were administered to thousands of unsuspecting people, throughout the United States and Canada. Others were subject to sensory deprivation, psychological abuse and rape, including the sexual abuse of children.”

You may find yourself wanting to stop reading at this point. The reality of parents who sexually abuse their own children is hard enough to digest. The idea that the U.S. government would perpetrate child sexual abuse on its own citizens may feel too outlandish and frightening to consider. You might find yourself thinking, “this is crazy, it can’t possibly be true.” And that’s exactly the kind of disbelief that horrific organized abuse inspires — and hides behind. As trauma expert Judith Herman wrote in Trauma and Recovery:

“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.”

So how does Project MKUltra connect to the “false memory” propaganda campaign? One of the MKUltra intelligence-hacking experiments involved a “honey trap” strategy whereby prostitutes were trained to extract information from intelligence officers using sex. Some of these sex workers were consenting adults. Others were sex trafficked children that MKUltra researchers gained access to under the pretext of medical treatment. Two women gave testimony about their experiences of child sexual abuse at the hands of Martin Orne and other MKUltra researchers at a 1995 hearing convened by Bill Clinton’s Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. The testimony, given by Claudia Mullen and Christine DeNicola, was filmed and is viewable with the links provided.

Orne and his MKUltra colleagues likely believed that by traumatizing their “research subjects,” they could ensure that their victims would not remember the abuse or would at least be too afraid to tell anyone. When survivors started speaking out, however, it became evident that their memories were resurfacing. So, what better way to silence sexual abuse victims than by launching a propaganda campaign that labels victims as crazy and discredits their memories? And what more natural frontmen to hide behind than the aggrieved parents of FMSF?

Okay, take a breath. Get a drink of water. Give your mind a rest for a moment. Because we’re about to go deeper.

Freud

The most effective deception tactics are often time-tested strategies with a proven success rate. The “false memory” campaign was no different. Heck, it worked for Freud.

In 1896, Freud presented a paper to an audience of his colleagues at the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology. Titled “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” it represents what I would argue is Freud’s seminal discovery. While treating female patients for what was then termed “hysteria,” he found a striking commonality among them — and in it, a possible root cause for the emotional distress and behavioral irregularities that brought them into his office. The common thread was a history of childhood incest, often at the hands of their fathers.

As Freud himself anticipated, this discovery was not well received by his peers, some of whom were the fathers of his patients. In a probable effort to maintain his professional standing and not be run out of town, Freud soon recanted his discovery, replacing it with the more palatable theory that his patients had merely fantasized the abuse. Inspired by mythology, he concocted a collection of pathologies like “oedipal complex” to explain away the politically dangerous truth.

The cover-up was wildly successful. As we know, Freud went on to secure his standing as a key figure in the history of modern psychology. Knowledge of his incest discovery was buried, while his theory of the “oedipal complex” endured. Nearly a century later, in 1980, author and scholar Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson was named Project Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives and was given access to the totality of Freud’s documents. When Masson came out publicly with his rediscovery of “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” revealing Freud’s original findings on incest, Masson was fired from the archives. The episode is chronicled in his fittingly titled book, The Assault on Truth, published in 1984 — less than a decade before the founding of FMSF.

Where We Are Now

Flash forward to today and the core curriculum at NYU’s Mental Health Counseling program still uses a Theories of Counseling and Psychotherapy textbook that includes a section on Freud’s “oedipal complex” while making no mention of the word “incest” anywhere in its 824 pages. In fact, this tome does not include a single sentence that identifies sexual abuse as a possible cause of psychological symptoms.

Denial, after all, is a universal response to incest. We don’t want to believe that humans can do terrifying things to other humans — particularly to their own children — because it threatens our sense of safety in the world. As Judith Herman pointed out in Trauma and Recovery, the history of trauma studies mirrors the experience of traumatic memory itself:

“The study of psychological trauma has a curious history — one of episodic amnesia. Periods of active investigation have alternated with periods of oblivion.”

After being submerged by the backlash called the “memory wars,” trauma studies are presently having another resurgence. But mainstream academia is slow to catch up. NYU’s Counseling program, for example, still relegates the topic of trauma to a one-semester elective course. And it is easily possible to complete graduate work in counseling without ever coming across the word “incest.”

Thus, the culture of silence and dissociation around the most unspeakable of sexual crimes lives on. Even in the age of #METOO. Which is why I’m writing this article to call #TIMESUP on incest denial and the “false memory” defense.

Resist the Gaslight

Undoing centuries of gaslighting engineered to keep abusers in power is no simple task. In order to free our minds and find our own truth, it’s helpful to educate ourselves about gaslighting tactics. Dr. Jennifer Freyd, whose parents founded FMSF, devised a helpful acronym to describe the common components of sexual predator defense tactics:

“DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. DARVO stands for ‘Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.”

What follows is a detailed investigation of gaslighting techniques commonly used to discredit and undermine incest survivors.

The “Witch Hunt” Deception

The conspiracy theory that a far-flung network of feminist therapists were behind a supposed epidemic of false incest accusations.

As has been pointed out by rigorous scholars, no actual evidence has ever been produced to support this theory — nor does it stand up to logical reasoning.

“Witch-hunt” rhetoric is a classic ploy used to deflect blame from abusers by reversing the victim and perpetrator roles. It’s been used to discredit Trump’s critics, Weinstein’s accusers, Cosby’s accusers and countless survivors who’ve come forward in the #METOO era and throughout history.

The “False Accusations” Deception

The notion that legal exoneration of an alleged perpetrator is proof of a “false accusation” resulting from a “false memory.”

Unless you are a men’s rights activist or living under a rock, anyone in the age of #METOO should understand that legal exoneration is not proof that sexual abuse did not occur. The legal system is rigged against sexual abuse victims, as has been shown time and time again — even in cases where irrefutable physical evidence has been present.

The “Due Process” Deception

The notion that sexual abuse memories should be treated as courtroom accusations and thus regarded with suspicion — even in a therapeutic setting — in order to honor due process for the accused.

While blanket skepticism certainly makes sense in a courtroom setting, it is not consistent with the general goals or attitudes of psychotherapy. Just imagine how a therapy session might go if the therapist viewed a client’s every memory with skepticism — childhood birthdays, the loss of a beloved pet, a fight with a best friend. Generally, therapists are trained to respond to clients’ memories with acknowledgment, empathy and curiosity. Only on the topic of childhood sexual abuse are therapists warned to be wary of “false memories.”

What we know about childhood sexual abuse is that — like adult sexual abuse — it occurs at epidemic rates and is grossly underreported, under-prosecuted and routinely disbelieved. Warning therapists to be wary of “false” abuse memories reinforces the status quo of disbelieving sexual abuse survivors.

The “Recanted Testimony” Deception

Many FMSF supporters have pointed to alleged abuse survivors who later recanted their testimony as proof of “false memory syndrome.” Somatic Experiencing literature contains its own version of this device in the form of an oft-trotted-out story about a man who thought he’d been sexually abused as a child but, after receiving SE therapy, concluded that his distress was related to a childhood surgery instead.

It is entirely possible for a person to tell a falsehood about incest and later retract it. However, there are compelling reasons to view retractions with caution. It is important to understand that retracting testimony — along with denial, minimization and memory suppression — is a textbook coping mechanism of incest survivors. Some of the reasons that incest survivors recant are similar to the reasons that Freud recanted his discovery, that Republican politicians disavow truth to align with Trump’s lies, and that family members of incest survivors often side with the perpetrator: The fear of being exiled from the tribe and being targeted for retribution by the perpetrator.

With this in mind, it is also important to acknowledge that denial — whether from an alleged perpetrator or an alleged victim — does not prove the absence of abuse. In fact, there simply is no way to objectively prove that abuse did not occur.

The “Satanic Panic” Deception

The narrative that, in the 1980s, the United States was swept by a “moral panic” characterized by widespread delusions about “satanic ritual abuse” of children — a supernatural phenomenon beyond the realm of credibility.

The “satanic panic” deception is designed to make abuse survivors appear “crazy” or “hysterical” — a tactic that deflects attention from perpetrators by discrediting their victims.

While the term “satanic ritual abuse” may sound out-there, it refers to a very real and commonplace phenomenon. The more ordinary term for this phenomenon is “organized abuse.” Put simply, it is the practice of organized groups perpetrating abuse as a condoned, intentional and habitual activity. Organized child sexual abuse has been documented in religious groups, cults, schools and other organized communities.

As with the “false accusations” deception, FMSF advocates have highlighted court cases in which the charges were dismissed as a way to delegitimize survivors of organized abuse.

The most famous of these cases was the McMartin preschool trial, in which members of a family-run preschool were charged with sexually abusing 360 children. After 6 years of proceedings, all charges were ultimately dismissed, and to this day the case is touted by mainstream media as a hoax.

This is despite the presentation of physical evidence during the trial, the victims’ persistent assertion decades later that they were abused, and the discovery of corroborating evidence of underground tunnels that victims had described being used as hiding places for the abuse.

The “Destroyed Families” Deception

The myth that epidemic numbers of families have been torn apart by “false accusations” based on “false memories.”

This deception is similar to the one used by men’s rights activists who believe that #METOO has caused an epidemic of “destroyed careers” for prominent men. Survivor testimonies don’t destroy families or careers. Abuse does.

The “Science” Deception

Members of the FMSF Advisory Board claimed to be interested in memory research on purely scientific grounds.

“False Memory” research is politically motivated. It came about as a response to sexual abuse accusations and its aim is to exonerate the accused, not to improve psychotherapy outcomes.

Elizabeth Loftus, widely cited as the preeminent memory researcher in the “false memory” camp, has made a career of defending alleged child abusers in court for large sums of money. By her own admission, she has no experience working with trauma survivors in any clinical or research capacity.

“False Memory” advocates uniformly ignore the ample evidence and research studies that support the validity of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Repressed memory is a phenomenon that is also commonly observed in survivors of military combat and other traumatic experiences, yet the memory debate centers uniquely on the more politically charged topic of childhood sexual abuse (Goldsmith and Barlow).

The “Implanted Memories” Deception

The claim that therapy clients are highly suggestible and that “false memories” — specifically of sexual abuse — are often “implanted” by unethical therapists through the power of suggestion.

Elizabeth Loftus’s “Lost in the Mall” research study is routinely cited as proof of this claim. It showed that research subjects could be manipulated into believing they had experienced a relatively benign childhood event that never really happened (getting lost in a mall.)

There are several gaping holes in this foundation for the “implanted memories” theory:

As trauma expert Bessel Van Der Kolk pointed out in his book, The Body Keeps the Score, Loftus’s research cannot be extrapolated to apply to traumatic memories, which are quite different from memories of benign events. Traumatic memory consists of not only narrative elements but also sense memories — conditioned emotional and physiological fear responses that can be activated by triggers that remind the nervous system of a traumatic event. No published research has been done to test whether it’s possible to “implant” a “false” traumatic memory. Doing so would be unethical as it would require frightening participants badly enough to elicit chronic physiological flashbacks. In other words, you’d have to traumatize them.

Furthermore, Loftus found that subjects were far more likely to believe the mall story if it was told to them by an older relative than if it was told to them by a researcher. This suggests that parents, not therapists, have greater influence to manipulate an individual’s memories.

In addition, a study on trauma and memory (Elliott, 1997) showed that, among participants who had experienced delayed recall of a traumatic event, psychotherapy was the least common trigger for memory recall.

In summary, the “implanted memories” deception is a projection. In fact, the most common memory manipulation occurs at the hands of abusive parents who use the power of loyalty and fear to convince their children that it never really happened.

The “False Memories are Invented to Explain Psychological Symptoms” Deception

A theory, espoused by Peter Levine and others, that when an individual experiences unexplained emotional distress, the mind may create or latch onto a “false memory” of incest out of a “desperate” need to explain the distress.

The term “desperate” as used here is a dog whistle for sexism — similar to words like “hysterical” that cast women’s emotional reactions to oppression and gaslighting as “crazy.”

Evolutionarily, humans are most likely to accept the beliefs that pose the least threat to our survival instincts, which are wired to prioritize family bonds as a means of securing protection and support that keep us safe — particularly in childhood. That’s one reason so many incest survivors repress, deny, minimize and doubt their memories of abuse. It’s quite common for survivors to experience periods of remembering that are so hard to bear that they push the memories away again, in order to keep the family bonds intact.

The notion that a therapy client would easily accept a therapist’s suggestion that they’d been sexually abused by a parent simply does not check out with the scientific research on attachment bonds.

The “Hocus Pocus” Deception: False Representations of Repressed Memories

The idea put forth by Elizabeth Loftus and other FMSF supporters that repressed memories are a kooky made-up phenomenon too out-there to be real.

In Loftus’s book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, she writes:

“I don’t question the fact that memories can come back spontaneously, that details can be forgotten, or even that memories of abuse can be triggered by various cues many years later.”

Based on well-known literature by both trauma experts and survivors, the above is a fairly sound description of repressed memory. It’s hard to understand, then, Loftus’s insistence that repressed memory is a myth.

That is because Loftus’s definition of repressed memory is not derived from trauma experts or survivors, but rather from the population that she is steeped in: Alleged perpetrators.

The accounts given to Loftus, as detailed in her book, describe repressed abuse memories as shocking, bizarre, out of sync with reality, delusional and entirely baseless — according to the accused.

Allowing alleged incest perpetrators to define repressed memory is like allowing Harvey Weinstein to define sexual trauma. Abusers have been calling their victims crazy since the dawn of time. Loftus lent authority to that diagnosis.

The “Memory Accuracy” Deception

The claim that repressed and later recalled memories are less accurate than continuous memories.

According to Goldsmith and Barlow at the University of Oregon’s Freyd Dynamics Lab and the studies they cite:

“Memory accuracy is generally not related to memory persistence. That is, people’s continuous memories are not generally more accurate than memories that are forgotten and then later remembered.”

The “Eyewitness Testimony” Deception

The notion that research showing the unreliability of eyewitness testimony can be extrapolated to apply to incest survivor testimony.

Another tactic that Elizabeth Loftus used to confuse the public about incest survivor testimony was her research on eyewitness testimony in non-familial crime cases, showing that memory is fallible and susceptible to biases such as racial bias. This tactic preyed on the moral conscience of white progressives.

While Loftus’s findings have merit in relation to single incident crimes, this research cannot be extrapolated to childhood incest abuse, where the perpetrator is well known to the victim, the abuse is usually chronic rather than single incident, and conditioning and bias would more likely cause the victim to deflect blame away from the parent and onto someone with less power and authority over them.

The “Legitimate Abuse Memories” Deception

Supporters of the anti-survivor backlash claim that repressed memories are “false memories” that were “implanted” by therapists — and that the propagation of “false memories” undermines the survivors who come forward with “legitimate abuse memories.”

Records show that FMSF supporters have used the term “False Memory” to discredit sexual abuse claims of all kinds: Abuse that the survivor remembered continuously, abuse that was corroborated with evidence, and abuse that was remembered by individuals who were not seeing a psychotherapist.

Furthermore, FMSF members have gone on record to espouse the view that molestation is not significantly harmful to children. Elizabeth Loftus has been quoted as saying that child molestation is “not that big a deal,” and FMSF founding member Ralph Underwager was quoted in Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia as saying that sex with children is a “responsible choice for the individual.”

The aim of the “legitimate abuse memories” deception is to dissuade survivors from speaking out for fear that, if their testimony is disbelieved, it will set back the entire survivor movement.

The “Client Wellbeing” Deception

FMSF literature claims that its goal was to protect children of the accused from being harmed by unethical therapists who “implanted false memories” of abuse in their clients’ minds.

The vast majority of literature on “implanted” abuse memories is written and distributed by accused parents and their supporters, not therapy clients.

The “Don’t Go Digging” Deception

The claim that it’s dangerous to go “digging” for causes of trauma symptoms, because you might implant a “false memory” of sexual abuse.

This trope is effective because it attaches a partial truth to a deception: It’s true that it can be damaging to a client to aggressively dig for trauma memories, but the potential damage is not likely to be a “false memory.” What’s far likelier is the potential to re-traumatize a client by prematurely or too aggressively challenging their coping mechanism of denial.

Further, what constitutes “digging” is subjective and influenced by politics. Proponents of “false memory syndrome” tend to view all questions about sexual abuse history as “leading” or “digging,” while they regard other standard history questions — like illness history or history of suicidality — as, well, standard.

The “You Can’t Diagnose Sexual Abuse” Deception

This deception hinges on a distorted interpretation of the seminal incest recovery book, The Courage to Heal, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. FMSF supporters claimed that the book “diagnosed” childhood sexual abuse as the universal cause of all common psychological symptoms like anxiety and depression.

First published in 1988, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse was — and still is — a revolutionary book the likes of which had not been seen before. It offered acknowledgement, connection and a path forward to millions of readers who learned for the first time that they were not alone, they were not to blame and healing was possible. It quickly became an invaluable resource to both incest survivors and therapists and as such, the book and its authors became primary targets of vicious attacks from the “false memory” camp.

Bass and Davis never proposed that sexual abuse could or should be “diagnosed” as the cause of psychological symptoms. Rather, The Courage to Heal lists symptoms commonly correlated with childhood sexual abuse in order to help survivors make sense of their emotional and psychological confusion and distress.

A phrase in the first edition of the book that is often maligned by the anti-survivor backlash (and was changed in later editions) is: “If you think you were abused, you probably were.”

Backlashers have interpreted this line through the lens of legal accusations and due process for the accused.

The intention of the line, however, was to offer validation and support to survivors who’ve lost faith in their own sense of reality due to fear, intimidation, gaslighting and self-protective denial.

The “Therapeutic Neutrality” Deception

The professional stance that a therapist should always maintain neutrality, and therefore it doesn’t matter whether a therapist believes a client’s memories or not.

This deception confuses skepticism with neutrality, as if doubting memories was something applied universally. As author and Holocaust-survivor Eli Wiesel wrote:

“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

The “Remembering is Not Important to Healing” Deception

A theory, espoused by Peter Levine and others in the trauma therapy realm, that recovery of repressed abuse memories is not important to healing.

Judith Herman, who worked extensively with incest survivors, conducted a 1987 research study with her colleague Emily Schatzow in which they were able to verify with evidence the recovered memories of childhood incest survivors. They found that memory recovery served several important therapeutic purposes for these women:

(1) Survivors were able to finally process the traumatic experience.

(2) They were able to make sense of emotional and psychological symptoms that previously seemed chaotic and incomprehensible.

(3) They were able to construct a clearer sense of identity and of meaning in their life history.

(4) Some experienced a dramatic reduction in certain posttraumatic symptoms after memory recovery.

It’s important to let survivors know that cognitive memory loss does not have to be a barrier to healing, and that somatic memories alone can provide the gateway to return to wholeness. But like the “therapeutic neutrality” deception, the theory that “remembering is not important” protects perpetrators and maintains our societal dissociation surrounding childhood sexual abuse. Keeping our collective awareness submerged allows the culture of abuse to continue. In order to change these generations-old patterns, we need to collectively wake up and acknowledge what happened.

The Path Forward

Healing from incest is a complex job. Often, a survivor’s self-protective suppression of abuse memories becomes fused with the abuser’s denial of what happened. The blending of these internal and external suppression mechanisms makes it exceedingly difficult for survivors to trust themselves.

Yet, as the title of Bessel van der Kolk’s book says, The Body Keeps the Score. Survivors carry with them a felt sense of the trauma in their nervous system, emotions, survival behaviors and fear reflexes — even when the mind does its best to ignore these clues. In addition, survivors — like all humans — carry with them an intrinsic and inalienable place of inner knowing that some call the “true self.” A place that, no matter how deeply buried, can always be returned to.

Doing so alone, however, is quite challenging. Below are two guides to reclaiming self-belief after abuse and gaslighting: One for survivors and another for the therapists who walk alongside them.

Reclaiming Self-Belief — A Guide for Survivors

1. Trust your gut.

Listening to your body is the most direct path to self-knowledge. Your body holds sensory memories that it expresses through sensations, emotions, automatic reactions, pain symptoms and other forms of expression that we often ignore. Paying attention to your body’s communication is called “somatic awareness.”

If the notion of body memories seems far-fetched, think of how your body responds to fire: Your mind may not remember the first time you learned that fire burns, but your body remembers to recoil and contract to avoid harm. Similarly, when you have experienced a stressful life event in the past, your mind might not be thinking about it in the present, but your body will remember to brace itself against harm any time it’s reminded of the stressful event.

Practicing somatic awareness consistently can bring our conscious mind and our inner truth back into alignment. You might want to start with a daily body scan, bringing your attention with gentle curiosity to the sensations in each part of your body, starting with the top of your head and working your way down to the tips of your toes. Google “guided body scan” and you’ll find many free resources to support this practice. Another great technique is journaling. Choose a part of your body to listen to, gently ask it what it would like you to know and then write down the conversation between the two of you. Two wonderful journaling resources are Elisabeth Corey’s book One Voice, and Nicole Sachs’s JournalSpeak method outlined in her book The Meaning of Truth.

2. Find your tribe.

Identify your allies: Those who believe and support you, those who give you empathy and understanding without caveats and those who can offer reflections and insights that strengthen your sense of shared reality.

Our sense of reality is not constructed in a vacuum. It is a conversation between our lived experience and the signals we get from others. In child development, this is called “social referencing.” It’s the process through which babies make sense of the world around them by comparing their felt senses with their caregiver’s reactions. This is an adaptive survival strategy that allows us to learn what’s safe and not safe. However, when a caregiver is also an abuser, the child receives incongruent messages about what’s safe and unsafe, and their sense of reality becomes distorted.

In adulthood, we have the opportunity to choose our social reference points. By choosing to surround yourself with people who are able to provide congruent reflections to your lived experience, you can create an intentional social environment in which it’s possible to unravel the distortions and find healing and clarity.

How will you know whom to trust? Do a “gut check.” Using somatic awareness will help you identify when another person’s signals are congruent with your felt experience. You will feel it “in your bones.” There’s a reason that sayings like this exist!

3. Be a beacon.

Gaslighting is an example of unhealthy influence — influence that fuels fear and disconnection from self. When we choose our tribe, we choose a circle of healthy influence that fuels love and self-connection. And when we spread that healthy influence to others, we amplify our healing, both individually and collectively.

You can spread healthy influence by being a beacon to others: Sharing your truth where it can be heard by those who will see themselves reflected in it. When you open the door to let the light shine on your truth, you are also holding the door open for others to share their truth. Being a beacon might look like writing a book, speaking at an event or sharing on social media. But it can also look like sharing your truth with just one trusted friend who needs to hear it. There is no act of sharing too small to make big ripples.

Nurturing Self-Belief — A Guide for Therapists

Many survivors who seek therapy report an anguished sense that something sexually traumatic happened to them in childhood, and a high level of distress over their inability to remember with certainty what happened. Too often, well-meaning therapists react to their clients’ distress with phrases like: “We may never know what happened to you, but that’s not important to healing.” In my opinion, this approach reinforces the internal and external dynamics of suppression that the client is already struggling with.

Knowing our history is how we know ourselves — through our family history, our ethnic, political and spiritual history, and yes, our sexual abuse history.

Telling a client that she may never know what happened sends the message that knowing her history — and thus knowing herself — is not important to you and shouldn’t be important to her. It also sends the message that you don’t believe she’s capable of remembering. This can damage a client’s self-belief.

A more supportive response would be to reflect to the client that if she can’t presently remember, there are internal and external reasons for that: There are political forces within families and society that encourage her to forget, and there are self-protective mechanisms of forgetting as well.

A supportive therapist should encourage the client not to abandon her search for truth, but rather to listen attentively to the stories her body is telling, for that is where the answers already lie. It is also important to encourage the client to periodically step back from the quest for truth to rest and gain perspective. As with the creative process, breakthroughs do not come from pushing ourselves past our limits. Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come during the breaks we take for self-care. But those breakthroughs are a result of the work we put in. It is important to keep showing up and doing the work.

When inaccuracies surface in a survivor’s testimony, the anti-survivor backlash describes them as “false memories.” It is of grave importance that therapists do not use this anti-survivor jargon. A supportive therapist will view memory distortions not as “false memories” but rather as clues. Like dreams, these clues are informed by the emotional content of what happened, even if the narrative content is rearranged. Instead of being careful to avoid “false memories,” therapists should welcome these clues in support of helping survivors reconstruct a coherent narrative.

In summary, instead of saying, “we may never know what happened to you,” therapists can say this: “We know something happened to you. Your symptoms are telling us the story.” Even in the absence of vast swaths of cognitive memory, therapists can support the reconstruction of a coherent narrative by providing congruent and empathetic reflections of the client’s experience and by encouraging her to trust in the truth-telling of her somatic memories despite the forces of internal and external suppression. As the saying goes, the truth will set you free.

References

History of the incest survivor movement, the anti-survivor backlash, and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation

Armstrong, L. (1994). Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics: What Happened When Women Said Incest. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing.

Bass, E., Davis, L. (1994). Honoring the Truth: A Response to the Backlash. In E. Bass, L. Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (3rd ed). New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Campbell, S. (2003). Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

DePrince, A. P., Allard, C. B., Oh, H., Freyd, J. J. (2004). What’s in a Name for Memory Errors? Implications and Ethical Issues Arising from the Use of the Term “False Memory” for Errors in Memory Details. Ethics & Behavior, 14(3), 201–233.

Rush, F. (1980). The Best-Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Scheflin, A. W. (1999). Ground Lost: The False Memory / Recovered Memory Therapy Debate. Psychiatric Times, 16(11).

Salter, M. (2018) Finding a New Narrative: Meaningful Responses to ‘False Memory’ Disinformation, in V. Sinason, Memory in Dispute. London, UK: Karnac Books.

Sinason, V. (ed). (1998). Memory in Dispute. London, UK: Karnac Books.

Whittier, N. (2009). The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Emotion, Social Movements, and the State. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

History of MKUltra and child sexual abuse experiments

Moss, B. (2013). Disinformation and DID: The Politics of Memory. http://bornepress.com/disinformation-and-did-the-politics-of-memory/h

[The following references in this section are from the B. Moss article above.]

Ross, C. M.D. (2006). The CIA doctors: Human rights violations by American psychiatrists. Manitou Publications.

Constantine, A. (1995). Psychic dictatorship in the U.S.A. Feral House. Chapter: The False Memory Hoax, 53–75.

United States of America Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (Public Meeting) Wednesday, March 15th 1995. Retrieved November, 2012 from http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/dir/mstreet/commeet/meet12/trnsc12a.txt

Claudia Mullen, R.N., testimony (scroll down) Retrieved from http://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/mc-documents-links/mk-ultra-links-torture-based-government-sponsored-mind-control-experimentation-on-children/

Claudia Mullen, R.N., delivering her testimony. (Video) Retrieved November 2012 from http://vimeo.com/26846581

Claudia’s fellow survivor (Christine de Nicola) and their therapist (Valerie Wolf) also provided testimony at the same Congressional hearing: http://vimeo.com/26848915

Marks, John (1979). The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control. New York: Norton. Retrieved November 2012 from: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm

Welsome, E. (1999). The plutonium files: America’s secret medical experiments in the cold war. New York: Dell.

History of Freud’s incest discovery

Masson, J. M. (1984). The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York, NY: Pocket Books.

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Rush, F. (1980). The Best-Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Literature Supporting Repressed Memory

Barlow, M. R., Pezdek, K., Blanón-Gitlin, I. (2017). Trauma and memory. In S. N. Gold (Ed.), APA handbooks in psychology®. APA handbook of trauma psychology: Foundations in knowledge (p. 307–331). American Psychological Association.

Elliott, D. M. (1997). Traumatic events: Prevalence and delayed recall in the general population. Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology, 65, 811–820.

Freyd, J. J. (1996). Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Goldsmith, R., Barlow, M. R. Common Myths about Memory for Trauma.