How Bad Psychology Tore Families Apart

Recovering Trauma That Was Never There

[Today’s article is going to touch upon topics of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and child sexual abuse. The text will be quite descriptive at times. If these topics make you uncomfortable or trigger memories, I would advise skipping this story.]

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Dad, I remember everything you did to me. Whether you remember it or not is immaterial. I had this experience the other day of regressing till I was a child and barely verbal. I was screaming and crying and absolutely hysterical. I needed your protection, guidance and understanding. Instead I got hatred, violation, humiliation and abuse. I no longer give you the honor of being my father.

In the 80s and 90s, families across the USA and the UK started getting letters such as these from their children. These letters, accusing close family members of child sexual abuse and incest were becoming more and more common.

Interestingly, there was a common thread that connected almost all adults accusing their parents of sexual abuse in the past, they had all been going to therapy.

Child Sexual Abuse

Childhood sexual abuse is a horrifying reality of the world we live in. Estimates of children experiencing sexual abuse vary between 10% and a mind-numbingly high 50%. The perpetrators of these crimes are quite often people close to the children such as parents, uncles, aunts, or cousins.

Unfortunately, victims of abuse rarely get the justice they deserve. This is due to a combination of legal, social, and personal factors. This leaves many people, who have already been traumatized, to deal with their traumas at an individual level through psychotherapy and self-work.

Interestingly, psychology, psychoanalysis to be accurate, offers another explanation of how we deal with traumatic experiences such as sexual abuse in childhood - we try our best to forget it.

Repression and Trauma

Repression is an idea borne out of psychoanalysis. It suggests that the mind represses memories that are too intense to be kept in the conscious mind. These repressed memories remain stored in our unconscious and rarely come out.

Regardless, these memories continue to influence us as adults and can cause physical or mental ailments if not resolved.

The problem is - we don’t know if our memories work like that.

And as it turns out, memories can be planted.

The Memory Wars of the 1990s

In the 80s and 90s, Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist, showed that our memories are not as reliable as we think. They can be influenced and they can be altered simply by the power of suggestion and misinformation.

This was also the time when adults in therapy were regularly “recovering” memories of forgotten sexual trauma and abuse. Accusations were made, legal action was initiated and families were torn apart on the basis of memories recovered during intense therapy sessions.

But was this a reliable marker for the occurrence of an event?

The work of Loftus and others like her showed that “repressed memories” could be altered, influenced, and sometimes completely made up depending on the therapist conducting the session.

Therapeutic techniques such as hypnosis, age regression, guided imagery, and repression-recovery have been implicated in creating false memories in young, impressionable people who are already in a vulnerable place.

Despite growing contradictory evidence, families continued to be accused of sexually abusing their children and people continued to be prosecuted on recovered memory alone.

False Memory Syndrome Foundation

When families were accused of sexual abuse, there was little that could be done to recant that accusation. Doubt, hatred, and disgust were normal reactions in spouses whose partners had been accused of sexually abusing their own children.

Had they married a monster? Was their whole life a lie? Could they ever see their own children again?

Families were lost. They didn’t know who or what to trust. That was when the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was created in the US to help families who had been accused of sexual due to presumed false memories.

In 1997, a therapist was fined $2.7 million for falsely planting memories in her client. The therapist wasn’t alone. Since then, many therapists have been fined millions of dollars for practicing unethically and planting memories of traumatic events in clients even though they never occurred.

Bad Psychology Has Costs

I am often asked why I strongly advocate against using techniques that have no scientific basis or theory behind them.

“What’s the worst that could happen? They are just trying to help in their own way”

Well, it becomes a problem when, while trying to help, these practices destroy people and their lives. Implanting a memory intentionally or unintentionally will have disastrous consequences both for the client and their families.

Regression techniques and Memory Recovery techniques have consistently proven ineffective at best and disastrous at worst. But we look past these techniques and those that practice them because…what’s the worst that could happen?

And even if it is bad, it won’t happen to one of us.

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Epilogue: The Grey Areas of False Memory

So memories can be planted. We can remember things that never happened at times. Now what?

Unfortunately, the work of Loftus in memory recovery has been consistently used by sexual predators in legal settings. Harvey Weinstein called on Loftus at his trial in an attempt to discredit the testimonies of his accusers.

If memory is not reliable, then witness testimony is not reliable either. If people can remember things that didn’t happen, people can also testify about the abuse they never faced.

While the false memory syndrome was proposed to suggest the possibility that memory can be planted, it has been used by abusers to gaslight their victims into questioning their own sanity.

How do we strike the balance? How do we ensure innocents don’t suffer while ensuring abusers don’t misuse these procedures?

You can let me know your thoughts by replying to this email or in the comments!