Oral History Interviews of Therapists, Survivors, the Accused, and Retractors. Also available in print in The Repressed Memory Epidemic: How It Happened and What We Need to Learn from It (Springer, 2017).
A Note on the Interviews
I conducted the interviews that follow throughout the United States, Canada and England from 1992 to 1995, in person or by telephone. I found subjects through numerous means -- by contacting organizations such as Survivors of Incest Anonymous, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, or the British False Memory Society, by reading newspapers and watching television, by browsing through yellow pages in telephone books, and, quite often, by word-of-mouth, referral, or pure serendipity. Because the repressed-memory phenomenon has affected so many people, it was not difficult to find a cross-section of stories.
I told people that I was writing a book about the repressed memory debate and that I was conducting interviews with those on all sides of the issue. In every case except one, I sent the transcript to each interview subject for approval, change, or amendment. (In the single exception to that rule, the massage therapist specifically assured me that he did not need to see the interview.) I explained that I would use fictitious names unless they preferred using their real names, and that the interviews would be edited, but that they would feature verbatim voices and opinions.Therefore, unless otherwise noted, pseudonyms have been used throughout these oral history transcript s, and place names have usually been altered.
To remove my questions from the transcripts, I sometimes had to paraphrase a sentence. For example, I might have asked, “How did you feel about your parents before your memories came back?” In the printed interview, that becomes, “How did I feel about my parents before I recovered my memories? Well, I knew I never felt loved ...” Aside from such minor adjustments, all words here were spoken by the subjects. I cut extraneous background information, using it to write the italicized introductions. Since most conversations jumped from one idea or time reference to another, I also rearranged portions of the interviews to promote a smooth flow. These are standard journalistic techniques pioneered largely by Studs Terkel, whom I considered a mentor. –Mark Pendergrast
Chapter 1a: The Therapists
We are especially prone to make mistakes when dealing with a domain in which we are expert. Knowing a lot about the self and a little about the other person is a recipe for a radical misreading of personality . . . . This means that an expert is not open-minded about himself or about other people, and is less open-minded as the information available declines in quality.
—Jeremy Campbell, The Improbable Machine[i]
Interviews in this chapter:
Sam Holden, Christian counselor
Peter Jones, British physician/hypnotherapist
Janet Griffin, M.S.W.
Horace Stone, minister/counselor
Leslie Watkins, Ph.D., clinical psychologist
Delia Wadsworth, British consultant psychiatrist
Charlotte Halpern, psychiatrist
Jason Ransom, body worker
Hamish Pitceathly, British primary cause analyst
Katherine Hylander, past-life hypnotherapist
Sally Bixby, psychotherapist
Linda Ross, retractor therapist
I conducted interviews in the early 1990s with therapists, “Survivors” who had only recently unearthed repressed memories of abuse, accused parents, and retractors who once believed in repressed memories but had realized that they weren’t true. In the next four chapters, you will hear, in their own words, what they told me.
If I had met the following therapists at a party and the subject of repressed memories had never come up, I would have thought most them were interesting, vital, caring people. And, in their own ways, they were. Yet all of them, except Sally Bixby and (now) Linda Ross, were busily helping their clients unearth memories, most of which I believe were illusory. They repeated the same clichés that we've already encountered, speaking with great assurance about repression, dissociation, inner children, body memories, and intergenerational abuse. They explained how they helped their patients overcome the inevitable denial following their returned memories. They spoke soothingly of safety and healing, while promoting what appeared to be mental tortures.
The voices represented here were by no means unusual or extreme. I conducted many more interviews than those you will read here, some far more outrageous. These therapists were representative of those whose specialty was repressed-memory extraction. They attended the same continuing-education conferences, read the same books, consulted with one another, and developed their own pet variations and theories. The majority of American therapists still believein the reality of repressed memories, as several surveys have demonstrated. A sizeable minority—perhaps 25 percent—specialized in incest memory retrieval in the early 1990s.[ii]With few exceptions, those who doubted the validity of memory extraction techniques kept their opinions to themselves. Indeed, perhaps the most disturbing voice in this chapter belongs to Sally Bixby, who knew exactly what her colleagues were doing but was afraid to speak out. “I'd be tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail,” she told me. “If you can tell me how to make a living afterwards, I'll be glad to go on the record.”
Included here are a psychiatrist and Ph.D. psychologist, as well as those with master’s degrees in counseling and social work. There are also a minister, a body worker (massage therapist), and a minimally trained past-life hypnotherapist. Generally speaking, one would expect that the less formal education, and the more “far-out” the approach, the greater the danger of misdiagnosis. To a very limited degree, this may be true.
As a group, psychiatrists, indoctrinated in the much-maligned “medical model,” appeared to be the least eager to find hidden memories. As we will hear from a few retractors in Chapter 4a, some psychiatrists literally saved their lives. On the other hand, because they could prescribe medicine and sign off on insurance forms, these psychiatrists often headed large mental health clinics, where they sometimes lost touch with therapy administered by the social workers working under their nominal supervision. In addition, many psychiatrists were directly implicated in this disaster, as the interview with Charlotte Halpern indicates. Indeed, because MPD was considered a more exotic “disease,” it appealed to those with medical training.
Doctoral-level clinical psychologists tended to be much worse, in large part because their training had only marginally stressed scientific research. Rather, they were encouraged to exercise their “clinical intuition” to discover the subtle causes of their clients' symptoms. Steeped in neo-Freudian dogma, they were primed to uncover repressed memories.
The most zealous memory extractors, however, appeared to be those with master’s degrees or less. I interviewed a terrifying young man, for instance, who possessed only a bachelor's degree and a summer's experience at a recovery movement retreat center. He used automatic writing, visualization, and body work to help 70 percent of his clients find memories of abuse. His command of the jargon was in no way inferior to that of the Ph.D.s. “I'm very careful not to lead my patients even when I know unequivocally they are secret incest survivors. I don't plant memories. I let them figure it out.” Even Katherine Hylander, the past life tour guide, spouted the familiar rhetoric. So did the older woman I interviewed who “channeled” Krishna and Jesus Christ through automatic writing—which revealed long-forgotten incest, of course. Educational level did not really appear to make a substantial difference in this process. What was vital for successful trauma therapists, regardless of any particular philosophy or approach, was the expectation that their clients would remember abuse (or, in the case of the channeler, that Krishna woud prompt her to write about it).
In the 1990s, more and more clients brought that expectation into therapy with them, as Janet Griffin observed in her interview. They arriveddemanding to retrieve memories, already having the feeling that they were molested as children. They had already seen Oprah, already read The Courage to Heal. With such well-primed repressed memory candidates, therapists coulc easily believe that they were not leading clients.
Most of the therapists I interviewed told me that a few of their colleagues were probably eliciting false memories, because they were pushing their patients far too hard. But they themselves never used suggestive or leading techniques, of course. They would tell me this just after revealing in detail how they led clients into such beliefs and then insisted upon their maintaining them.
It is remarkable how many therapists believed in ritual abuse, with its human sacrifice, blood, and multiple sadists. Six of the therapists interviewed here believed (or once believed) that satanic cults were thriving in their particular parts of the country. The “Christian” counselors appeared to be among the worst offenders, which I found particularly distressing. When a parishioner approached her pastor for counseling, she should not have to worry that he might try to convince her that her parents and their friends were monsters.
It has long been recognized that some psychotherapists enter their profession in order to heal their own neuroses, as Sam Holden's story demonstrates. Some trauma therapists were themselves incest victims who brought their own agendas to each session. More frequently, they had recovered their own “repressed memories.”[iii] I believe it is a mistake, however, to emphasize the therapists-with-their-own- issues aspect of this phenomenon. Those quoted here did indeed have an agenda, but it wasn’t a particularly personal crusade. Rather, it was a dogma learned from books, tapes, fellow therapists, and seminars.[iv]
Nor was it my sense that female therapists elicited memories more frequently than their male peers. While women recovered the majority of the incest memories, both genders participated in promoting the process. (More female therapists helped clients recall repressed memories simply because more women than men were becoming counselors.[v]
Even though “feminist” therapists were sometimes accused of conducting a warlock hunt against fathers, it is obvious from these interviews that mothers were also on their hit lists—see Leslie Watkins' observations on mothers who try to drown their infants.
I was particularly disturbed by the tendency of most therapists to absolve themselves of any responsibility. Almost all of them asserted that it didn’t matter whether the memories were literally true or not. The memories represented the “internal truth” for the client, and it wasn’t the therapist's job to search out the facts. It didn’t disturb them that their clients nearly went crazy thinking such awful things, or that the “memories” often resulted in shattered families and lawsuits.
I urge readers to attend to the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that these therapists encouraged their patients to redefine their pasts—or, as Janet Griffin phrased it, “expand the problem space.” If they always remembered abuse, that isn't enough. They must remember more! Ever vigilant to spot symptoms that might indicate abuse, therapists unwittingly created the very problems they sought to heal. As Leslie Watkins observed, “You start to see things when you realize that they might be there.”
I close this chapter with a hopeful and revealing interview with Linda Ross, a therapist who once led her clients into believing their “repressed memories” and who now realizes what harm she was doing. She provides a wonderful role model for other therapists who have the courage to admit they were wrong, and the compassion and wisdom to help reunite the very families that they once tore asunder.
Sam Holden, Christian Counselor
Sam Holden, a slightly built, soft-spoken man of 35, billed himself as a “Christian counselor,” in part because he served as a fundamentalist minister for ten years, as did his father before him. Holden was remarkably open about his own personal problems and his therapeutic methodology. “I really wished I was a girl,” he told me. “At the age of six, I realized I would never turn into a girl, and it disappointed me. I think it's because I felt so rejected at birth, when my mother's breast milk gave out and she switched me to a bottle.” He received his masters in counseling through an innovative program that allowed minimal classroom time and substantial correspondence through the mail. He practiced in Los Angeles.
In addition to memory retrieval, Holden was involved in a child sex abuse case in which a father, convicted of sodomizing his sons, was sent to prison. The case commenced when the wife went for a counseling session with Sam Holden. When she described her concern about her children's sexual acting out, Holden deduced that the husband was a pedophile and gave her two hours to get a restraining order before he turned the case over to the social service agency. From there, the case escalated, the children were subjected to repeated, coercive interviews, and a case was built.
When I first saw John Bradshaw's Homecoming video series, he had a man imagine he was holding a younger version of himself on his lap. He said, “Tell him you'll be there for him,” and the man started crying. He couldn't do it. So I imagined my two-year-old self, and the first thing that flashed into my mind was pushing him onto the floor and kicking him. That was a piece of me I couldn't accept. I didn't like the temper tantrums, the part that was always getting spanked. I went on to heal that part of my life.
Yes, inner child work has helped me a lot. I combine it with faith work as well. I ask people to imagine their Higher Power coming and talking to the child.
I was very confused about sexuality when I hit puberty. Many classmates informed me that I was gay, harassed me on a daily basis, called me a fag or a fairy. Mostly they would imitate me. It hurt a lot. I became very depressed for years. I didn't become suicidal, but I wished I was dead. I spent a lot of time praying.
After I hit puberty, I had fantasies of cross-dressing. I was curious about other males and their sexuality. I had strong homosexual tendencies, which upset me a lot. My parents tell me that they never noticed I was effeminate, but every single classmate noticed it.
I was socially adept in structured situations, was the president of the drama club and debating team and did well in school. But I took part in no sports.
I went to a small fundamentalist college, where I started to date. It made me feel more masculine. The girls I dated liked me, because I wasn't so threatening. I eventually married someone who appreciated not being threatened. No, that's not a great reason to marry someone. When I really got into the recovery process and started to become more masculine, she felt scared. She said she didn't like my voice, it frightened her.
For a long time as an adult, I had exhibitionistic tendencies. I was really captivated by nudity, and I would find some woods where I could be naked. I almost got caught several times. There's an addictive nature to it. I think it had to do with a lot of repressed anger coming out. I was one of the nicest people you'd meet, almost saccharine; some people couldn't stand it.
I was also sexually attracted to boys. I did grooming behavior, trying to get close to them and see them naked. I once went skinny dipping with a group of boys. I had clear boundaries against molesting and didn't act on anything, but it really upset me.
I eventually grew out of my denomination. I don't consider myself a fundamentalist any more. Being a therapist is a lot less stressful than the ministry. When I was a minister, I used to have somatic complaints, pinched nerves, a numb right arm. Besides, I'm more well-respected as a therapist.
I started to deal with sex abuse about eight years ago, when some of my parishioners came to me with their problems. I received my training mostly by reading and talking with other therapists. At first, I used free association and guided imagery, but now I use hypnotic age regression to get at repressed memories. I learned it from the Bradshaw videos. I never called it hypnosis until a few months ago when I described it to other counselors and they said, “Yep, that's hypnotism, all right.” About 80 percent of my current clients have been sexually abused.
I'll describe the hypnotic process. I usually ask a person to uncross their legs, put their hands by their sides, and take a few deep breaths. Then I say, “Imagine walking down a flight of stairs. Remember that as an infant, you practiced holding on and letting go, holding on and letting go, until you knew just when to let go and when to hold on. As a toddler, you practiced running away and coming back, running away and coming back, until you had just enough distance. Those skills will help you in this meditation. If you encounter something scary, you can run upstairs and open your eyes any time; you don't need my permission. When you get to the bottom of the stairs, imagine walking along a corridor with doors on either side. They may be multicolored or all one color. Behind each door is a memory or an age. Find the door that you need to look at today. When you find the door, say 'Aha.' When you are ready, open the door and walk through.”