Oral History Interviews of Therapists, Survivors, the Accused, and Retractors. Also available in print in

Stephanie Krauss, Retractor from a Psychiatric Hospital

Stephanie Krauss really was sexually abused by her father, who began fondling her at a very young age. A salesman, he was very religious, as well as abusive and alcoholic. Eventually, other people, including members of her extended Georgia family, also coerced her into having sex with them. She never had any problem remembering any of this abuse. Though she aspired briefly to be a marine biologist and diver, she dove into depression instead, dropping out of school when she was 15. “I got involved in a number of promiscuous relationships. I went from one man to another to another. I think my lifestyle was a reflection of my upbringing.” As a young adult, Krauss sought counseling, which helped turn her life around. “I was able to let the hate go.” She married, had two children, and was determined to get on with her life. When she was 34, however, she found herself becoming depressed and having marital problems. In 1991, she entered therapy again, but this time it was not to be a pleasant experience.
I went to see a clinical social worker for what were really quite normal family problems. When she found out about my childhood sexual abuse, though, she said I had post-traumatic stress disorder and should see Dr. Eugene Deming, a psychiatrist who specialized in that sort of thing. Dr. Deming seemed wonderful to me. He was gentle, sincere, intelligent, and articulate. He seemed so warm and trustable, and he listened with his whole heart. I felt that he was going to help me with all my troubles. I didn't worry as much. I had hope that things would get better.

I told him about my current problems, but he was more interested in my childhood. So I told him about my sexual abuse, but I didn't really feel the need to talk about it. I had been to therapy before and dealt with all of that. I don't like thinking about it. I always remembered I was abused. Even when you try to forget, the memories come back to haunt you, like ghosts rising to taunt you again.

Abuse does wound a person. Those wounds can heal, but they leave scars that may stay tender for the rest of your life. You may not dwell on it, but you never really forget that you were abused. After a while, though, that's all Dr. Deming wanted to talk about. He had lots of questions that he said needed to be answered before he could really help me. Some of his questions seemed a bit strange, but I just thought, “Well, he's the psychiatrist, he should know.”

The sessions with Dr. Deming rekindled one of the things about my past that did still bother me. Why did I still love my father and yearn for his love in return? I think I saw in him and my other abusers the possibility of a life wasted. I realized that my own life could have been just as wasted as theirs if I did not rise above the bitterness and unforgiveness they harbored for whatever life had brought them. They took it in and it poisoned them.

In the middle of my therapy sessions, my father unexpectedly died of a heart attack. I had to make the funeral arrangements, and a lot of emotions came up for me—fear, guilt, numbness, disbelief, anger, confusion, love and hate. When I came back from the funeral, I was raw-nerved. It was the first time I'd been in the same room with this man that he had not hurt me some way. All of the years I had spent as an adult trying to get his love and attention in a healthy way were over. There would be no more chances.

So I told Dr. Deming about all this emotional turmoil and the flood of memories that had come back. He told me that I had many more memories that needed to come back if I was to get well. That was my real problem, not anything related to pressures of family or job. That confused me, because I didn't know I was sick. But Dr. Deming offered a concrete solution; he had the answers to the perplexing questions of my life. So when he told me that he thought I should enter this special unit at a nearby hospital, I listened.

He said that it was very important that I go in as soon as possible. He made it sound so wonderful. The hospital had programs and facilities especially geared to my needs, all covered by my company insurance. I could have a break from my regular life. That sounded tempting. I felt a bit guilty about taking advantage of the insurance company, but he said that's what it was for.

I felt like I could use a rest for a few days. I talked to my husband about it, and he was all in favor of it. It turns out that Dr. Deming had already called him and convinced him that I was deathly ill, and he should sign me in involuntarily if I wouldn't go on my own. But I didn't know that at the time.

In Dr. Deming's description of the hospital, he had compared it to a fine hotel. When I got there, I was in total shock. It wasn't anything like what he had said. The recreation facilities, the library, the manicured grounds, the jogging trails, those things were there, all right, but I was never allowed to use them. From the very first, I was treated more like a criminal than a patient. I saw people in restraints. Some of them were taken down by nurses and techs if they resisted. I was shocked to find children as patients in this environment. Even now, I cannot stand to hear a child cry, because the sound reminds me of the voice of a young patient in the hospital, begging to see her mother, crying to go home.

Because of my background, I've always felt that I deserved the bad things that happened to me. That was my initial reaction to the hospital. When Dr. Deming finally came to see me, I was so relieved. I didn't want him to leave me there. But he turned so cold. In our sessions, he was hostile. He kept insisting that I close my eyes and picture my abuse. I tried to cooperate, but my efforts were never enough. He told me I had been in a satanic cult, and that I had split off all these alters to cope with it. I knew about satanic cults from watching TV and from things I had read, but I didn't think I had been in one.

Still, if my dear Dr. Deming told me, maybe it was so. I loved him. I felt valued and important when I was with him. But I gradually came to realize that I was only valued if I stayed sick. He couldn't keep me in the hospital if I didn't have grave psychological problems. I had to be suicidal or homicidal. He interpreted all my actions and words that way, even though I told him I wasn't in a cult, and I wasn't suicidal. His response always indicated that I simply did not know the truth about myself.

If I did not behave in a way conducive to what he or the staff believed, I was “in denial,” and “regressing,” and I would be denied any privileges, like using the telephone or even sleeping in a bed. I finally managed to talk to my husband on the telephone. I told him that this place was not like we were told, that they had lied. I said that bad things were going on, that it was hurting and not helping, that I thought I would go nuts if I had to stay there. He didn't know what to think or what to do. A tech was listening in, it turns out. After that, they told me I couldn't make phone calls for a long time. I wasn't even

allowed to see my children. I was put on “constants,” where a tech sat with me all the time.

When my family and friends asked why I wasn't allowed to have visitors or phone calls, Dr. Deming would only say that there were “some things” going on. When they asked what he meant, he said he couldn't talk to them about it, because it would break the patient confidentiality law.

There sure was something going on I didn't understand, and I was terrified that it was a possibility that I really was a multiple personality and didn't know it. But I could see that most of the alters the patients had were created there in the hospital. Most of us went along with it so we wouldn't be put on restriction. Often they would threaten us, saying that if we didn't act right, we'd be considered untreatable, and they'd have to put us in the state hospital. They pushed people to the breaking point. I was close to mine.

I was drugged and obsessing over all the pain I had inside. I tried to explain what I felt, but they wouldn't listen to me. So to show them my pain, I started scratching myself up. They had told me that people like me would do those things, so I did. I figured they would understand that. All it got me was these mitts on my hands, kind of like boxing gloves. I couldn't even take them off to eat, so I had to kind of wedge a spoon up inside the mitt or I had to have a tech feed me.

It was like a drug store in there. One of the patients had been given over 20 different drugs at one time or the other. All of us were given at least one addictive drug. Many patients suffered various physical problems. We were physically sick a lot, but they ignored it most of the time, saying that everything was a body memory. A lot of the women had extremely long periods because of the drugs, or had two a month, or stopped having them at all. This was interpreted as evidence that different alters were out.

I was exhausted from fighting them—confused, drugged, and hopeless. I could feel myself emotionally slumping into compliance. I began to just go along with it all more and more. No matter how bizarre or unbelievable, I just did what I thought I was supposed to do to “get well.” Some of the people there supposedly had animal alters. Nobody I knew actually had them for real. They were all made up to suit the doctors and their insatiable appetite to help us poor patients [laughs]. We patients tried to help one another by exchanging information on what worked or didn't work to get more privileges or stay out of trouble with the staff. We even managed to make jokes to keep ourselves going. Since Dr. Deming had told most of us that this would be like a hotel, we renamed the unit “Hell Hotel.”

The smallest things became precious to me. I began to realize that the problems I had originally sought counseling for were trivial in comparison to what was happening to me in the hospital. Everything the patients did supposedly had some deep, troubling meaning to the staff. For example, in art therapy, if you put apples on your tree, or used different colors for your stick people—it meant something really significant. Every movement, every expression could help or harm you in the eyes of the staff. I think one of the scariest moments for me was when I realized that my doctor’s wild imagination was becoming my reality. I fought to hold on to even a semblance of the truth I had once known. I knew I had to get out of that “twilight zone” of a hospital.

But it was almost impossible to get out. I know a woman who called 911 and told the police that these crazy people were holding her hostage. They came to the address, but when they found out it was the nut house, they just laughed and left. The unfortunate thing is that it was really true.

I finally did get out when a member of the hospital housekeeping staff took pity on me and helped me contact my husband, who contacted my insurance company. They stopped certifying any more treatment, and I was released.

So I got out after five months of pure hell. Dr. Deming told me if I left his care and went home, that the cult would arrange for me and my family to be killed, either by sending a hit-man, or triggering me to do it myself. I am still struggling to overcome the fear implanted by that suggestion. I rarely go outside and constantly worry that Dr. Deming's predictions may come true. It makes me nervous just talking to you about the things that happened in the hospital. I still have nightmares about what I saw and experienced there.

As terrible as the incest in my childhood was, that dissociative disorders unit was worse. I've been raped physically, and I know what a person goes through. What happened to me in that hospital was worse than being raped. And I'm one of the lucky ones. I got out sooner than most people, and my husband was still there for me. So many people lost everything. Their children were taken away from them and their spouses divorced them. They had no home to return to. I did, and I went.

Still, my family has been virtually destroyed. My husband wants his lover, his wife, his friend. My children want their mother back. But I'm not the same person I was. I have lost the joy in things I used to do. I can barely function. I'm afraid to leave the house alone.

I'm seeing a good counselor now. She doesn't believe I was ever in a satanic cult, MPD, or anything else Dr. Deming said about me, and now neither does my family. But I'm still afraid to read the Bible, because Dr. Deming convinced me that there were cult messages there that would trigger my programming. I don't think I was in a cult. I don't remember anything about it. Yet I'm afraid to trust my own feelings and memories now, even good ones.

When we went into the hospital, we were your neighbors, your coworkers, your family. Now, we're nuts. Dr. Deming put so much self-doubt and fear into me that I get confused a lot now. If any of Dr. Deming's patients were really in a cult, this man would be dead. He was so paranoid about the cults that he kept bodyguards to protect him. I think now that he was really afraid of the people whose lives were destroyed by him.

They told me in the hospital to beware of this False Memory Syndrome Foundation, that it was a terrible cult full of pedophiles. I've met some parents in that Foundation now, and they're some of the nicest people you'll ever meet. One man at an FMS meeting was angry, though, and vented at me a bit. “How could you let somebody put these lies in your head and believe them?” he demanded. I told him as respectfully as I could, “It's not that I let anyone. That carries the connotation of giving them permission to screw up my head. I gave no one permission. I didn't even know they were doing it.”

Some people may believe that, because we were stupid enough to trust these doctors in the first place, we deserved the bad things that happened to us in the hospital. I can only say that human beings can be fooled. They can misplace their trust in another person, and few of us are so wise that we never put faith in someone who may end up hurting us.

I know it's important to get to the root of a problem and deal with it, but I don't believe in this repressed memory theory. It is destructive and does not help get to real problems or truth. Most real victims of sexual abuse that I know, going to counseling, do have some memories. They may try to push them out of their minds. Most of them don't want to talk about it. On the other hand, in my experience, those who have “recovered memories” are usually excited to talk about it and get all the attention they can. It seems to be all they want to talk about.

One thing I've learned through this is that having a bunch of letters after your name doesn't make you wise. People can become so prideful in their knowledge that it makes them fools. You take someone with a big degree like Dr. Deming has and put them on a panel with a laundromat attendant, and I'll put my money on the laundromat attendant every time to display more sanity. A lot of therapists are screwier and more messed up than the patients they treat. They get hold of this impressive-sounding theory and it goes through some metamorphosis in their minds and is transformed into fact. Then they go treat patients with this new information that only causes more havoc in the lives of persons with normal problems. They have this zeal to treat a disorder that doesn't even exist—at least, not until after treatment starts, and that's when the suffering really begins.

– • –

Robert Wilson, Retractor

A rugged, 38-year-old former Marine, Robert Wilson could not find a job in Illinois. “Who wants to hire a former mental case who hasn't worked in years?” Piecing his life back together after thinking he was an incest survivor with MPD, he was still trying to understand what happened. Wilson really did endure emotional and physical abuse during his childhood. Both of his parents were deaf and possessed limited education. His father, a weekend alcoholic, made life hell for his three children. A Vietnam veteran, Wilson became severely depressed at the age of 29 and entered a VA hospital for four months. Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, he was put on lithium, had a good counselor, and received support from other veterans. “I thought I was on top of the world when I came out,” he told me. The hospital counselor suggested that he continue with follow-up sessions at a local hospital near his home. In 1986, he entered therapy with Dr. Donna Lovins, a 27-year-old Ph.D. clinical psychologist.
I thought Donna was pretty young, but she was a doctor, and I trusted her. She wanted me to talk about my childhood. I told her my father was an alcoholic who used to come and flip the bedroom light on, on Friday and Saturday nights, and yell and scream at us. Because he was a deaf mute, he couldn't hear his own screaming. Then he'd wait till we were asleep and do it again, all night. He did the same thing to Mom, shaking her awake. All of us kids became adults real quick. My older sisters and I had to communicate for our parents.

Depression probably runs in our family. My middle sister Jill went through it, and so did our father. Everyone on Dad's side of the family was alcoholic and abusive. His mother punctured his ear drums with large bobby pins, for instance, and his father went to prison for murder.

Donna Lovins put me on full, permanent disability in 1987, the year after I started therapy with her. Until then, I was a welder, an auto mechanic. I can look back now and see how she suggested me into it. I told her about a real incident from when I was 12. I was working at a corner store, and my Dad came in one Friday night, screaming and yelling. I was so embarrassed, I quit the job. So Donna told me that I would probably have trouble at work. And I did. When I asked her why, she said, “The machinery and noise remind you of your father, and you'll have to walk off the job, just like you did when you were 12.” So I wound up doing that.

Donna was fascinated by the stories from my childhood, but they weren't enough for her. She kept saying, “There's more to this than what you're telling me,” and I'd say, “No, there isn't. I remember my childhood.” That's when she said I was repressing it, and there was a way to get it all out, through hypnosis. At first, I went to see her once a week for an hour, but then it was two hours, and then two sessions a week, two hours each. Donna gave me a book, Outgrowing the Pain by Eliana Gil, written for survivors of childhood abuse. Later, when The Courage to Heal came out, she gave that to me, too.

Before we did formal hypnosis, Donna trained me to relax. I'd concentrate on my breathing, then relax my feet, work up to the calves, legs, chest, relax every part of my body. It's sort of like meditation. It was no problem for me to relax, because I was on 200 milligrams of Mellaril and 100 milligrams of thorazine, which is very heavy medication.

After the relaxation sessions, we started doing hypnosis. I never remembered anything about it afterwards. I felt like I just fell asleep, and when I woke up she had so much to tell me. She said my father raped me when I was six years old and that my mother sexually abused me by kissing me, like a girlfriend would. At the age of seven or eight, my father and my sister Jill got me into a satanic cult, where I witnessed human sacrifice.

I was devastated by thinking these things had happened to me. I totally believed all of this, though I couldn't remember saying it. And I developed real memories of these things. I could see it all in my head. Donna had a tape recorder in her office, but when I asked her to record a hypnotic session, she said, “I don't advise it,” so I dropped it. I totally depended on her. If she'd told me to jump, I'd have asked how high.

I wanted to confront my family, but Donna said, “No, they'll just deny it. They'll say you're crazy.” Donna convinced me that Jill had tattooed “666” on my ankle, which is a satanic number. I was really angry at Jill for that. Donna said I was not just abused, but tortured. She used that word over and over again. I almost brought charges against them, but instead I would call them up and harass them. People now tell me I looked like a shark, with that cold stare.

I had to talk to Donna daily just in order to get through a day. She gave me relaxation tapes of her voice, and when I started to experience anxiety, I was to listen to her voice, telling me what to do, like hypnosis all over again. She would tell me to relax and go to this safe place in my head—a green pasture, a sunny day, where there were animals but no human beings, a nice, quiet, warm place.

Donna convinced me that everyone in my life had abused me. When my mother died in 1987, she told me to go to her casket and remember all the pain she had caused me, to remember my sexual abuse. So I did. I said, “I hate you for what you did to me.” And at the time, I felt no grief, no pain.

Then Donna started telling me I had different personalities. I said, “No, I don't have that. If anybody knows, it's me.” She said I was in denial and I had to face it. She named different parts. One was Paul, who was like my protector. When I was a child, Paul would come out and take the pain. Damion was the one who participated in the satanic cult. Bobby was supposed to be the intelligent one who did all the paperwork. I was Robert, the core alter. She also said I had a female personality, and I had a real hard time with that. I thought maybe it meant I was gay or something.

What's so awful and makes me so ashamed is that I started to act out these roles. As Damion, I started acting out satanic rituals, like in a dream state. It's hard to explain. I sacrificed a stray dog. I cut its throat in my back woods. And I stole money from my union, over $50,000, and burned it as a sacrifice. My mind was so twisted and warped, the money was supposed to take care of my mother in hell. Each time I burned the money or did something else awful, I called Donna and told her I was out of control. “I'm committing a felony. I need help.” She didn't respond. She'd just say, “We'll talk about this in therapy.” Actually, I think my being out of control excited her. At one point, I tried to commit suicide with an overdose of my medication. They found me passed out on the street, and I woke up in the hospital with a tube down my throat.

Then she told me about George, another personality, who was a male prostitute specializing in older women. The next thing you know, I was on a street corner acting out being a male prostitute. I really did have sex with older women for money. To me, it was like a dream. I would find myself in situations I didn't believe. I was making money, wearing fancy jewelry. I honestly didn't consciously know what I was doing until it was over.

In 1989, Donna sent me to this special hospital unit in Chicago for MPDs run by this famous specialist, Dr. Bennett Braun. The first thing they did was inject me. Then before I even went to my room, Dr. Braun showed me the Control Room. It had all glass walls with curtains all around, and a bed with thick straps. I thought, “Oh my God, I'm in trouble here.” I was terrified. I called my wife and said, “You've got to get me out of here.” Two days later, I was out. Dr. Braun told me I needed to be there. Donna was very upset with me for leaving.

By 1991, I was so afraid of being out of control that I wouldn't leave my house. I confined myself to my bedroom for a year, only coming out to go to the bathroom. It's amazing to me that my wife stuck with me. My three sons were active in sports, but I couldn't go to the baseball games. I would still talk to Donna on the phone during this time. She convinced me that all my friends were against me, that they would try to hurt me. She told me my wife was cheating on me, that my children were my enemies. She was the only one in the world who would help me.

During that year, I stopped taking medication, and I started to feel better. I couldn't understand it. Gradually, I started to come out of my bedroom and reconnect with my family and the rest of the world. I started going to my kids' baseball games. I saw Donna for the last time in person in April of 1992, but I still hated my father and sisters, and I'd talk to Donna on the phone frequently.

On Christmas Eve in 1993, I had been thinking about my sisters a lot, and I decided to call Jill and Barbara. Barbara wouldn't talk to me and still won't. I started to question Jill, and she assured me that the sexual abuse never happened. “Dad would say vulgar, awful things, but he never touched us sexually.” It was the first time we had talked in eight years. A few weeks later, Jill called and said, “I saw this program. Would you please call this 800 number for the FMS Foundation?” Two days later, I called, and everything seemed to fall into place. I heard so many stories that were similar to mine. Finally, I could relate to someone else. I had gone through this same thing.

I got a call from Donna six weeks ago, and I told her I was talking to the FMS Foundation. She went ballistic. She threatened to get a court order to put me back in the hospital. I got an attorney, and he told me not to worry. In fact, I'm going to sue my therapist now. She stole eight years of my life. She should be in jail. I didn't get sick until I saw her. She turned a minor problem into a life-threatening mental disorder. She took advantage of me. She took the truth and intertwined it with lies.

Why did Donna do this to me? I've thought a lot about that. I would say she's Dr. Frankenstein. She was trying to create a monster, and I happened to be her monster. Maybe she wanted to write a book about this case for the publicity. She always told me males were more aggressive and would act out more.

What I went through in therapy reminded me of the Marine Corps, the same sort of brainwashing. They would tell you to attack a machine gun nest, and you'd automatically do it. That training was really hard, the hardest thing I've done in my life. They would drill and drill us to kill. Donna would drill and drill me about my past in an almost identical manner.

I still have memories and feelings, even though I intellectually know they're not real. The other day, I got mad at Jill about that tattoo, even though I know an “alter” put it on under Donna's influence.

I'm starting to speak up about this now. I know there's other men out there. People say, “You're a big guy. How could this happen to you?” We're strong on the outside, but weak inside. I'm ashamed. It's embarrassing. I can't really explain it. But I think if it happened to me, it could happen to anybody.

One of my biggest regrets is that my mother died thinking I still hated her. Oh, God, it bothers me. I can't even ask her to forgive me. She was the sweetest, kindest woman on earth.

I cannot go to a therapist now. I know there are good therapists, but I'm scared of them. Talking about what happened to me is my therapy.

I feel fine now. I don't even feel depressed any more. I think everyone on the planet gets depressed sometimes. I did have a very hard childhood, but I went to therapy to be a better person, not to get worse.

This has been really hard on my wife and kids. My wife is still very bitter about it. I think she's only staying with me because of the children. The boys are 15, 13, and 9. We've sat and talked about what I went through. They're very angry—partly at me, partly at the therapist. But they're glad to see I'm a Dad again. It's not too late. Considering everything that's happened, they're doing well.

^ An alarming 1994 survey of therapists indicated that 21.8 percent remembered being sexually abused as children. Of those, 52.7 percent reported having forgotten some or all of the abuse. In other words, over half of them had recovered “memories” of abuse themselves.

^ In The Healing Woman, many of the testimonials were written by Survivors who were also therapists or psychics. I interviewed one staff member at an eating disorders facility who had originally gone there as a patient. While there, she recovered memories of incest during “Survivors' Week.” Now she helped others retrieve their memories. Sometimes the procedure could work in the reverse direction, however. One psychiatrist tired of his MPD patient calling him at home every night, so he asked his teenage son to talk to her instead. After a year of such phone conversations, the son entered a mental hospital thinking that he, too, harbored multiple personalities.

^ Increasingly, therapy was being taken over by women, who had always dominated social work. The M.S.W. was now the primary degree held by clinicians. In 1976, women constituted just over 31 percent of all Ph.D. recipients in clinical psychology. By 1990, they made up over 58 percent. “Due to the feminization of psychotherapy,” Ilene Philipson observed in her 1993 book, On the Shoulders of Women, “the experience of examining one's inner life by working with a caring and authoritative male therapist is becoming less common and may soon be anachronous. Men who ideally could serve as benign, caring, and attentive figures of authority—a role increasingly left vacant in families today—represent a small minority in most clinical training programs."

^ Not only did therapists disclaim responsibility for harming clients, they often blamed them for everything. Thus when Sam Holden felt like hitting them, it wasn’t because he had a problem, but because they subtly invited abuse. Katherine Hylander thought that her clients deserved their traumas to atone for the sins of their past lives. And Leslie Watkins, who wanted her clients to remain utterly dependent upon her, interpreted their excitement over a new relationship as attempts to “derail” therapy, informing them they were delaying the recovery process.

^ The following interviews may not be altogether representative of those who recovered abuse memories because: (1) All of them are women. About 10 percent of Survivors were male. (2) Most of these are interviews with middle-aged women, many of whom recalled ritual abuse. There were many younger Survivors who recalled simple incest, but I could not find many who would talk with me on the record.

^ Similarly, I didn’t necessarily take Survivors at their word when they told me they could not recall whole years of their childhoods. When I caught them with their guards down, they would tell me particular incidents from those lost years. Few people remember their youth in much detail, so it was easy for therapists to convince clients that they had amnesia for vast chunks of time.

^ Psychologist Joy Davidson wrote an interesting book called The Agony of It All: The Drive for Drama and Excitement in Women's Lives (1988). Davidson believed that human beings have an innate need for challenge and thrills, but that women in Western societies have been denied healthy outlets. “For women,” she wrote,“drama-seeking extends from restrictive, sex-biased conditioning imposed by both society and family . . . . Women often learn to create drama as the primary means of satisfying their sensation-seeking needs.”

^ In Anxiety Disorders and Phobias, Aaron Beck and Gary Emery discussed cases in which a “lifelong pattern of separation fears and dependency” could lead to agoraphobia (fear of leaving the house) and panic attacks. Such anxiety symptoms were often interpreted as flashbacks or body memories. In such cases, Beck and Emery wrote, there was “the increasing expectation that the individual take on the demands of adulthood or parenthood and at the same time function more independently. Birth of a child, loss of a caregiver through separation or death, increased demands at home or at work, all may precipitate agoraphobic symptoms.”

^ Harvard Medical School researchers reported three cases in which patients saw vivid intrusive obsessional images and were convinced that these represented flashbacks to abuse. When given appropriate medication (serotonin reuptake antagonists), all three stopped having their “flashbacks.”

^ As a result, Ingram was imprisoned for acts that he clearly did not commit, though he was later released. Surprisingly, false confessions aren't rare, as Gisli Gudjonsson pointed out in The Psychology of Interrogations, Confessions, and Testimony (1992). Many occur when “suspects come to believe during police interviewing that they have committed the crime they are accused of, even though they have no actual memory of having committed the crime.” Richard Ofshe, the psychologist who proved that Paul Ingram was fantasizing his own guilt, also wriote an interesting paper on how suspects' self-doubt and confusion can lead to false confessions.

^ There was actually a 12-step support group for “adult children of dysfunctional affluent families” designed to help “victims of the difficult and debilitating effects of affluence.”

^ I learned of several families who lost first one, then several children to recovered-memory therapy. One father I interviewed had lost four of his five daughters, one of whom accused him of “incestuous” behavior because, when she was 22, he told her about his job dissatisfaction—a conversation more appropriate with a wife, she asserted. Another couple told me they had lost seven of their eight children. These cases were particularly devastating because so many people assumed that if multiple children made the accusations, they must be true. They did not stop to consider the improbability of several children completely forgetting abuse for years, let alone one.

^ I interviewed one retired Tennessee doctor whose two daughters, in their 40s, recovered hypnotic “memories” of how he sexually abused them at his summer home, along with 12 prostitutes whom he then allegedly murdered and buried. The police led a hypnotized daughter around the property and dug for the bodies, but they never found them. The daughters sued their father for $4 million each. At least he was not in jail, as was Rhode Island attorney John Quattrocchi (his real name). In 1994, Quattrocchi was convicted of molesting his former girlfriend's daughter. The 19-year-old’s “recovered memories,” which she discovered after months of psychotherapy, went back to when she was three, just prior to the time she first met Quattrocchi. He was sentenced to 40 years by Rhode Island Superior Court Judge John P. Bourcier, known locally as “Maximum John,” but his case was finally overturned and he was released.

^ At one point I sat next to Sculley while listening to a “retractor” describe the mental agonies she had gone through in therapy. I looked over and saw tears quietly streaming down his face.

^ The widely held belief that real sex offenders usually deny their guilt may not be true. A 1978 book on family violence, for instance, found that nine out of ten fathers accused of incest admitted it. A 1983 article noted that of all suspected criminals, those accused of sex abuse had the highest confession rate. It appears that only in the past few decades has the stereotype of invariable denial been accepted.

^ McKillop's experience was not uncommon. “This began a pattern,” one Survivor wrote in 1992. “I would cut myself, resolve not to do it again, she [the therapist] would say it was going to happen again, and I would cut myself again. It became a vicious cycle. I came to feel like no matter what I did, I would never be able to control what I was doing.” Such women were tacitly encouraged to mutilate themselves by a newsletter aptly titled the Cutting Edge, filled with poetry such as: “Slip slash slide enters the blade / and all the pain will fade.”

^ I do not mean to imply that retractors should abandon all therapy, just the search for repressed memories. Nor should they necessarily avoid all medication that could ease their suffering. For some, such as those suffering from manic depression (bipolar disorder), proper medication appears to be essential.

^ Here is how Alice Miller began her 1991 book, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: 'The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.” She went on to recommend recalling and resolving “every facet of the original experience within a process of careful therapeutic disclosure.”

^ Even in comparison to The Courage to Heal, the Littauers' book is incredibly suggestive. Freeing Your Mind From Memories That Bind offers an extensive list of “symptoms” of repressed sexual abuse memories, including pre-menstrual syndrome, asthma, migraines, insomnia, vague bodily pains, or even nose-picking.

1Endnotes for Chapter 1a

^ Campbell, Improbable Machine, p. 254.

2^ Poole, “Psychotherapy and the Recovery.”

3^ Feldman-Summers, “Experience of Forgetting,” p. 637.

4^ Allison, “Effect on the Therapist,” p. 14.

5^ Philipson, On the Shoulders, p. 1, 144.
Endnotes for Chapter 2a

6^ Blake, Complete Writings, p. 663.

7^ Bass, Courage, p. 45, 166.

8^ Davidson, The Agony, p. 4.

9^ Bass, Courage, p. 52.

10^ FMSF Newsletter, Jan. 1996, p. 6.

11^ Bass, Courage, p. 47.

12^ Ganaway, “Dissociative Disorders,” p. 11-12.

13^ Beck, Anxiety Disorders, p. 133-135, 142-143.

14^ Bass, Courage, p. 48.

15^ Lipinksi and Pope, reported in Loftus, “The Repressed Memory Controversy,” p. 445.

16^ Bass, Courage, p. 163.
Endnotes for Chapter 3a

17^ Kafka, The Trial.

18^ Wright, Remembering Satan, p. 8; Ofshe, “Inadvertent Hypnosis.”

19^ Gudjonsson, Psychology of Interrogations, p. 228; Ofshe, “Coerced Confessions.”

20^ Book of Job 4:7; 6:21.

21^ FMSF Newsletter, May 3, 1993, p. 13.

22^ “Repressed Memories: Can They Be Trusted?” Santa Cruz Sentinel, March 21, 1993.

23^ J. Alexander Bodkin, July 2, 1994 unpublished letter to the New York Times; John Quattrocchi interview, Sept. 6, 1994; Smith, Martha, “The Bulldogs,” Rhode Islander Magazine, July 31, 1994, p. 11.

24^ Seligman, What You Can Change, p. 133-144.

25^ Finkelhor, “Victimization of Children.”

26^ FMSF Newsletter, June 1995, p. 3.

27^ Manchester, “Incest and the Law,” in Family Violence; Mitchell, “Confessions.”
Endnotes for Chapter 4a

28^ Putnam, quoted in Robbins, Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, p. 402-403.

29^ The Cutting Edge, Fall 1992, p. 4, 7.

30^ Gavigan, The Retractor, Dec. 1992/Jan. 1993, p. 1-2.

31^ Miller, Breaking Down the Wall, p. 1.

32^ Littauer, Freeing Your Mind, p. 87-217, 226.