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

Olivia McKillop, Retractor

She was one of those “perfect” children who had never given her parents the least cause for concern. “We used to call Olivia LPWC, for 'Little Perfect Wonder Child,' “ her father Harry told me. An avid church-goer, Olivia McKillop seemed thoughtful, compassionate, and well-balanced. A professional child actress, she had appeared in bit parts in Hollywood films. During her senior year in high school, however, she fell apart and began therapy with Tricia Green. Soon, she began to retrieve memories of abuse. When I interviewed her, McKillop, 20, had broken with her therapist and was trying to rebuild a good relationship with her family.
I was the good kid. Everybody liked me. I was very compliant to people's faces. But there were things sleeping beneath the surface. I got everything in the way of material things, but I missed my Dad. He's a high-power businessman, and he just wasn't there a lot in the last few years. I was jealous of my older brother Jerry. Dad seemed much more interested in Jerry's sports than in my plays. I completely love my Mom, but she lives out a lot of dreams through me. I felt that I couldn't just be a normal kid, I had to be the brilliant actress.

The pressure just kept building on me. One day in October of 1991, in the fall of my senior year of high school, I just went berserk. I threw my school bag down and was banging my head on the floor. I had this horrible feeling of total despair. My Mom came in and said, “Get up off the floor, you're fine, get up, get up.” Mom is very reserved and controlled. I screamed, “I don't feel loved, I don't feel loved.” Finally, I calmed down. “I'm sick of being the perfect kid,” I told her. And I went to bed. I just felt this coldness and started to shake. That was the beginning of my panic attacks.

My parents had some meeting behind closed doors, as always, and they took me shopping. I got lots of new clothes. I just got more and more angry. Then one morning I couldn't wake up. I broke down and checked out. For six weeks, I lay in bed 20 hours a day. I couldn't go to school. My Mom just kept saying, “You're stressed, you're stressed.”

[The family doctor diagnosed McKillop as clinically depressed. He put her on antidepressants and strongly suggested she receive counseling. Harry McKillop distrusted the mental health profession, but when his friend told him that local therapist Tricia Green had helped his wife through a bad depression, he relented.]

I was looking for a savior. Tricia lived only ten minutes away. I went in, and she had Georgia O'Keefe paintings on the wall, and it was so soothing and nice. I thought, “This is great, I'm going to get better.” Tricia is divorced, in her 40s, has a masters in counseling, and is also an artist. She's licensed by the American Association of Marriage and Family Counselors. I told her what I was going through, but I got the feeling she didn't quite believe anything I said. She was after something. At the end of the hour, she said, “Well, Olivia, your prognosis is really good, but it's going to take a lot of time.”

She gave me Outgrowing the Pain: For Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse, by Eliana Gil. It was a short little book. I thought, “This is funny. I don't remember telling her about abuse.” But I read it from cover to cover, three times that week. Suddenly, I could not wait to go back to counseling. It wasn't so much the book, but her. The atmosphere was so soothing, and I loved the attention Tricia gave me.

I made sure I looked really nice the next week. I wanted to please her. The second session, she grilled me about my Dad and my older brother Jerry. She asked all these questions, but I never knew what she wanted. She never seemed to believe me, no matter what I answered. “Is he nice to your Mom? How does he treat Jerry? What would you say his typical day is? Olivia, would you say that your Dad is a very angry man?” I'd say, “Yeah,” just to agree. Gradually, I began to see my family as really abusive and dysfunctional.

She asked me to bring in pictures of myself as a child. I pored over our family photo albums, and we worked from these pictures. I looked kind of sad in one. I said, “Oh, I hated wearing that sweater.” And she said, “Oh, really?” as if she didn't believe that was all there was to it. Then she made me visualize a safe place. It was like a ring, and I would lie down in the middle of it. She'd talk me through guided imagery, with this really soothing voice. “Now just imagine that you're this little girl in the white sweater. Imagine you're a helpless, vulnerable, defenseless little girl.” I had told her how I used to go to a day care and lie under the piano, staring up at it. So she took me back to that scene. I was totally seeing all of this as she said it. “Are you scared?” she asked, and I found that I was. “Do you see somebody?” I saw this piano repair man. “Does he come and sit by you?”

And then suddenly I visualized him lying on top of me. Tricia was really silent at this point, letting me live this scene. I imagined this man taking off my pants and sweater and totally licking me and kissing me from my crotch to my neckline. I didn't say this out loud. “Is he hurting you?” Tricia asked. “Yes, yes,” I whispered. Then I opened my eyes and screamed, “Stop! Stop! I want out of this.” Tricia was calm, really calm, and she was smiling. I grabbed my stuff. I was hyperventilating. She said, “If you need to stay here a minute and settle down, that's fine. But I have another client coming.” As I walked out the door, she said, “You're probably going to feel self-destructive, because flashbacks are really hard. So call me any time.” I went straight out and bought The Courage to Heal, which she'd told me to do.

That night, after everyone was asleep, I got up, went to the kitchen, and took out this knife. I started cutting myself up on my arms. I was very calm. I just cut and cut and cut, lots of little cuts. Then I put the knife away, cleaned everything up, and just stared at my blood. I liked it! It was so weird. I went to my room and stayed up all night.

I gobbled up The Courage to Heal just read it, read it, read it, particularly the stories by Survivors at the back of the book, like “Michelle and Artemis” and “Gizelle.” They were so awful. The phrase kept coming back, “If your life shows the symptoms and you don't remember it, you were still abused.” I just lived with that phrase. And I bought Secret Survivors and Silently Seduced and a bunch of other recovery books, too. I read them all.

By the time I went for my next appointment, I was an Incest Survivor, and there was no turning back. I did this drawing exercise with my left hand, showing what I felt like as a little girl. At this point, I wanted Tricia's approval. I wanted her to help me so bad. Sometimes I would exaggerate or even lie. My parents were turning into these monsters of dysfunction. I started to believe my Dad was an alcoholic and Mom was codependent and neurotic. Tricia wanted me to talk to my sister Casey, who's four years older than me, to form a liaison with her, but I resisted that.

I kept worrying that I wasn't like the women in The Courage to Heal. It wasn't like I was driving my car and kazam, I had this flashback. I was really concerned that I wasn't a true Survivor. If I felt I wasn't acting the right way, I would freak out.

Eventually, I came to believe that six men had abused me, including my grandfather, Dad, and my brother Jerry. Tricia would take a real incident and help me turn it into something awful. “Olivia, remember when you and your brother were fighting downstairs,” she said during one guided imagery session. “He throws you up against the wall. What are you doing?” “I'm screaming back at him. Now I'm on the ground.” “Is he on the ground, too?” I said, “Oh my God, we're rolling around on the ground together!” And then I saw him raping me. That night I went home and cut all my long, curly hair off, my pride and joy. I think I wanted to punish myself for thinking this about my brother.

I stayed in therapy once or twice a week for six months. I deferred college, gave up a potential music scholarship, and moved out of my parents' house on Tricia's advice. I went to be a live-in Nanny. I began to tell my friends that I had been abused, but I didn't confront my family. “You stay away from people who don't believe you.” Tricia told me. “Those people aren't worthy of you!”

[That fall of 1992, a friend got Olivia to go on a six-month Mission Quest program for young people. After extensive training, she volunteered in Central America with her group, but she continued to conduct weekly phone sessions with Tricia. After a near-rape by a Latino, Olivia told her group leader Fran, “I'm so afraid I'm going to have nightmares and remember much more abuse now.”]

Fran just stopped and said, “Olivia, you were not sexually abused.” I said, “What?” I was livid. She said, “I'm sorry, but at the risk of you hating me, I have to say this. I've listened to you for the last four months, and I just don't believe it. You're the product of bad counseling. This woman Tricia is a psycho. It kills me to watch it. Every time you call her, you're worse the next day. I can't continue and not tell you the truth. Get out of it.”

I didn't believe her, but this seed of doubt was planted. I thought, “Olivia, look at how much better you are. Look at your life. You're so much better than when you were in therapy.” I said to myself, “Hey, I was a pretty happy person before.” I wished for that peace again. This was a few days before my 19th birthday. I looked back at my past year, and it was just gone, wasted.

At the end of March, 1992, I came back home. I was different, really softened. My depression was gone. I came in the house and saw my family there in the living room by the fire, and I really saw them as this treasure. My God, after a year of being in this daze, I really saw them again. I thought, “I don't want to go back to Tricia. I don't want my family to turn into these horrible people any more.” So I called her up that night and told her. She was really okay about it. She said, “Olivia, promise me that you'll continue to work on this, and if you need to come back, come see me. But get into a support group.”

By this time, I was accepted to a few colleges. But I realized that my relationship with my parents was still just like ice. So I decided to go back into therapy again. I was having nightmares about the man who assaulted me in Central America. At first, I went to see a male therapist, but when I told him about my repressed memories, he said, “Let me get this straight. You didn't remember anything at all until you went into therapy?” When I told him that was right, he said, “I'm sorry, I can't take you as my client. I can't work from that basis.” I was so pissed.

He had a woman associate, so I saw her. On her advice, I bought The Courage to Heal Workbook, and we started working more on my memories of my grandfather. I started getting nervous again, starving myself again. I started slipping back. I couldn't afford the $85 sessions, though, so I stopped. But I was still doing the workbook and telling people I was a Survivor, even though some of my oldest friends were confronting me about it, saying “That didn't happen to you.” Finally, what really turned me around was an experience that summer, when I was a camp counselor. I was in a boat on the pond with this beautiful, sweet, sad little ten-year-old girl. She was really quiet and shy and never dressed in front of anyone. She said, “Counselor, my Daddy is doing something bad to me, when he sleeps with me in my bed.” I turned around and looked at her, and I started to cry. And I thought to myself, “My Dad did not rape me.” I was not like this child. She remembered. She always remembered. So we reported what she said to the authorities.

[Even after the camp experience, however, Olivia continued to waver. “The hold these therapists can have over you, it's so bizarre,” she observed. She discovered the FMS Foundation, but she still hadn't rid herself of her “memories.”]

In the fall of 1993, when I was a freshman in college, I was crying one day about this whole mess. A male friend who knew my story said, “Tricia still has a hold on your life. Can you say out loud, 'I was not sexually abused'?” So I said the words out loud, then again, then screamed them in the middle of my dorm, three or four times. It was a liberating moment. After that, I wrote Tricia a letter and told her the same thing. In a ceremony, I ripped up and burned my copy of The Courage to Heal.

When I told my family about this, my father and brother were totally upset and astonished. They had no idea what I'd thought. We're in counseling together now, with a good therapist who understands FMS [false memory syndrome], and I'm so grateful for their forgiveness. My Dad is an amazing man, and he is really trying to rebuild a relationship with me. And I love my brother to death.

But I still have nightmares from these “flashbacks.” Sometimes I still say to myself, “Maybe something happened,” just to give myself some peace. It's like security, like your savior. It's like coming out of a cult. Something so powerful doesn't just disappear.

Looking back, what makes me the angriest is how Tricia turned me into this pathetic victim. When that man nearly raped me, I froze, and all I could hear was Tricia saying, “You're a helpless, vulnerable, defenseless little girl.” She practically told me that I would be revictimized because of what had happened to me, and she led me into cutting myself. Also, I think she had kind of a sick relationship with me. She said I reminded her of her daughter. She kept my picture on her desk and my poetry by her bed. She gave me these long hugs.

Before therapy, I was always a strong person who could stick up for myself. I grew up in a good family. I'm bright. I'm the kid next door. If this could happen to me, it could happen to anyone.

It has really helped to contact the FMS Foundation and to speak out about this, but I don't want being a Retractor to become the focus of my life the same way being a Survivor was.

Something that has been really difficult for me is realizing that my relationship with my father will never be the same. I can feel it. I'm not the same person to him, and I know that's hard for him. We're adults now. I don't need him like I did as a little girl. It's different now. He's Harry, not Dad. I mean, he'll always be my dad, but it's not the same. I think the sad thing is that, due to FMS, my Dad lost me prematurely. The whole natural process of breaking away from parents and coming of age was sped up and distorted. I came of age by turning into an Incest Survivor. Yeah, I had to break away from my parents, but it shouldn't have been out of fear and hate.

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Linda Furness, British Retractor

When she was 32, Linda Furness of Bath, England, felt abandoned and rejected by her two previous lovers. She had plenty of money, hut she felt empty inside. Desperately, she began to spend money on designer clothes and skiing holidays, and she took up with a fast London crowd, where she was introduced to psychedelic drugs. She had a bad trip, and her boyfriend in the group said she must have some deep-seated psychological problem to react that way. He suggested she go for therapy. At the same time, her mother expressed concern over her fast lifestyle and said she should find someone to talk to. “So two key people in my life said I should get outside help.” She found Mary Beth Snodgrass, a therapist who specialized in transactional analysis, better known as “TA.”
During our first session, Mary Beth talked about my aspirations and asked me about my childhood. She said, “What we need to do is to form a contract to say what are the outcomes you want to achieve in your life.” She explained that therapy was a process of understanding myself and reaching my potential. This was quite exciting. This was like a hammock, a safety net. I was finally getting myself sorted out, finding out what made me tick, and I would become everything I could be.

I had been constantly living with frustration and disappointment. I never felt fulfilled, despite my achievements. There was always a gap. I wonder now if I was being selfish to be so introspective. She invited me to become extremely self-centered and introspective.

In our sessions, Mary Beth concentrated on negative emotions. I didn’t express anger very much. She concentrated on me being able to get my anger out. She used lots of different techniques, but mostly Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis. Very early on, she wanted me to learn the methodology of TA and buy these books. I was going to become intimate and break down barriers, have loving relationships. She helped me understand that I was just playing games most of the time.

Some sessions we would do chair work. She would ask me to imagine my mother or father in a chair. More often, she asked me to become the other person, go and be my mother. It was a strange and scary experience. Sort of like trying to split my mind. But I went along with it.

In April 1993, I left my job. I had a new tall, dark male boss who frightened me to death. He was verbally abusive, didn’t believe I could do the job. He was absolutely ruthless. I couldn’t respond positively. I became unable to do the work. I ended up leaving by mutual agreement. So I wondered what I was doing to myself, why I was self-destructive. I was full of self-doubt. I thought maybe I could do freelance, design management and communication. I thought I could speed up the therapeutic process, really get somewhere. I wanted to be right before I could take on another job.

The dream work became quite central to my therapy around this time. I came in with more and more dreams and nightmares. This one particular dream led to my sexual abuse accusations. I dreamed I was in the same house with my parents, in a room that had hundreds of bolts up and down my bedroom door. I was quite happy with this privacy, with the door shut, with a male I felt comfortable with. Outside in the hallway, on a cold floor, my mother was sitting on a quilt. I was thinking, Why doesn’t she go back to bed? There was a voice, my father’s voice, shouting for my mother to come back upstairs to bed. And that was it.

The method Mary Beth used for dream work was to split the elements down. The theory was, each was a part of your psyche. So she said, “Linda, you are the bolt, what are you doing in Linda’s dream?” I was into it, like a kid’s play, but I felt pretty silly. I had gotten accustomed to this process, though. I said the bolts are barriers, keeping people out, achieving my own privacy. I could have said anything. I was trying to please her, give her an answer, say the first thing that came into my mind.

So then we went, Door, what do you want? Quilt, what do you want? Mother, what do you want? The quilt was to keep my Mum warm, away from the cold floor. Then we were going to put the dream together. The male wasn’t threatening. He was holding me and it was comforting. He was a married man I was in a relationship with at that time, but he was unattainable.

What really bothered me was that my mother was cold, sitting on this quilt. I wanted to put Mum and Dad together again, put her back there. The quilt was bothering me. I wanted to put the quilt on top of both of them. But when I did, I felt a searing pain, a visualization of this quilt on my father, as if the quilt were me. That’s when I got the pain, as if I was being penetrated, almost up to my chest. By this time, I was rocking back and forth. It felt so real, I was clenching my fists, nursing myself. This voice came out of me that sounded very childlike. “It hurts, it hurts, stop it, it hurts.” I freaked myself out.

Mary Beth was looking fairly concerned, like there was a breakthrough going on. She then had to take me back up to being an adult so I could walk out without being a gibbering wreck. Often in these sessions, I’d get very tearful. I would cry just about every time.

I didn’t actually tell her what was going on; I was in a state of shock. She gently brought me round without talking about it at all. At the next session, I said, “I’m very confused, I don’t understand the experience.” She explained that I had had a body memory, a memory of being sexually abused by my father.

I was open-minded to the fact that this repressed sexual abuse might be why I had been so pained and upset and introspective and putting up a front that everything was OK. Maybe there was this big trauma. She explained that I would have blocked it out because it was too painful to remember consciously. I said, “If it was an abuse issue, it could be anybody. Why would it need to be my father?” I tried to come up with other ideas of who might have taken care of me. She would say, “I think you’ll find it’s your father who is revealed in the end.” Every session, I went in and would deny it. I wanted to understand the body memory process, I was intrigued by this. She explained, “Your body is capable of storing the memories in a way that’s so traumatic that your brain doesn’t remember.” I never got more than that; I just had to believe it.

Then I started to have more body memories, when I was agitated, distressed, and dehydrated. I said, “I feel like I can’t breathe. I feel hot, like a hot baby in a pram.” She asked how old I felt. I said I felt as if I were 18 months old, or maybe up to about four. I thought my father had actually abused me with his penis in my mouth, that’s why I was feeling suffocated and phobic, with pain on my chest. It was probably from the weight of him.

I went into a severe depression, almost suicidal. I didn’t want to believe it. I was paying my money for absolute hell. I was desperately trying to get her to change her mind, but she wanted me to believe that she was right. It was a struggle of belief systems. And eventually, she won.

I did not really want to believe that anyone had abused me, but because of these body memories, I had no way to dispute it. People I wanted to get answers from were on a track, and they wouldn’t get off it.

After the blackest days of my life, on one occasion, I woke up and literally couldn’t see, it was total darkness. I thought, “This is the darkness of depression.” I told her I just couldn’t cope with this. I just lay in bed with my clothes on. I just didn’t want this to be the truth. And she would say to me, “These dark days, you have to go through them to become a better person.” I had to go through one more dark depression before I got out of it. So she headed me off for another one. It’s almost like becoming masochistic, I kept going back for more.

Eventually, I accepted that my father had abused me. I became very withdrawn. I still saw my parents, but very infrequently. I didn’t say anything to them, but I started to reveal these terrible awful secrets to others. The more people I told who accepted it, the more I thought it must be true. I told all my friends, even very new friends. I was getting my strokes and my attention from these people. You know, “Oh, you poor thing.”

Some people told me later that they never believed it and thought I was being brainwashed. Yet even my closest friends went along with it. My closest childhood friend and I were bathing our children together when I burst into tears. I said, “I think I believe it, but I don’t want to.” She said, “Well, there’s no reason not to believe you. What you believe is real to you.” I wish somebody had said, “Linda, come out of this.”

I finally disclosed it to my brother, and he said, “There’s no way this happened. Don’t ever accuse my father, or I’ll never talk to you again. You really should stop seeing this therapist.” To me, that was, “Oh, well, he’s in denial.” By this time, I believed that my father abused me because he was abused, and my mother married him because she was abused, going on for generations, a family taboo, and my brother was abused as well and was in denial, and he had married someone with an eating disorder who was abused. And if I didn’t get better and accept it, I would be an abuser or marry an abuser.

This all gave me a key to everything. It explained why I lost my job: I had transferred my feelings towards my father to my new boss. He was trying to control me and being abusive, just like my father had been.

I decided not to go home for Christmas in 1993. It would have been a sham. Instead, I spent the holiday miserably walking the moors on my own. I just told them I had things going on and didn’t want to upset them during Christmas. They were upset, but they said, “If that’s what you want, OK.”

Then, around Easter in 1994, I went home. By that time, I was thinking, “OK, he did it, but I forgive him. He was abused and he didn’t know what he was doing.” So I was trying to figure out how to help my family realize this truth. As soon as I clapped eyes on my Dad, I had trouble. We ate together, but I couldn’t hack it after the meal. He said, “What on earth is wrong with you? We don’t like you anymore. You shouldn’t see that woman. We don’t know you anymore.”

We had a buster. My mother asked, “What on earth have we done for you to treat us this way?” I said, “You’ll never get me to tell you.” He said, “We’ve racked our brains, and we can’t figure out what we did wrong when you were growing up. You’d better go. I’ve finished with you. I wash my hands of you.” And he left the room.

Mum said, “Before you go, will you come upstairs and talk with me? What is it? Have you got AIDS? Are you a lesbian? Are you taking drugs? Has your father ever done anything bad to you?” That sort of triggered me, and I said, “OK, come upstairs and I’ll tell you.” I told her that I’d been exploring in therapy that he had abused me. I didn’t go into any detail. I never actually confronted him directly. Then I left the house. In retrospect, I think that was a cruel thing to do.

She didn’t tell him for a week, going through in her own mind, wondering if it was true. She finally confronted him; they went through medical records. He totally denied that it ever took place. She was in a dilemma of who to believe. Finally, she made a decision that this could not have happened. From there, I realized that I didn’t have any allies in my family. To me, they were all in denial. I was getting more and more into believing it totally. I was in such deep pain, it was evidence that it was true.

I felt like I understood the pain and why it was there. When I became a whole person, the pain would go away. I had to take on the dark side of my nature and go through it and purge it and accept the terrible truth. Then I could choose to live in a happier frame of mine. I would be one of the few who really understand and could help the rest of the world. I was starting to speak their language, I was taking it all on board.

Once I was saying and doing the “right” thing, my next step began. I went to group induction training for TA. There were aromatherapists, massage people, NHS therapists, psychiatric nurses. I moved from being a victim to being a rescuer. I was on a crusade to save the world by this time.

But I didn’t like the former psychiatric nurse who was the trainer. I thought he was playing God. He really got into the sound of his own voice. I asked him about body memories, and he said, “Trust me, all I can say is that the body stores the memories that the brain can’t cope with. Your memories are coming out in a safe environment, a lot of inner child work is going on, so you feel safe. The body never forgets.” I said, “Yes, but where is the scientific evidence for this?” He said, quite agitatedly, “You must trust me.”

I began to doubt it then. One massage guy was hoping to use TA to convert massage clients. He put it to a 6o-year-old that she had to have hip replacement because she had been abused. I found that plausible, but where were the facts to back it up? I started to get a bit rebellious.

My Mum, Dad, and brother came to the clinic around this time and met with the head psychiatrist. I was invited to listen. I thought the therapists would get my family to see the truth. Mary Beth told my father that he needed help. As Mum and Dad left, they said, “If she’s hurt, we hold you responsible.” My Dad was the last one out, and he turned and said, so sorrowfully, “When will this process be finished? Where’s the end to all of this?” It touched me, it really touched me. The therapists said to me afterwards, “Those are very sick people; your family is dysfunctional.” I struggled with this. I really wanted to go after my family. I got very distressed because they had left me. I was more vulnerable than ever.

I kept awake all that night, and I suddenly recalled the Peter Pan play I rewrote when I was in the Sixth Form. We wanted the audience to shout, “We believe in fairies,” and the crew would hoist Tinkerbell on wires. But they couldn’t pull her up, so I kept having to go out and urge the audience to shout louder, stalling for time. I thought, “It’s just like that play. This is about belief, and it’s up to me to choose what I want to believe. I don’t want to believe that this is the truth.”

I phoned Mum and Dad and told them I felt unwell, that I didn’t know what to believe any more. I went home, and at first they were cool towards me. I told them I didn’t want to believe it was true. Then my Dad got hold of me and gave me the biggest hug he ever gave me. He looked into my eyes and said, “I thought I had lost you forever.” It was at that point that I converted 100 per cent, looking right into his eyes. That was what was missing all my life. I had never had the closeness I wanted from him.

I never went back to the TA people.

Now that I’m thinking for myself, I realize that these negative states are normal to us as human beings sometimes, and they don’t necessarily indicate that we were abused. We all know what it feels like when you can’t breathe because you’re so stressed out. It doesn’t mean it’s a body memory of oral sex. I’d love to discover what it would be like to concentrate on all the positive aspects of your childhood and see how that was in therapy.

For the time being, I’m living here at home, and I’m trying to get myself a permanent job. Even though I am still dependent on my parents and feeling rather vulnerable, it has been good to be home for a while. Dad and I agree this time has been invaluable. We are considerate of each other. I am treated as an adult, with my own ideas and views. I enjoy my parents now.

Every now and again, I remember the therapy process, but I don’t allow myself to think of the details. That’s why it’s hard to talk to you. I wonder if it will trigger me again. I’m talking to you so that others can read my story and understand what has happened to them. If one other person reads this and gets themselves out of this environment, it will be worth it.

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