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

Laura Pasley, Retractor

Laura Pasley (her real name), 39, was one of the first retractors to sue her former therapist successfully, though he settled out of court, so no precedent was set. A somewhat overweight, no-nonsense Southerner, Laura dropped out of college to work in a police station, where she was making a career.
I really was a sad kid, you know, with a real distorted view of myself. I felt invisible growing up. When I told my mother this, she said, “No, you didn't.” [laughs] My counselor, Steve, was the first person who really heard me, my anger and need for acceptance. He would sit and listen no matter what, without boundaries, whether it was 3 a.m. or whatever. I could call him any time.

I went into counseling because I had an eating disorder. I'd been bulimic since I was ten, so I'd been throwing up for 22 years. I was desperate, and I'd read about Steve in a book, how this girl supposedly got healed by him in a four-month period. I went to my pastor, who was like my best friend, and he said, “Well, this man is a Christian counselor, so he must be all right.” Steve had a masters of divinity. He was overweight and balding, like the perpetual nerd, someone you'd avoid in high school. My Dad tells me he can't believe all these women fell for this short, fat, balding, wimpy-looking guy. But he became my whole life.

At my first counseling session, in 1985, Steve asked if I'd ever been sexually abused. I told him I had. When I was nine, a boy, a stranger, inserted his finger in my vagina through my swimming suit under the water. The biggest trauma was that I couldn't tell anybody. I didn't feel comfortable. I was ashamed. So I told that to Steve, right up front, but it didn't matter to him, because I always remembered it. He told me I needed to find buried stuff with deeper roots. He told me that since I had an eating disorder, it automatically meant I was seriously abused. So we went to work trying to find buried memories.

From the second visit on, I closed my eyes every time. He'd say weird stuff which I couldn't understand. I would tell him I didn't understand him, and he'd say that was okay, that my subconscious caught it. He used big words like counter-super-autonomous. I tell you, he could use some big words!

You have to understand my mind state. I was desperate. It was like I was drowning and this person reached out a hand to me, and he was my only hope. It's like I sold my soul to this man. I became incredibly dependent on him, wouldn't make a move without him. I went to therapy constantly. It ruled my life. I had just bought a house when I met him. My insurance wouldn't cover him, so every penny I got my hands on went to him. I got into incredible debt, went a year and a half without a car.

I'm convinced that Steve didn't do it for the money. At the time, he really felt that he was anointed by God, he had a mission in life. He said it was his calling. It was a combination of ego and a personal mission to save the world.

He had me get a picture of myself as a little girl, and to imagine her as my inner child. I could close my eyes and just see her sitting on the floor, surrounded by toys, playing. She was a tiny little thing with big, sad eyes. Then, one day when I was vacuuming, I had a visualization of a three-year-old boy trying to smother an infant. I couldn't breathe, broke out into a terrible sweat. Steve kept badgering me the whole hour of our next session to get me to accept that my brother had tried to kill me. After that, I would usually have flashbacks either when I was hypnotized or right after the sessions.

At first, he had me relax while he counted backward to hypnotize me. But it got to a point where I could just go into an immediate trance by closing my eyes, and I was his. He had a very hypnotic voice.

Next I started having flashbacks of being in a bathtub, being abused by either my Mom or my brother. I kept having fingernails molest me, hurting my vagina. I couldn't put a face on it, but Steve said it had to be my mother. And it really did physically hurt, like it was happening right then. The focus came to be on my mother. Steve really hated her; I think he had a thing against mothers.

I never totally cut off from my parents. I'm a single mother, and they helped me with my daughter Jennifer. Steve tried to convince me that my parents were sexually abusing her, but I never bought it. My daughter was different from me, so bubbly and self-assured. And they seemed to be so good with her. Steve called a social worker once to evaluate the situation, and I was so scared I would lose my child. I had to take her to counseling, and the lady said, “I see no indication of sexual trauma, but just to be certain, she should have a gynecological exam.” No way, I wouldn't do it, I thought it would be too traumatic for her. It's a good thing I didn't, or I might have lost her.

What I was going through was terrible for Jennifer. She loved my parents, and she loved me. And I just hated my mother through this whole thing—it confused Jennifer and tore her up. Jennifer was basically the mother in the family for a while. I would be in my room chain-smoking for days at a time, and she was pretty much left on her own. Also, when I would be having a flashback and would call Steve, he told me it was healthy to beat on the bed in front of her. He said it was a healthy way to exhibit rage.

Along about April 1986, I started having flashbacks of Mom sexually abusing me with a coat hanger. That went on for quite a few months. I would be like a little child, curled up in a ball screaming. It was still going on when we started the group. There were about ten of us. Steve brought in a co-leader, Dave, who had a Ph.D., but it was really Steve who was the leader. They were like Frick and Frack, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Dave wore this very obvious, gross toupee, and he had on real tight pants. He'd sit with his legs spread apart. Mostly, he was just a puppet for Steve.

At first, we just interchanged ideas and talked in the group, and it was kind of neat. I felt a camaraderie with these women. But it kept escalating. Late in 1987, I was really bad off, and I'd accidentally overdosed on Xanax and had nothing in my stomach. I went into the hospital on a Friday night for the first of two stays. They were both 30 days long. Oh, yeah, I was only sick for as long as my insurance lasted, 30 days per calendar year [laughs]. It turns out that Steve was the therapist for the psych ward at the hospital, so I saw him three days a week individually, every day in group, and on Monday nights. Plus, on Sundays he'd lead what he called a “spiritual rap session,” and he'd wear this ridiculous motorcycle jacket for that.

Anyway, the following Monday night we had the group. Someone said, “You look tired; are you okay?” I lied and said, “Yeah,” and Steve lit into me. For two hours, he screamed. He made me talk about my mother, have more flashbacks. It was a very loud, traumatic few hours. They put a coat hanger up on the clay wall for me to throw clods at. Did you see that TV show where those MPD women were doing that? They couldn't hold a candle to me. I had clay on my eyelashes. I was awful. I tell you, I could throw some clay! There's no doubt that I was angry, all right, but it wasn't “getting out” my anger. It was creating it. It just makes you madder. I was so mad by the time I left that group. I was in a rage for four consecutive years.

After that, the group got more like that all the time. The next week, some other girl would scream and carry on. It was like they all wanted to get into that, getting more loud and hysterical. We'd be sitting there tearing up phone books, beating on chairs with bataaka bats, and Steve or Dave would be screaming in our ears, reading aloud from the terrible things we had written about what we had “remembered.”

Then the blood drinking and satanic abuse stuff started. First one girl had an alter, then she started cutting herself. That really got Steve's attention. Then it started with more horrific rapes, the whole nine yards. I had these horrible flashbacks of being given cold enemas and various objects inserted into my vagina. Another time, I remembered my brother and his friends hung me by my feet. It was only recently that I realized where those particular images came from. The enemas and insertion came from the book Sybil, and the upside down hanging came from a movie called Deranged, which I saw when I was 17. And I had incorporated some of a story I once wrote about identifying a prostitute's body in the morgue. So different pieces of my life that had nothing to do with me being abused became part of the flashbacks. It's amazing to me that my subconscious mind had served them up without my knowing where they came from.

I eventually came up with scenes of group sexual abuse and being raped by animals. After I had a vision of a dead man hanging from a rope, my grandfather, the murderer, got added to the abuser list. But it was mainly my mother who was the target of my anger. Steve convinced me that she had been trying to kill me for years. I interpreted everything she did that way, so when she bought cookies, it was to encourage my binges. Everybody in the group was encouraged to divorce their families and make the group their new family. If anybody expressed any doubts, Steve and Dave would goad them. “You're in denial.” The rest of us would join in. “You want to stay sick for your family. You don't want to get well.”

I got worse. I vomited more and more, and my life seemed out of control. Even though I landed twice in the hospital with overdoses, my doctor kept prescribing Xanax for me and pills for every other ailment—to sleep, to stop depression, to mellow out. Some of my friends at the police station where I worked saw me going through this. One officer told me, “This guy is a quack. You're turning into a pillhead.” I pulled the phone out of the wall and threw it at him. I said, “You don't understand, I've got to get worse before I get better, and this man is going to save my life.”

By 1989, my mind was so cluttered with cults and Satanism, I didn't know where I was half the time. In one of my last sessions, I actually started to talk about some of my real-life problems—money, my daughter, my job—and Steve just sat there with this big smirk on his face. I stopped and said, “What the fuck is your problem?” He said, “You're avoiding your real issues; you're not working.” If you weren't screaming or having flashbacks, you weren't working. I just lost it. “Let me tell you something, asshole. Every single day of my life is work, just to stay alive.” At that point, I would just sit in my room smoking and thinking of ways to kill my Mom.

All this time, Steve kept telling me I had to get worse before I got better. I was sick of hearing how you have to get worse. I was about as worse as you could get. By that time, I was about to lose my house. I had given every penny, every ounce of energy, to this therapy. I had used up all my sick time and vacation time. I was still horribly bulimic, but I had gained a hundred pounds during the four years of therapy. One day late in 1989, I called him, all excited about writing a book about my experiences at the police station. And you know what he said to me when I called? “You're not finished with the flashbacks.” And something snapped. I thought, “Oh, yeah, asshole, I am. Four years of getting worse is enough.”

So I quit and went to Linda, a woman therapist. She believed I had been an incest victim, all right, but she didn't egg it on. I couldn't deal with anything except grieving over the loss of Steve for a long time. I was so depressed, I didn't really accomplish anything. Then one day in 1991, I read an article in a local magazine about false memory syndrome, with an interview with parents who had lost their daughter. They sounded like nice people. I had been in the group with their daughter, and I'd heard all these horrible stories about them. So I sought them out and met them. They're no more Satanists than I am. One night Steve told us he had to call the police on them, that they had come to their daughter's house threatening her. It turns out they were bringing her Christmas presents.

It was like a light came on in my head. When I realized what had been done to me, I called a good psychologist. I told him, “These flashbacks seemed so real, I mean they were really real.” He said, “They were real, honey, but not reality.” I'll never forget those words. I like to fell off this bed, because I had put my life into a fantasy. After I realized that none of these flashbacks were true, I filed my lawsuit. I also went back to Linda, my good counselor. She accepted that I had made up all the abuse. Now, all of us from the group have called it quits except one girl, who is a tragic case. She accused her mother of satanic ritual abuse, of murdering her twin at birth. It didn't matter that there was a single child registered on the birth certificate. The coven had taken care of that.

I strongly recommend getting a good counselor to people coming out of this mess. They need to set boundaries and appropriate limits, to find a way to feel good about themselves—all the stuff these trauma counselors talk about but don't really do. My Mom and I really do have some problems to work out, but nothing about sexual abuse. It's getting better, not so bad. My bulimia is completely gone now. I don't really know why. In these last few months, I've really taken responsibility for my own life. No more playing the blame game. I realized that if anything was going to change in my life, I'd have to do the changing. I'm more assertive now, don't hold things in as much.

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Maria Granucci, Retractor

It was an all-too-familiar story. Maria Granucci, 37 at the time of our interview, was too smart and competent for her own good, since she had an insecure, incompetent male boss at her accounting firm. By November of 1988, she couldn't take his verbal and physical abuse any more. When she complained to senior management, they “solved” the problem by taking her and her boss to lunch for a chat. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Granucci quit. Soon afterward, she thought she was dying of a heart attack but was diagnosed in a local Virginia emergency room as suffering from a panic attack instead. A nurse suggested she see clinical psychologist Karen Meynert.
Karen seemed very concerned and compassionate but also very assertive from the beginning of our therapy sessions. She's four years older than me. She probably did more talking than I did. She always insisted on me paying and scheduling the next appointment before our session began.

I kept trying to focus the sessions on why I could not handle this boss, so the same thing wouldn't happen again. Karen kept refocusing them back on my childhood. At the very beginning, she asked if I was ever sexually abused. I said, “Absolutely not!” and she backed off. But she harped on the fact that I could not handle this work relationship because I had been emotionally abused by my father. She also intimated that I had married a man somewhat like my father, so I continued to live in this emotionally abusive situation by choice. She said it was good that I had this breakdown so I could now break this pattern and learn to be my own person.

In a way, I really was emotionally neglected by my parents. When I was 10, my parents told me I was too old to kiss them good night any longer, telling me, “You're a grown-up now.” I strove to be an adult at age 10 to please them. So there has always been this emotional void in my life due to lack of open affection from my parents. Also, I was the oldest of four girls in a blue-collar family, but I had this 157 IQ, which is two points higher than Einstein's. They really didn't know what to do with me.

Still, I wasn't buying into the dysfunctional family scenario too well until Karen finally realized that she had to take the intellectual route to get to me. She started giving me written assignments. At first, it was writing unmailed letters to my former boss, then to my parents. Then I read Little Miss Perfect by Melody Beattie. I did see a lot of myself in that book. It did not talk about incest, but it identified emotional abuse. Then we went on to The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, and all the rest of the Alice Miller books.^31 I did writing assignments on all these, analyzing the books.

Finally, in April 1993, Karen asked me if I was willing to discuss possible incest issues. She had groomed me for over four years to get to this point. In desperation to get well, I said I was willing to entertain the thought. Karen gave me a copy of The Courage to Heal, and soon after that, I succumbed completely and became a Survivor.

I never developed any specific times and places, but I was sure the abuse had occurred on a continual basis between the ages of 5 and 15, when I met my future husband Tom. Karen wanted to hypnotize me to do age regressions, but I wouldn't do it. Instead, we did relaxation exercises, which I have since learned were really hypnotic sessions. Karen would turn off the lights, tell me to shut my eyes and relax my body, and she would put on relaxation tapes. She always took me to a safe place, which was my bedroom, sitting on my bed with a pile of books. I always have been an avid reader and still read six books a week, on average. The door would always be shut.

Then I would remember my father invading my safe spot by entering the room and closing the door behind him. I would picture him demanding that I take off my clothes. At first, I would remember him just looking at me. Then it proceeded to, “My God, he fondled me!” Finally, as I got older in my memories, I realized that he repeatedly penetrated me. I began to have flashbacks during sexual relations with my husband. Karen interpreted these as flashbacks for me. If Tom touched me in a certain way, I would scream and back off, sometimes picturing my father above me. For about two months, Tom and I stopped having sex, at Karen's suggestion. It was making the flashbacks occur too often.

Karen asked me if my father ever hit me. I said, “No.” She asked if I ever hurt myself, and I told her how I had fallen on the ice when I was seven and broken my nose. She convinced me that I was protecting my father, that he had broken my nose while forcing me to have sex. This was my life pattern, she said, to take the blame on myself.

I became completely distraught throughout this summer and fall of 1993. I was put on medical leave from my bank job, but then I couldn't go back. I lost 65 pounds. I became very ill and suicidal. Karen told me I was in no condition to see my family, so I cut off all contact, but I didn't tell them why. Karen referred me to a psychiatrist, who put me on Prozac, the tranquilizer Klonopin, and lithium. I became a walking zombie, I was so heavily medicated.

My husband and children did not know what to do with me. Tom didn't know if he should institutionalize me. I got in car accidents because I was on medication. Luckily, no one ever got hurt. In July, Tom took my license away from me. Karen suggested that I should divorce him because our relationship was dysfunctional, like my childhood. She said I could not get well and remain married to Tom. But even in this state, I clung to him. Still, I was totally dependent on Karen. To pay for my sessions, I spent all our savings and remortgaged the house.

Tom believed all of the incest allegations against my parents. They became the answer to my behavior and explained our marital problems.

Finally, on October 4, 1993, I sat down at my computer and typed out a four-page confrontation/accusation letter to my parents in which I told them my pain was “beyond horrendous.” I wrote, “You thought you had got away with it. The 'good' daughter had repressed forever. Not a chance, Dad.” I accused my father of repeated rapes, but I also blamed my mother, who must have known what was going on. “Why didn't you save me? I am your child. Was your fear of Dad so great it came before my safety?” Finally, I told them how much all this was costing—over $4600 just in the last two months—and complained that we had lost virtually all our old friends. I wrote, “Our world has shrunk so small.”

I mailed the letter before I could have second thoughts and brought a copy with me to my next therapy session. I was so proud that I had the guts to do it on my own. Karen went wild. She stood up, shook her fist, and said, 'How dare you do something like this without asking my approval first?” She was livid. I had never seen her like that, and it scared the shit out of me. Our roles were that she was the mother and I was the child. I had done something wrong again. I agonized over disappointing her.

My father, an electrical engineer who had retired a few years earlier after a serious heart attack, responded on October 18 with a 20-page letter accounting for every minute of his life. He denied everything. He said he knew I'd like to hear him say he was sorry, but that would be wrong. He said he and my mother still loved me, but they were very hurt. I showed the letter to Karen, and she said, “There is guilt written all over this letter. This is a very guilty man. You should think about pressing charges.”

At that point, I began to question what she wanted from me. I just wanted to get better. I did not want to put my father in jail for something that happened so long ago. I wanted to live my life ahead. I was also internally doubting all this, but I was afraid to tell Karen.

During this period, I sometimes did not sleep for five days straight. Then I would catch a few hours and go without sleep for another few days. I had a lot of medical problems as a result of the stress and weight loss—boils, cysts, a broken hand and foot. After I received the letter from my father, I became even more distraught, if that was possible. Tom became very concerned about the stability of the household, which had been in jeopardy for so long. He took my medication away and said, “You are not taking any more.” I became very angry. He said he was only trying to help me, that he didn't know what else to do besides institutionalize me.

So Tom and I agreed to a withdrawal plan. I was off all the medication in four weeks. As I came off it, I started to become myself again, started to feel clear, real, tangible. I also stopped seeing Karen during that time, on my husband's insistence. He is a very smart man, a saint. He saved my life.

In November, I told Tom that I was beginning to question the accusations. He was horrified. “If that's so, how are we going to fix what we have done to your family?” He jointly took responsibility. Over the next two weeks, I reread the letters and parts of The Courage to Heal. Finally, I said, “I have got to fix this.”

The last week of November, I made an appointment with Karen. I told her I no longer believed the accusations, that I felt nothing but shame for these bogus memories. I asked her for help to fix the mess I'd made. Karen said, “Oh my God, you've re-repressed and you are in denial again. It was too painful for you. Now we have a lot of work ahead of us. We've taken quite a step backwards.” I saw what she was up to, because I had been away from her for a while and was not medicated. She said, “Do not apologize to your parents until this is straightened out. Do not call or see them.”

The next day, one my mother's best friends, who knew nothing about any of this, called to ask me how my father was. He had suffered a massive stroke. I called my mother and told her I had to see her, that I was so sorry, that I wanted to see Dad. I thought she understood that I was taking the accusations back, but I've since learned that Mom didn't understand that. Because of the stroke, my father didn't remember anything about the allegations. Mom was afraid that if he saw me, it would trigger his memory of it and would cause him to have another stroke which might be fatal this time. So she had a restraining order put on me to keep me away from his hospital room.

I was in hell with worry and guilt. Finally, I was called to come to the hospital. It turned out that my father kept asking for me, wondering why I wasn't there. My father cried when he saw me and hugged me. It felt so good. He asked, “Where have you been? Why haven't you visited me?” I made up some excuse so as not to upset him. Later, I spent a long time explaining myself to my mother, my three sisters and their husbands. They finally accepted my retraction.

Since then, I have worked very diligently to regain my parents' and family's trust. At first, they thought I would change my mind again. Once they realized it was not temporary and that I had broken off therapy with Karen, it was better.

My father now knows what went on. When he moved to a rehabilitation center from the hospital, I spent 12-hour days by his side. He cries a lot. He is the most wonderful man. He calls me now and asks me how I'm doing. He tells me, “Please, don't get too depressed again.” He's recovering nicely. He's 59. He's regaining his memory capacity slowly. Since the stroke was on the left side of the brain, he's paralyzed and blind on the right side. Dad is medically disabled and has to count on all of us now for a lot of support. I am just so grateful to be in his life again. Since the stroke, he's much freer with his affection. The void I always felt is finally full of wonderful love, hugs and kisses from my parents. I love them so.

My family had compiled articles and taped talk shows about something called false memory syndrome. I spent nine hours, all alone, reading this material and watching the tapes. I saw myself in them! I cried and cried, and I became very angry at Karen. I realized that my mind had been raped. I now feel that I was the perpetrator rather than the accuser. It is the shame I live with every day.

Now that there are more and more retractors, it's important to talk about it. Post-retraction is no bed of roses. There is a lot of pain and shame. I still have trouble dealing with it, but I will never go to a therapist again. The therapy I need right now is just what I am doing, being an advocate in any way possible for the FMS Foundation and telling my story. I only wish that I could tell my parents how sorry I really am. They will not let me. They don't want to talk about it. And my relations with my sisters are still very strained.

There's one thing I want to clear up. After hearing my story, somebody asked me, “Did you always have sexual fantasies about your father?” I was repulsed by the question. When I would picture my father on top of me instead of Tom, it was a sick delusion fostered by my toxic therapy, not a wish-fulfillment fantasy. I have never thought of my father in those terms. Similarly, I never had any sexual problems with my husband until this therapy.

I entered therapy in 1988 because of a job-related harassment issue, and I left in 1993 a suicidal wreck. It stole five years of my life. I became completely irresponsible and self-involved, but I blame Karen Meynert for what happened. She was the professional therapist who systematically led me down this road.

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