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

Katherine Hylander, Past-life Hypnotherapist

In 1990, Katherine Hylander was hypnotized for the first time by her dentist when she underwent oral surgery. “I had no pain and was completely transported into another consciousness,” she recalled. Unfulfilled at her job as a computer payroll manager for a large California bank, Hylander pursued training in hypnotherapy over the next year and, by the end of 1991, she wasn't altogether upset when her position at the bank was cut. Since then, she had been a full-time hypnotherapist. In 1992, she accidentally hit upon her specialty: past-life regressions. Hylander also helped clients uncover UFO abductions, spirit possessions, and repressed memories of sexual abuse in this life. Lately, she had progressed some clients into the future, which could be frightening -- particularly when they saw California covered by the ocean.
I had heard so much about past lives, but then it happened spontaneously in a 1992 session. I had a client coming for hypnotherapy to build her self-esteem. She was a prober who wanted to understand the mysteries of life, to know why she was here on this earth. She wanted to learn about her earliest feelings. I had her visualize a one-handed clock, letting it count down backwards. I got down to three, and she kept saying “More, more.” We got to where she was a newborn baby. She still wanted to go further back, so I said, “Okay, you're in the womb.” She experienced her mother's feelings and emotions. As the youngest of seven, she wanted to make sure her mother wanted her. It was beautiful, because her mother did want her.

One day, she came holding her jaw, with a painful neuralgia in her face for no apparent physiological reason. When she was under hypnosis, I instinctively said, “Go way back, find out where that pain came from.” She suddenly found herself being attacked by peasants somewhere. I didn't understand. I said, “Is this San Francisco?” She just said, “No!” like I was stupid. These peasants were angry at her because she had this wonderful spirituality, and they accused her of being different. They stoned her to death, and the last thing she remembered was being hit in the face. She said they were speaking this funny language. I think this was some time in the Middle Ages in Europe.

Since then, I've done more and more past-life regressions. I'm not out to prove anything by it. I'm nonjudgmental. I tell people they may not have a past-life regression. The issues may be from this lifetime, from this childhood. You see, a lot of patterns are repeated, either from this life or past lives.

Repressed memories are a major cause of suffering for my clients. I see it every day, in about 90 percent of the people who come to see me. They often feel depressed, with a general malaise. They might cry for no reason. Oh, they may take Prozac, but that just treats the symptom without touching the underlying problem. We must find the root, the origin of the problem. Memories can fester if they are not dealt with. I see so many wounded children inside my clients. They may have been sexually abused, raped, or totally ignored, which may be even worse.

There are quite a few physical symptoms that result from trauma in a past life. I really believe that all illness is psychosomatic. For instance, asthma may be the result of smoke inhalation in another life. An allergy to wheat may stem from a rape in a wheat field, or arthritis from being stretched on a rack during the Inquisition.

I'll give you some specific case histories. One 42-year-old divorced woman came with generalized sadness, but she couldn't put her finger on just what she was suffering from. She felt major anxiety every evening around dusk, just when she was going home from work. If she happened to be with a man around that time of day, she felt a tremendous fear of sexual contact. She asked me, “Am I crazy?” So I hypnotized her. She didn't think I would be able to, because she couldn't relax. The people who say that are usually my best subjects. I regressed her to a past life, and she gave very vivid commentary. “I'm in Mexico, I'm eight years old, I'm wearing a white dress. I have no shoes on, but I'm very pretty, very dark.” She described the room where she lived with her family.

Suddenly she was tense. “Oh, oh. He's coming home now. My father. I don't like him.” I asked her why, and she said she didn't want to talk about it. But then she relived the terror. Every night when he came home from the fields, he went into her room, closed the door, and raped her on her bed. I said, “Do you know what time it is?” She answered, “Yes, dusk.” I told her then that it was time to let go of that memory and get on with her life. I progressed her to a time when she was happy, at 18, and in love. But then she got pregnant and died in childbirth. After her death, she experienced a feeling of peace and spoke with her spirit guides. I asked if there was anything else she wanted to find out. “Yes, I want to go back to that little girl and wash her, cleanse her. I always feel dirty and don't know why.” So I helped her to go back and gave her as much time with that little girl as she needed. I told her to tell the girl that she'd come from the future to heal her.

I do that a lot now in regular regression, healing the wounded inner children, picking them up, putting them in the heart center, stroking them, just letting them know that they're wonderful, clean, good. They've never been told that. A child who's been abused feels worthless, not respected. I take my clients to different stages of their childhood. We might go to a beautiful garden and bring their abuser there to tell him how they feel. But I always come out on a positive note. “Look at me, I'm stronger than you are,” they tell the abuser.

Another 34-year-old woman came to me with a myriad of problems. The first thing she mentioned was this phobia she had about her husband's hands. Her marriage wasn't going well, but every time she tried to leave him, she kept getting this vision of his hands, and it stopped her somehow. So we went to regression. In a past life, she had also been married to this same man. I find that's fairly common, that the same group of people often interacts throughout different lives, which can account for why you have such a strong immediate reaction to someone you meet for the first time. In this past life, her husband wouldn't give her any space and wouldn't allow her to leave. She started screaming. She smelled something terrible. Her eyes and nose started running, and she had trouble breathing. His hands were covering her mouth. “My God!” she said, “He's a doctor! He's putting ether on me!” Eventually, in that life, he strangled her.

While she was still under hypnosis, I regressed her to another life. “Dear God! I've done it again!” she cried. “I'm married to the same son-of-a-bitch! He's blinded me! I have psychic abilities and he doesn't believe in them.” She was going so fast, I didn't have time to ask any questions. Between lives, though, she said, was the most beautiful experience. “I'll never fear death again.”

She taped the whole session, and afterwards, she said, “Wait till he hears this. My husband is against anything New Age or psychic.” She felt that she was very psychic, but her husband always ridiculed her. When he found out she was coming to see me, he said, “You're crazy. Don't waste money on that hocus-pocus.” But just before she left, he said, “If you like it, make an appointment for me.” So maybe there's a chance for reconciliation. I told her not to go home and tell him everything, but to give him the information in spoonfuls, to say something like, “You know, honey, I like to confide in you, but sometimes I feel a little threatened. There's something new I've just learned . . ."

The whole object here is to be healed, not to heap blame. There's really no injustice. We're required to experience everything to learn. It's a natural evolution of the soul. I think we choose our parents and our circumstances. If you experience terrible abuse, maybe it's because in a past life, you've been a horrific person, and you need to know what it feels like to be abused in this life. Once you learn the lesson, you can truly forgive. I don't believe in retribution. This planet is a great big classroom. Once we're perfect, we won't have to come back. Suffering is here, not on the other plane of existence.

I'll give you one final case study about a young Indian girl, about 24, who discovered repressed memories from this life. Her parents brought her to America from India at a very young age. When she came to me, she was very troubled and said she hated San Francisco but didn't know why. “I feel it's dead here, I can't get out, my parents won't let me go.” She lived a very cloistered existence. I hypnotized her and said, “Go to the subconscious origins of this tremendous fear and hate.” I've found that the subconscious is very literal. You have to give it explicit instructions. But I'm very careful not to lead anyone. I don't say things like, “Go to a time you were raped.”

This girl said, “I'm standing at a bus stop, coming home from school. I'm nine years old. A man dressed in black is watching me. He has his collar up.” She walked home down a wooded street, but she felt he was following her. She went up to her bedroom and was doing her homework. It was daytime, and she was alone in the house. “I'm afraid, I'm so afraid.” So I asked her to lift herself out of it, to become just a witness. “That man from the bus stop, he's in my room. He puts me on the bed, he's taking my clothes off. I'm quiet, I'm numb.” He raped her, then nonchalantly put his clothes on and left her lying there. It turns out he was the family doctor who lived on the same street. “I didn't tell my parents, they would never believe me,” she said. So she repressed it.

I told her, “It's not that you hate San Francisco, but what happened here.” In other sessions, we found that during her annual check-up, he raped her in his doctor's office once a year until she was 16, with her mother in the waiting room. This is a very well-behaved, proper young lady. I asked her if she wanted to be angry. I told her she could shout and call him every name under the sun. She said mildly, “You were a very bad person, and I'm telling you now I'm really angry.” I'm working with her on a weekly basis. She's got a new job and is moving to a different city. She doesn't want to confront the doctor in real life. She won't tell her parents, even today. They would only call her a liar.

Some of my clients were abducted by aliens and taken to UFOs in the middle of the night. It's utterly horrifying for them, a real violation. There's a ten-point checklist which cues me to look out for these cases. That includes things like missing time at night, nightmares about UFOs or vampires. Very often, people who have been abducted will wake up at the same time every night. The subconscious remembers everything; it's trying to protect itself. Some people are so vigilant and don't know why. They wake up and can't sleep until dawn. Sometimes they experience bodily sensations, tingling, paralysis, or pain. Some have mysterious marks on their bodies, bruises, scars, when they wake up. I've seen these. A lot of UFO abductees tell me they had ear problems as a child, which is a sign of an implant which can't be detected by our science. The aliens put them in to observe us.

Another sign is if someone reacts violently to the subject of UFO abductions. The other day, I was giving a public speech. As soon as I started talking about UFO cases, one woman just shot out of her chair and ran out of the room. I almost stopped the speech to run after her, because I'm sure that she was taken up by a UFO and needs to face it.

Everyone can be regressed, if they don't block the process. Well, almost everybody. A few people have told me under hypnosis that they are from another galaxy and can't be regressed. But for most people, you have to chip gently away at their armor, their defense mechanisms. I give them the chisel and let them do it under hypnosis. I must be gentle and respectful. If they are ready, they'll be regressed. No, they don't have any trouble getting back—no one's ever been left in a past life!

I love what I do, but I don't let my ego swell over it. I'm just a facilitator. I don't profess to heal anyone. I'm an instrument.

– • –

Sally Bixby, Psychotherapist

Sally Bixby, 50, who held a masters degree in counseling, was a therapist in a large Colorado city. Although she was extremely skeptical of the search for repressed memories, she would not go public with her concerns. “I'd be tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail,” she explained. “If you can tell me how to make a living afterwards, I'll be glad to go on the record.” So, as with the other therapists here, other than Linda Ross, her name has been changed.
More and more is being written to indicate that memory is not the infallible resource that people thought it was. Like eyewitness accounts, memory is open to suggestion. What I see and interpret can be very different from what you see. We're subjective beings, and we tend to attach meaning to what we see, which results in skewed memories.

The whole notion that people can forget massive trauma entirely, and then it comes back later, is also being challenged. Those who suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, such as Vietnam veterans, never forget what happened to them. Their difficulty is not being able to forget.

I can see how, given the right encouragement, people could mix together real feelings and incidents from their childhoods with invented abuse memories. Being a child is difficult. You're small, defenseless, and you don't know how to interpret things. A lot of things appear frightening. Your father's face near you can be scary, and the smell of his aftershave may indeed bring back a memory of that fear.

For instance, I have a very clear memory which I never “repressed.” When I was four, I had my tonsils out. I was convinced that I had been a bad girl, and they were going to kill me. They rolled me into this operating room, and there were guys with white robes and what looked like jars of blood, and they put this thing over my face. I thought they were going to smother me. I was terrified. When I came to, I realized I was okay. If I didn't know any better and went to the right therapist, this memory could be turned into a satanic cult ritual.

That sort of therapy does a real disservice to people on a number of levels. It provides a simple explanation for all the troubles they have in their life. You know, “This awful thing happened to me, and that's why I have so many problems. It's not my fault. I can't help it.” As a matter of fact, there is evidence that people can be terribly abused and still function quite well in their lives. Humans are more resilient than we give them credit for. But now there's this idea that damage in your childhood creates these insurmountable problems for the rest of your life. I've just been reading this interview with Roseanne Arnold, and she says every day is hell for her because she was so traumatized. I'm sure she honestly believes it, but she's a perfect example of this whole thing.

I'm not trying to minimize real abuse or its effects. There is clearly incest and abuse, and these people have real stories to tell and difficulties to overcome. But I don't think they ever forget it.

The work of Murray Bowen, who pioneered in family systems therapy, has influenced me a great deal. He tried to stick to observable facts instead of subjective interpretation, and he studied animal behavior. People are not all that different from animals. We are animals. A lot of Freud's theories set us apart, but we're more alike than unlike. Bowen said that the degree to which people individuate and become their own person, separate from their parents, has a lot to do with how well they will function in life. How a person fares at any given time is a function of the amount of anxiety they feel and their level of individuation. That's one reason so many of the women are accusing their parents—they were probably too close to them. This is a way to separate, but all they're really doing is transferring that dependence to their therapist.

I get a lot of people walking in the door who are very pop-psychology-wise. They'll announce, “I have co-dependent issues,” or “I'm an ACOA,” or “I think I was sexually abused.” The first thing I do is to get clear what they mean by that term. I want them to think for themselves in more detail instead of grabbing onto some label that will give them an easy answer. We're all co-dependent. It's not bad; it's just a fact of life. Anyone could relate to the list of symptoms, just as with supposed repressed memories of sex abuse. They are symptoms of human experience. If you have those symptoms, it means you're human, and you should rejoice.

I tell clients right out front that I have no answers and I can't cure them. I try to dispel the notion that I'm God or some expert. Some of them never come back to see me again. Others catch on, and it helps them function more clearly. If I’m doing my job, I help people manage themselves in their lives a little differently, so they can function better. I use here-and-now cognitive work. Sure, I do a family history because it tells me something about the system they come from, what they have to deal with, but really, we're not trying to heal past wounds or get in touch with feelings.

I see a lot of people who are angry at their parents. I don't try to tell them not to be angry, but I do ask them to look carefully at their own role. People tend to blame others and absolve themselves of any part in what happened. Certainly a small child who is terribly abused has no responsibility for it, but as you grow older, that's not so true. It's an interpersonal dynamic. This label of “emotional incest” is dangerous, because it encourages such anger and blame. There's some truth to the basic idea sometimes, but we should look at it without blaming, just looking for information and how to function better in your life.

For those reasons, I rarely suggest bringing parents into therapy. There's no point in telling them how pissed off you are. If I make it clear that we're not bringing them in to unload on them, then I can do it. A lot of what I work on is reactivity. Can you be in the same room with someone and not necessarily react? When even one person in a relationship can manage their reactivity, it can change the relationship.

This whole idea that we must unburden ourselves immediately of any feelings we have bottled up is wrong, I think. I went to a workshop a few years ago with an old-school therapist who told us, “If you're a therapist who goes after the feelings, you're like a surgeon who operates because he likes to see blood flowing.” As some part of personal growth, you'll get feelings, but that's not the important point. The aim is to know what your feelings are, but not be ruled by them.

It would be interesting to trace all the threads that have led to this rage to uncover repressed memories of incest. I think it's ironic that this started out as part of the women's movement to empower women, but now it is disempowering them, putting them in the role of victim. Somehow, confronting parents and cutting off from them, suing them, is supposed to help. I think it just creates more anxiety and makes women less able to function independently.

I don't usually get patients who try to retrieve memories, because that's not what I'm known for. But I did have one client, Stephanie, with a lifelong history of mental illness, who has spent a good deal of time in institutions, where she was always diagnosed as schizophrenic. A few years ago, she went to the Pines Retreat Center, where they diagnosed her as a multiple personality disorder and she began to retrieve memories of incest. I didn't know anything about MPD, and so I attended some conferences on it. At first, I embraced the idea fully, but now I'm beginning to question it. We all have multiple personalities. For some people who don't have a firm center, those personalities can get fragmented.

At this point, I don't challenge that Stephanie has MPD, but I don't spend much time talking to her different personalities, looking for more memories, or talking about them. I've also found out that the Pines Retreat specializes in diagnosing MPD and eliciting repressed memories, and some insurance companies won't pay for people to go there any more.

No, I don't use any form of hypnotism or guided imagery to help retrieve memories. When I first started my practice ten years ago, I used a lot of creative visualization for anxiety reduction. But I got scared off when I had one extremely agitated client who couldn't sit still during a session. I thought I would try relaxation techniques. But it just made her more upset. It triggered all her anxieties about safety.

I'm not too sure what hypnotism really is. There are people who say that whenever you sit down with somebody, in a sense you're hypnotizing them. It's fairly well documented that people with dissociational disorders are very hypnotizable, which could explain why they are so open to suggestion.

I don't challenge my patients' memories. I would not try to convince them that their repressed memories were true or not true. But I wouldn't focus on the memories. If they have cut off from their parents, I tell them it would make a world of difference to them if they could learn to be with that parent and not automatically react. I think people will come to question the “memories” on their own if there's a seed of doubt. I don't need to plant the seed. If they come to me in the first place, it's probably because they instinctively are calmer and willing to question.

What would happen if you took this interview and published it with my real name in the local paper? Oh, my God! I don't even want to think about it. A number of people might say, “Wow, she's really brave to say that,” and they would secretly agree. Others would see it as heresy, as being abusive to clients, not validating or hearing them. I might lose my referral base. I would also worry that some of the clients I work with would say, “Oh, wow, she thinks I'm just making this all up.”

– • –

Linda Ross, Retractor Therapist

Texan Linda Ross (her real name), 49, was a soft-spoken, gentle woman. She became a devout Christian her junior year in college when she joined a Christian campus organization. After graduating with a degree in early childhood education, she married and had two children. In 1982, she returned to school for a master’s in counseling, where she embraced Gestalt therapy and encountered her first case of recovered memory.
One of my first courses was called “Anger Therapy.” It met every day for three weeks. After a short lecture, we'd meet in small groups with a therapist. This was a very intense, emotional experience. After a round of checking in, each group member was asked whether they wanted to “work” or not on any particular day. That meant doing a two-chair visualization, where you imagined the person you were angry at to be in the chair across from you, and you vented your anger, using a bataaka bat to hit a foam pad. This was supposed to get out your unresolved anger. This was a whole new world to me. I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole with this stuff. Here I was in my placid little world, and this was like entering a subterranean world I never knew existed.

One Friday, a woman in the group told us she had an image of herself being sexually abused when she was two years old. She said, “I know I was abused by someone, but I can't see who it is.” On Monday, she told us with tremendous sorrow that she had realized that it was her older brother. The therapist had her “put him in the chair,” but instead of using the bat, she said she wanted to rip his head off. The therapist handed her some magazines and told her to have at it. She started screaming at the top of her lungs at her brother, crying and ripping magazines. Everything was going well until she grabbed one of the therapist's favorite Smithsonians, and the therapist yelled for her to stop and not rip that one. This woman completely shifted gears. She very politely said, “Oh, I'm sorry,” and put it down. Then, with a vengeance, she grabbed another magazine and went back to ripping and tearing.

At the time, I interpreted this to mean that she had control over her anger. I had wondered if people would get so angry during these exercises that they might just lose it completely. This woman's ability to stop herself so quickly showed me that people weren't really losing total control. In fact, this incident made the therapy feel more like a play with a therapist/director who had just yelled, “Cut!”

Still, I had no reason to doubt that she had been abused—her tears, her sorrow, her anguish, her rage, her sense of betrayal were painful to witness. I remember being so angry at the thought that anyone could do such a thing to a small, helpless child. The fact that she had remembered her relationship with her brother as being happy prior to this memory seemed irrelevant. Obviously, her mind had shielded her from the awful truth. No one even remotely thought to question the memory of a two-year-old. Also, the idea was that young children had trouble giving words to their abuse, because they were in a preverbal state. So there was just this nameless rage buried there all these years.

Throughout my courses, there was a lot of talk about “body memories.” We were taught that anger was stored in the body. During times of anger or stress, you could identify your “stress organ.” Mine is in my neck muscles. This woman stored her anger in her jaw. I found this concept very useful. During guided imagery, I would ask clients to recall a specific memory and ask them where they felt it, in what part of the body. When they finished their anger work, the tension would usually be gone, which I took as an indication that they had worked through that emotion.

Another woman in our group had come from an unhappy, dysfunctional home. Our instructor led her in a guided visualization and helped her create a new family for herself. At the therapist's suggestion, she re-invented her childhood, which included growing up in a different state, in a new house with a new, improved family. It seemed to be helpful to her, and everyone in the group praised her. I wondered at the time what she planned to do with her real family—the one she still had to deal with. But then, I was just a student and the therapist was the expert.

I also remember one woman who had polio when she was young. The therapist asked her what the purpose of the polio was. The idea was that your body and mind collaborate, and that nothing that happens is simply circumstantial. Initially, this feels like an insight and explanation for something that seems so unfair and irrational. In this case, the implication was that she was being sexually abused by her father, so she developed polio in order to escape to the hospital.

At the time, I really admired this therapist who led my groups. She was bold, outspoken, and fearless—a really good role model for mousy little me. She seemed invincible and infallible. She was very much in control of the group, always starting and ending on time. She had people sharing their deepest secrets and unleashing their rage from day one. I'd never seen anything like it. Then, after people had bared their souls, she would be very tender and caring, like the Mom we had always wanted. But at precisely 12 noon, the warmth would end. I always had the feeling that if I saw her in the grocery store, she wouldn't give me the time of day. She was someone I both admired and feared.

Probably because I had not been very open with my true feelings before, I really took to Gestalt therapy. It was very freeing for me. I saw it work, and I still believe it can be very helpful to people. One of my first attempts at Gestalt therapy was a piece of work I did with a woman at my church who was still grieving over a miscarriage. She did a beautiful piece of grief work over the loss of her unborn child. That was one of the most amazing things I have witnessed. I saw her almost transform in my presence. She was able to find peace in her miscarriage and let go of some aspects of it.

Once I graduated with my masters in 1986, I began to counsel people with a variety of issues, but I also developed a sub-specialty in sexual abuse. In 1990, I ran a sexual abuse group that lasted nine months. While most of the women in the group had always remembered their abuse, there were a few who had vague images or just a gut feeling that they had been abused. I remember conducting a guided imagery session with one such woman. I had her close her eyes, get comfortable, and find the tension in her body. I said to her, “How old are you in this memory?” She was about four. I would ask other questions, like, “Do you know where you are? Do you feel like you're inside or out-of-doors?” In my own mind, I did not see this as leading at all. They seemed like innocuous questions. Later, I realized that this was almost like playing Scrabble with someone and putting in a little word that suddenly opens up a whole new section of the board. I was helping her to take that little image and let it flow into a specific place. I was actually helping her fill in the details.

She said, “I feel like I'm being smothered. Something's in my face, and I don't know what.” I took a pillow and gently put it on her face to simulate the experience. She sat with it for a while, then suddenly she started crying. She said, “I see it now.” It was her babysitter abusing her. She remembered a nude woman forcing her to have oral sex. At that point, she sort of emotionally closed down and couldn't go any further with it. I said, “When you're ready, you can open your eyes. How is your stomach now?” It felt a little better, she said. Then I told her, “I'm really proud of you—you worked really hard.” Others in the group also gave her feedback, such as, “What you remembered was really helpful to me, because it helped me be in touch with what it was like to be little and to remember what happened to me.”

I wouldn't have said I was doing hypnosis at all. I tended to think of hypnosis as induced by a swinging watch chain. This was just guided imagery. I thought I was getting into the subconscious. We had been taught in our anger therapy class that you stored memories in your body. No one explained exactly how that was done. I just took it for granted. Another thing we learned was that claustrophobia often indicated a person had had oral sex forced on them. It made a certain amount of sense.

Unfortunately, this client with the babysitter memory never really got better. Few of my recovered memory clients ever improved. This person was always terrifically angry, and the work we did never seemed to help her. In fact, I would say that the sexual abuse group made her worse, and it just distracted her from her real issues—her daughter, her troubled marriage, and a stressful job situation.

Still, I completely believed in the memories I was hearing in my therapy sessions. My first doubts began with Sally, whose story continues to haunt me, especially because it is on-going. Sally is in her mid 30s, and she came to see me almost four years ago, wanting help with her compulsive eating. Later, she told me that her father had been an alcoholic, and we began to focus on her dysfunctional family. One day, Sally came to see me after getting the image of a little girl sitting in a pool of blood. All the details of when, where and who were unclear. I had her close her eyes and led her through guided imagery, asking my typical questions: “How old are you? What are you wearing? What time of year is it? What happens next?” With my prompting, she began to retrieve little bits of memory. In the end, she saw her father penetrating her when she was three.

At the end of the session, Sally asked, “Can this possibly be true?” She had always felt so close to her Dad. His drinking had always made him a happy drunk, and she was actually closer to him than her Mom. She had no memory of him sexually abusing her before this image. I gave her the classic line: “Sally, there would be no way for you to have invented this much detail unless it really happened.”

After that first memory, she started having others. They would come to her during the week, and she would come to each session more and more depressed. She also had terrible insomnia and pelvic pain, which I explained to her as body memories. They were further proof that her memories were true.

By this time, I had witnessed many clients recovering repressed memories, and I totally believed them. If you saw the emotion, you would have no reason to doubt. The images were punctuated over and over again by the anguish, tears, contorted face, clenched fists, and rage that was expressed in hitting and kicking and ripping and gnashing of teeth. And there was always the pleading question, “How could he do this to me?” It would have been incomprehensible to think that the person just came up with it to play act. They weren't play acting. We honestly believed the images that came into their heads were the horrifying records of real events.

When Sally first came to see me, she was a relatively functional person. Home schooling is very popular here, and she had been home schooling her two boys for a couple of years. But after she started to get the abuse memories, she became so emotionally fragile that she decided to put her sons in public school. Sally would have horrible nightmares and days of sitting in a dark room just staring at the wall. She couldn't do her housework, so her husband had to do his work and then come home and do hers.

Sally's husband was very supportive of her, yet there were times he would get really frustrated, watching his wife slip away before his eyes. They had no sex life because she wouldn't let him touch her. He would vacillate between being understanding and being really angry.

Meanwhile, Sally decided to confront her Dad. I would say to clients, “One of the issues facing you is whether to confront the perpetrator or not.” If a person decided to confront, we talked about how to do it, how to craft a letter, or, if they were going to confront in person, we would role-play. We always planned how they would react if the perpetrator denied what happened, what boundaries should be set. Sally wrote her father a letter. He called her and completely denied everything, but we took that as evidence that he was in denial.

After confronting her Dad, Sally seemed to get a little better, but it wasn't long before she started having more images, and another round of memories would begin. Just when we would start to work on current issues, like her troubled marriage or the problem she was having with her youngest son, boom! There would be another image.

Then one day, she came to me and said, “I had this image that involved my mother.” She closed her eyes, and we went back to a time when she was a little girl living in Iowa, in this sleepy little Midwestern town. She remembered that her mother had a miscarriage. Sally was seven years old, and she found her mother in the kitchen dismembering the fetus with a knife on a chopping block. When her mother saw her, she made her help. Sally remembered severing a tiny leg, and then she had to fry it and eat it.

I was horrified. During the week after this session, I began to realize I was having a hard time believing this memory. I told myself that it was so horrible that I probably just didn't want to believe it. That year, I had attended a presentation at a local Baptist church, where a patient described her experience in a multi-generational satanic a ritual abuse [SRA] cult, so I was somewhat familiar with this type of story. She had been locked in a rat-infested basement with other children. They had been drugged and programmed to cut themselves if they ever told. She described how she had repressed all of this and recalled it in therapy. Her therapist, a counselor at the church, was a man who seemed very caring, very professional. I bought this presentation hook, line, and sinker.

So now, when I was having trouble believing the memory, I put the blame on myself. I realized that I had to tell Sally and, even worse, I realized that I could no longer do therapy with her. We had built up such trust, and I was really worried about Sally's reaction. She had begun cutting herself by that point. I had been taught that it would be a thousand years in purgatory to doubt the memory of a client. Nonetheless, I knew that I could not be effective in Sally's recovery as long as I harbored doubts. Furthermore, we had crossed into the uncharted territory of SRA, and I felt that I was no longer qualified to treat Sally. I referred her to an expert, the counselor at the Baptist church.

I later learned that after the first week or two of her new therapy, her counselor suggested that she might have multiple personality disorder [MPD]. By her fourth session, she had discovered three personalities. From that point on, she developed more and more. I understand that she now has 35 or so. She has been hospitalized at least five times. She has overdosed and cut herself again and again. After three years of weekly and sometimes twice-weekly therapy with a counselor and a psychiatrist, she shows no sign of improvement. Her marriage is now on the brink of divorce, and her two sons are tired of their Mom being so crazy. They are frightened of her and for her. I get the feeling that they feel responsible for keeping her alive. Her new counselor told Sally that things would have to get worse before they got better. He sure was right about that!

A couple of months later, a woman named Rebecca came to see me. She was having images of ceremonial-type murders. In this case, there was a corroborating witness who had instigated an investigation against her parents. This involved a real unsolved murder from many years ago, and the police were called in. I thought, “Here's an example of SRA really happening.” Before, I had queasy feelings, but here were the police giving credence to it. Again, I referred this client to the so-called experts, this time to a residential treatment center in New Mexico called Cottonwood, where they specialized in the treatment of SRA victims. The main focus was on recovering repressed memories. In group, they would share any thoughts or dreams, and if a person had a memory, they were highly praised for it. The worst thing you could say was, “I don't know if this is true or not.”

Rebecca got much worse instead of better. She told me later that the images never felt quite like her other memories, and she continued to question their validity. She also found out that the corroborating “evidence” of her friend consisted of recovered memories she had retrieved in therapy. After the police investigation failed to turn up any physical evidence to support the accusations, she decided to take a break from all the stress of therapy and make an attempt to get back some kind of normal life with her husband and young children. As time passed, she noticed that she felt better. The nightmares stopped, her symptoms abated, and her thoughts cleared. In fact, she began to seriously question whether any of her repressed memories were true. She missed her family but was uncertain how to reconcile with them, particularly with her father. Finally, when Rebecca became seriously ill herself, she called on her mother for help.

By this time, Rebecca's parents had discovered the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and had tried to get some FMS literature to me through my pastor. He gave it to me to read. I took one look at it, and the tone seemed very anti-therapist. I said, “This sounds like nonsense, like perpetrators trying to invent a safe haven.” I didn't pay much attention to it.

Rebecca went through her surgery, and her parents were very loving and supportive—pretty amazing, since she had accused her Dad of murder. She finally allowed them to see her children, whom they had not seen in over a year. In the past few months, I have met her parents and tried to make amends for the damage I caused their family. They have been incredibly kind and forgiving.

After her surgery, Rebecca started reading the FMS material and realized that she fit the pattern of the repressed memory victim to a T. Instead of merely doubting her abuse memories, she began to denounce them. In early 1993, she came to me with the article about Paul Ingram from The New Yorker. That article was a turning point for me. As I read it, I kept thinking of my experience with Sally and how she had not gotten better, but worse. She had gone from mere hell to sheer hell.

I began to think maybe there was such a thing as false memory. I wondered why the Vietnam vet doesn't forget being in Vietnam, or the Chowchilla children being buried in a bus, or the Holocaust survivors. Why don't flood victims forget? The problem with real victims of trauma seems just the reverse—they can't forget about those experiences. Does the mind work like a movie camera, recording every detail of an event? How early can memories be retrieved? How can people remember back to six months old? One of my clients had recalled being sexually abused in her crib by her grandfather. Where is the science to give credence to a belief like that? Or for that matter, do women in their teens forget incidents of repeated abuse? One incident might be forgotten, but repeated acts of torture, how do they get repressed? And why was it only sexual abuse that was blocked from memory? Why not physical abuse?

I had just re-read The Crucible about the Salem witch trials, and I began to see parallels. The same flimsy “evidence” that condemned innocent people to die in Salem was now being used to accuse and sometimes even charge parents of crimes, the only evidence being a repressed memory. I realized that I had never once questioned the idea of repressed memory. It was a presupposition that had been laid down in my profession as a foundation, and I had just stepped out onto it without questioning whether it was a solid foundation on which to build beliefs. I began to read snippets of the FMSF literature, which was based on scientific research in the field of memory and hypnosis. I realized that I needed to rethink many of my fundamental assumptions.

In the fall of 1993, I attended my first local FMSF meeting. I wasn't sure what to expect. These were the accused, after all. I remembered all that I had learned about how all perpetrators are in denial. I expected a room full of defensive parents. What I found instead was a group of sad and shocked parents who asked the same question their daughters asked: “How could she do this to me?” I had been so supportive of women and their repressed memories, but I had never once considered what that experience was like for the parents. Now I heard how absolutely ludicrous it sounded. One elderly couple introduced themselves, and the wife told me that their daughter had accused her husband of murdering three people. Another woman had been accused of being in a satanic cult that had used babies for sacrifices. This woman in a pink polyester suit was supposed to be a high priestess. The pain in these parents' faces was so obvious. And the unique thread was that their daughters had gone to therapy. I didn't feel very proud of myself or my profession that day.

I think that if I had been counseling only sex abuse cases, or if I had pressed my clients further when they denied being sexually abused, or if I had used “symptom lists” on clients, I probably would never have gone to that FMSF meeting. I think that there is a point of no return with repressed memory therapy, where admitting what you have done to clients would be too terrible to ever face. Fortunately, I had not yet reached that point. Still, I left that meeting with a tremendous discomfort, realizing that I had clients who had cut off all relationship with parents who would have looked exactly like these people and would be in as much shock and disbelief. I felt like the sorcerer's apprentice.

After that FMSF meeting, I would frequently wake up in the middle of the night in terror and anguish, thinking about clients who fit the pattern for False Memory Syndrome. Sometimes I worried about being sued. A number of the parents I had met were eager to sue their child's therapist. Most of the time, though, I just thought about those mothers and fathers who wanted their children back. Most of them hadn't talked to their children in at least two years, often longer.

There was one client who kept coming to mind. She had occasionally voiced doubts about her memories—they had always been very vague, and I had secretly wondered if she hadn't jumped to a false conclusion when she accused her Dad. The next time she came in, I asked if she would like me to attempt mediation with her father, and she was open to the idea. He must have been stunned when I identified myself as his daughter's therapist. He told me that he was so hurt that he never wanted to speak to her again. But he also told me, “You know, my daughter really was sexually abused by a babysitter when she was five,” which coincided with the age she had memories of being abused. I told him a little bit about FMS and that his daughter had not maliciously accused him. I gently pressed the issue and found that he really did want to reunite with his daughter. Finally, after a good deal of trepidation, she called him. Now they are on the path to making peace with one another.

Since then, I have been going back to former clients, one by one, trying to undo the damage. I will meet with them and ask them to read over some FMSF material. “Even if it turns out that your repressed memories are true,” I say, “you should know that information questioning them is out there. I want you to read it, and then we'll talk.” Some clients, like the woman who thought her grandfather had abused her in the crib, have retracted with evident relief. Others have re-established some sort of relationship with their parents, but they haven't taken back the allegations. One just shrugged and told me, “I guess we'll never know whether these memories are true or false.” That attitude really disturbs me. And Sally won't hear what I have to say yet, but some day, I hope she will retract.

I have also changed the way I practice sex abuse therapy. I only work with clients who have long-standing memories. Now I never ask if a client has been sexually abused. I leave it up to clients to present their own issues. And I no longer refer anyone to experts on satanic ritual abuse, since there are no real experts. There may really be groups of people dabbling in ritual abuse, but I do not believe in multi-generational everyone-in-town-is-involved SRA cults. The FBI and police forces around the country have found no evidence to support their existence.

It is very disturbing to me that many who consider themselves Christian counselors are among those searching for repressed memories, particularly of SRA. Christians believe in the concept of an evil force called Satan. Ritual abuse gives credence to that kind of evil, a personal Satan with attendant spirits. It gives that spiritual dimension to the counseling. One counselor I know tells clients to ask God to tell them if they were sexually abused. God is supposed to reveal their abuse in response to their prayers. This makes God Himself an accessory to this dubious practice of retrieving memories. In the name of God, thousands of families are being split apart.

I believe that therapists constitute a new priesthood. I think we all have been sold a bill of goods that human misery can be attributed solely to traumatic childhood events. I'm often struck by people who have relatively normal lives who experience the same kind of misery. I am not minimizing the effects of trauma, but as Jesus said, “In this life, you will have tribulation.”

Another saying of Jesus also has great resonance for me now. He said, “Perfect love casts out all fear.” That's true, but I think the reverse is also true, that perfect fear casts out all love. That is what happens in recovered memory therapy.

I recently got a call from an elderly gentleman who had heard about my efforts to reconcile families. He wanted to talk to someone who would understand his story. He's 84 years old and had just lost his wife of 56 years. Five years ago, their only daughter had written them a letter accusing him of sexually abusing her and vowing never to speak to them again unless he confessed. He denied the charge and hasn't heard from her since. Other family members have told him that she now believes she has multiple personalities.

When I told him that there was a support organization for accused parents, he was really surprised. He and his wife had thought they were the only ones. But he saw no point in attending an FMSF meeting. At his advanced age, he didn't expect ever to see his daughter again. Before he left, I said, “I have a prayer for these lost daughters. Can I share it with you?” He agreed, and I began quoting from Luke 15, the Parable of the Prodigal Son. “I will arise and go to my father and will say unto him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee.' “ Obviously recognizing the story, he stood and continued: “But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.” We finished together. “For this my son was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found.” Together, we found a small glimmer of hope in that moment, enveloped in an awful lot of charity. We both cried. I wished him God speed, and then he left.