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

Susan Ramsey, Incest Survivor

Susan Ramsey, a New York social worker, looked younger than her age of 51. After agreeing to talk with me about how her repressed memories came back, she called with second thoughts. “There is some stuff I have a very difficult time talking about,” she explained. “Maybe I could just write it down.” That was fine with me, so she wrote the following and handed it to me just before our interview:

"I have memories of being abused by my mother, my father and my maternal grandmother. I also believe I was abused by a family doctor and some uncles, but that is really too vague to go into. My parents abused me both separately and together. The abuse from my mother was her fondling me and making me fondle her breasts and genitals. My father was an alcoholic and when he abused me alone, he was drunk. He fondled me and forced me to do oral sex on him. Eventually he raped me. He came into my room at night and it was totally dark except the light of the cigarette he was smoking. He used the cigarette to threaten me with [burning] if I didn't do what he wanted. What the two of them did to me together was to force enemas on me and make me hold them. The cramps were severe and then when they finally let me go to the bathroom they made fun of me as I rushed off. Sometimes they sexually stimulated me (manually) while making me hold the enemas. After I came back from the bathroom, they would make me watch while they had sex. Humiliation and shame were a big part of it as was pain. I repressed all of these memories."
I'm the oldest of three children. I have a brother two years younger than me and a sister seven years younger. I'm not really that close to my siblings. I've only spoken to my sister about my abuse. I didn't really plan to tell her, but it just came out. She feels she might have been abused, too, but she hasn't had any memories yet. She was in therapy, but she kind of stopped connecting with me about this. My therapist thinks she got scared and backed off.

I always knew that my father was an alcoholic. I've been depressed and in therapy most of my adult life, but I never dealt with abuse issues. The first inkling I had was when I was in group therapy for ACOAs [Adult Children of Alcoholics], and the therapist said she sensed that I had been sexually abused. My reaction was to say, “I

don't know.” I didn't say it was ridiculous, I just didn't know. This was about ten years ago.

I was seeing a psychiatrist, but he never really involved himself in my childhood. I was in an unhealthy marriage, my two kids were driving me nuts, and he was just trying to keep me together in my present life. Eventually, things settled down, I seemed to be able to cope, and I wanted to do some deeper recovery work. But he was no use. I terminated with him after 12 years. The subject of sex abuse never even came up with him—it's kind of surprising, but it didn't.

About three years ago, I found Randall Cummings, a therapist who specializes in trauma. I started doing inner child work with him. I had already seen Bradshaw videos and read some of his books. Then Randall and I started doing age regressions in therapy. No, it's not hypnotism, just relaxation exercises. You spend time breathing and relaxing, going back to remember the house you lived in and the neighborhood, seeing the child you were, then you become her. I was dealing with being a toddler at the time, and during age regression, I first remembered the abuse.

I pictured this child, you know, and I have real photos of me which helped. I let myself be her and feel her, and once that happened, he would ask questions like, “How old are you today? What does it feel like to be three?” And I would say, most of the time, “It doesn't feel too good. Things are happening I don't like.” He never said, “Do your mother or father touch you or do things you don't like?” He just let the process flow. That's kind of validating, that it just came from me. After the first memories started coming, I asked if he knew this would happen. He said he didn't know, but he wasn't surprised. He said he didn't want to force things.

I was doing age regressions regularly in therapy for a long time, and I kept getting memories. Now I know that I was abused from the time I was in my crib at six months or younger, up until I was 18 and left for college.

The other thing Randall taught me was to do inner child meditations on my own. I do them every day. I get in touch with my inner child, learning to nurture and care for her. I let her know that I love her in spite of what happens. When she's scared about things, I listen. The child within is really my feelings. I never knew what I was feeling before, ever. Now I've stopped being depressed. I'm doing a lot of grieving for losses of childhood, but I'm not depressed so much. Anger is still really hard for me. I'll start to get in touch with it, then push it away. It's starting to come up, and there's a lot of it there.

The only one of my abusers alive is my mother, who's 75. I first told her, “I don't want to talk to you for a while.” Since then, I've gotten back into contact. I have to call her, though; she isn't allowed to call me. I didn't tell her why at the beginning. Eventually, I told her I was sexually abused, but I wouldn't say who did it. She kept hounding me. Finally, I told her it was several people, that she and my father were two of them, and that I couldn't discuss it with her. Now she's dropped it. We don't discuss it any more.

During those months when I wouldn't allow communication, she abided by it for the most part. I had called to tell her this from my therapist's office, and when I got home, there was a message on my machine. She wondered how long this would last, and wanted to know if she could talk to my therapist about it. I was a little annoyed by that. I didn't respond. I didn't feel it would serve any purpose for her to talk to Randall. I think she's probably blocked it out like I did.

What did I think of my parents before I knew about the abuse? Dad was a nasty, mean, cruel drunk. When he was sober, he was a pretty nice guy. We had some good times, though not many. I remember sitting on his lap on Sunday nights listening to the radio. When I was little, I was sick a lot, and my mother was always very, very busy, with no time for kids. Dad would come and sit on my bed and talk to me.

By the time I hit adolescence, I didn't want anything to do with him, though. He could be physically abusive when he was drunk. He once threatened to kill us all. He was also verbally abusive, repeatedly calling me a “lazy no-good young-un.” I am still convinced I'm lazy. He criticized everything I did. I didn't wash the dishes right, didn't help my mother enough, sat and read books all afternoon. I would be careful not to do that thing again, but the next time it would be a different list. I couldn't please him.

I felt safe around Mom, thought I really loved her, and I would get really scared if I thought anything would happen to her. I was very dependent on her, even asking her what to wear in the morning until I left for college.

I think I'm overweight as a direct result of trying to use food to make my feelings go away. I've been overweight since second grade. It could also be a way to deny my sexuality, to hide it behind all this fat.

I've been in Survivors of Incest Anonymous [SIA] for almost two years now. It's been good. Some people have flashbacks during the meetings, but that hasn't happened to me. I've been triggered, though, by what someone said. After one meeting, I remembered my parents telling my younger siblings that they were going to do to them what they did to me when I went to college. They had my brother and sister watch them having sex with me when I was 18. I don't think they remember it. My sister doesn't.

I know it's hard to believe that an 18-year-old could block out a memory like that. You just split, you can't stand what's going on, your mind takes off and lets your body stay there. The body is what remembers, not the mind. When you feel ready to hear and believe, it comes back. I think that's how I've heard it explained [laughs].

I subscribe to Changes Magazine, and there was an article in there that was somewhat disturbing to me. It was about how some of these memories might be false. It's hard when you don't have physical evidence to accept them. You don't really want to accept them anyway. Some of these people who think these are false memories are appearing on talk shows, and my mother might see them and think, “Oh, this is what's wrong with my daughter.” It would validate her point of view. She'll say, “Oh, she'll snap out of it one day.” I was reassured because Randall didn't use leading questions in my case.

I've asked Randall, “Am I wrong? Could I be making this all up?” His attitude is, “Whether the details are accurate or not, it's extremely evident to me that you were a severely wounded child. Something happened. I strongly suspect that most of what you remember is true.” In his mind, it's irrelevant whether the details are true or not. I don't agree, though. I don't want to go around saying this stuff unless it's true. When I first had these memories, I doubted and vacillated a lot.

But I agree with Randall that there's something wrong, there are major problems in my personality, and they didn't just happen on their own. So something happened. I didn't get my basic emotional needs met as a child, that's for definite sure. My relationship with Randall demonstrates that. I'm very dependent on him, I feel very needy and worthless without him, and I want him to have more than a professional relationship with me. I want him to be my Daddy. Lately I've been starting to have sexual feelings toward him.

I have a teddy bear named Serenity who helps me. I used to take him with me to SIA meetings, and I still do when the mood strikes me. Sometimes I'll cuddle with the bear on my bed, but I don't sleep with him every night.

– • –

Diane Schultz, Incest Survivor

Diane Schultz, a North Carolina accountant, appeared to be the opposite of overweight Susan Ramsey. Schultz was small, even petite, and quite attractive by American norms. Yet she too blamed her eating disorder—bulimia—on long-forgotten incest. She first entered therapy for marital counseling when she was 27, but she was soon seeing therapist Sondra Atkins individually and getting divorced. Three years later, she went to the Healing Heart, described in its brochure as “a safe, nurturing environment,” for an intensive two-week workshop intended to address “childhood issues and adult dysfunctional behaviors.” During guided imagery at Healing Heart, she regressed to her birth, where she suffered “prenatal suffocation syndrome.” During similar regressions, other participants remembered sexual abuse. Soon after coming back from the workshop, Schultz commenced the difficult work of retrieving her incest memories, a particularly painful process for her, because she had previously recalled her childhood quite fondly.
When I was 30, after I returned from the Healing Heart, I thought, “Maybe that happened to me, too.” I had similar symptoms: eating disorders, relationship difficulties, a dysfunctional family, my sexual acting out. As soon as I acknowledged that fact, I started having dreams, physical body memories, feelings, sensations, and visual images, like unclear snapshot photos. They just wouldn't leave me alone or go away.

I would dream about my father raping me, but I would at first minimize and deny it. I dreamed about my mother sexually violating me also; she had a penis and would sometimes anally penetrate me. It could have been her finger in reality, any sort of phallic thing. The idea of my mother being sexual with me is the point.

Eventually, I had dreams about a particular canoe trip my father took me on with my uncle and his best friend, when I was 16. My dreams indicated that I was drugged at the time, and raped, at least by my father and uncle. I would do art therapy, and pictures would come up about it. I would take the pictures to my survivor group and have physical memories there. My tongue would get numb like I was on drugs, and I could feel myself being penetrated both orally and vaginally. I would have these sensations right there. One of the benefits of such a support group is that someone has witnessed it. To be honest with you, they believed me more than I believed me. There are some things you just cannot make up, they told me.

As the memories came up, I was physically and emotionally drained. Sondra Atkins, my therapist, diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder, and I took a four-month leave from work. I was an accountant, and I couldn't add two and two together to get four. I couldn't carry out everyday responsibilities.

Sondra just kept saying she believed me. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation and my father say that these memories are the product of man-hating therapists, but Sondra doesn't hate men. She's married, has kids, and is a pillar of the community. Still, I've worried about this myself. Did Sondra brainwash me? She said she believed me, that there was an end to all the pain, and she encouraged me to find ways to nurture myself, to take care of myself, and she trusted my inner wisdom.

Eventually, I realized that I was molested from infancy until 16. My mother abused me when I was in my crib, until I was four. My father did it the whole time.

When I would have the dreams, sometimes I would feel bad and washed out afterward, but sometimes I wouldn't feel much at all. But then I'd go to therapy, and I'd start having convulsions—sobbing, crying and gagging. I couldn't scream loud enough, and that's when the dreams would come to life as memories in fact. I would experience the grief, the terror, and I would shake. I'm shaking right now. This is difficult to talk about. Sondra would have to constrain me to keep my skin on, to keep me from exploding, to keep my heart from breaking, which it is.

Sondra uses what she calls the psychomotor method. She says that the body remembers more than the mind does. I would have tension in my jaw, and Sondra would come and hold my jaw, saying, “Feel it! Exaggerate it!” and she'd ask what I was seeing. It would accelerate to gagging and the feeling of a penis in my mouth, then mental images, the pubic hair and skin and legs. And it all starts, the feelings, terror, shock, confusion, and rage, rage, rage, rage. Sometimes I would take a tennis racket and hit the pillow, bite things, release the rage.

I also have memories in my shoulder, where I was held down. Sondra would push on it, and I would feel like being held down. I'd see my mother on the right, my father on the left.

The memories come slowly, as a progression, like one when I was a baby, involving my mother. I took a nap one afternoon and dreamed that one of my best friends and I were masturbating each other. I woke up with the sensation that I had used my entire right hand to masturbate her. And I had the desire to wash the hand, or just wring it, pull it off. Then the memory came later, where I see the crib, the gate is halfway down, and I see the bars, and my mother from the belly button to mid-thigh, and she's using my right hand to masturbate with. It took several months to put the pieces together. I call them confetti memories. It's like my life was a sheet of whole paper, and it has been shredded into tiny pieces, and I put it together one piece at a time.

Sometimes Sondra asks me to draw or write with my left hand, to contact my unconscious better. See, here's a picture, and I wrote this with my left hand: “It's true, you will know, I know. I'm inside. Listen to me, I'm inside.” That was my inner child writing.

During this leave of absence, I was seeing Sondra three times a week. I had to learn to trust her. The most intimate people in my life had been violating me. I still struggle with that. For 30 years, it wasn't safe. Finally, I could trust Sondra enough to let down my guard, and to trust my friends in the survivor group.

I've told a lot of people about my abuse now, and they sometimes ask, “How could you forget all of this?” But these were my parents. I had to greet them every morning, eat with them, day in and day out, and I had to forget in order to be with them. I had no place to go, and no words to articulate the abuse as an infant.

I've had to let go of the myth of what I thought my childhood was like. It was like bursting a beautiful bubble, and it's very difficult to do. My mother was a beautiful woman. She died before I had my memories. My father is a plastic surgeon. We used to travel a lot. We'd hike and horseback ride in the summer, and we'd ski in the winter, as a family. There wasn't much yelling or screaming, no anger expressed. There was no punishment. They were very permissive. They used to go skinny dipping with us, even when I was a teenager. We'd light up joints first. I was so self-conscious, I'd go over to the side to get undressed. I never thought of that as abusive, didn't think of drugs as being wrong. I thought I had cool parents.

I liked the hiking, the family thing. My parents were young at heart. Here are some pictures.

[Schultz showed me family photos of a handsome family. There she was with her younger brother Kevin, her father pulling his ears playfully, the whole family aboard their sailboat.]

After my leave of absence, I confronted my father. This was all in letters. I didn't want to do it on the phone or in person. I wanted to have everything in black and white. So I wrote him a letter, told him what I remembered, and gave him a list of my symptoms. He wrote back and said that it never happened, it was all in my fantasy, that I was bulimic because it was fashionable, and that the sex abuse was made up by a man-hating therapist. He said he was a good father and didn't do anything wrong. I wrote back and said I didn't want to close the door entirely, but I wanted to sever the relationship for the time being. That was a year ago. He wrote back to get the last hit, saying that I was right, it was best not to communicate as long as I felt that way.

I do know he loves me, and he did the best he could. He may not remember the abuse himself. He may have been in a trance state. I still love him, still miss him, but I'm very hurt and angry. That's another reason this is so crazy. How could I love him after what he did? But I still do, because he's my father.

The memories might not be totally accurate, but what purpose would it serve me to spend so much time, energy and money to blame my father for something he didn't do? I've spent about $60,000 in the last six years on the retreat, the therapy, a hospitalization, the leave, doctor's bills, massage therapy, art therapy, all inclusive, and that's not taking into account the loss of not knowing what to do with my life.

Still, I'm much better now. I stay present more. I used to dissociate a lot. I would be in the middle of a business meeting and lose track of the conversation. I see people more clearly for who they are now. I think there are still some memories to be had. I'm at a plateau, at a stair step. Maybe there will be more vivid memories of my parents. They get clearer every time. I get more details, more feelings. The whole process of healing has been a spiritual one. I thought God had forsaken me. I have become more spiritual and believe in a power higher than myself. We need to learn the lessons we're here to learn.

– • –

Frieda Maybry, Ritual Abuse Survivor

Frieda Maybry, 54, tended to the poor, who often found her at home in a lower-class Chicago neighborhood. She could afford such time and kindness because she lived on total disability resulting from the purported ravages of ritual abuse by her father and his fellow Masons, which she had recalled relatively recently. Prior to that, she had spent a great deal of her life in therapy or New Age movements, searching for answers and solace. “As a child, I had frequent bronchitis, colds, flus, allergies, headaches, G.I. tract indigestion. I had hemorrhoids by the age of ten, and a lot of nervous habits and tension—little twitches and things.” Her parents were divorced when she was 14; her mother died three years later. She recalled her mother as loving and supportive, while she described her father, also deceased, as cold, non-verbal, and frightening. Now she felt she finally had the answer for her various physical and mental ailments. Frieda was sure that her memories, first retrieved while she was in graduate school in her late 40s, were accurate, because she recovered them with her peers rather than with a professional therapist.
I began remembering sexual abuse seven years ago in 1987. I had no idea that I had been sexually abused, although several therapists had suggested to me that it seemed a high likelihood, especially since I had absolutely no memories before the age of seven.

I took a weekend workshop with a self-help group called Re-Evaluation Co-Counseling, RC for short, in which people learn how to counsel each other. They use very basic non-intrusive, non-directive techniques. Once you learn how to do that with the group, you exchange time. I get an hour, the other person gets an hour, and we don't have to pay. Being a peer relationship, it's not a situation where a professional has power over you and you're coming to be fixed.

About two months later, there was an advanced course, which happened to be on early sexual memories. All 11 of us from the original class attended. The leader gave us a lot of information about sexual development, family problems around sexual behavior, and child sexual abuse. She taught us how to approach this in counseling if any of us had material around this issue. She also talked about what to do if we didn't remember that this had happened to us, but we suspected it might have. She gave about six indicators that would indicate likely incest. Every one of them was remarkably true for me except one, and that was that you remembered.

So during a counseling session, I tried what she suggested. You just sit face to face with your co-counselor, put your hands together and push against each other, palm to palm. You're not trying to overcome each other, just put a lot of pressure. And then, you move around a bit with it and notice what feelings come up in whoever is being the client. If it feels like you want to push more, let some aggression come out, you go with it, and say whatever you feel like. You might say, “No,” or do some yelling or whatever, all within the parameters of being safe and careful.

When I did that, immediately very strong feelings came up. Not a real memory, but I broke into really heavy sobbing. I pushed very hard and started saying “No, No, NO, NO, NO!” and it went into desperate feelings and crying. The theory of co-counseling is that memories bring with them all the emotions that were there during the event, and those emotions need to be felt and gotten out for healing. So it doesn't really matter whether you get the memory or not. If you keep working on it, over time, whatever memory might be there will come up.

Then I had an experience which had happened a few times before, but not for years. I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. My eyes would just be open, and I would be frozen in terror in my bed, stiff. I couldn't even breathe. And I would be looking up at the silhouette of a dark figure reaching down to get me. It was really as if there were someone right there, but I couldn't move. Eventually the figure would fade completely. I would finally be able to get a breath, and I would really have to work at making myself move a finger, a hand, and finally be able to reach for a light and turn one on and sit up.

Well, I had never understood this, but now I connected it with the possibility of sexual abuse, like maybe somebody came and got me in my bed at night. So I wrote in my journal about that, and I really started working on these memories. I was using money I'd inherited to live on and was going to write my thesis. Instead, there were these memories and distress, crying, depression, anxiety, and just incredible turmoil. I started co-counseling at least three times a week. I did a lot of journaling and reading books. The Courage to Heal was the first one I got. It was brand new then and was considered the book to get.

I had this terror every time in counseling I would try to address that figure in the night. I would freeze again, go into panic, and would physically jerk away and say, “No, No, I can't!” I literally couldn't face it. One co-counselor suggested real gently, “Can you imagine a situation where you could bring love into this scene, where you could feel safe?” I couldn't, but one day I was driving along, and it suddenly popped into my mind what an amazing thing it was that my brain could reproduce this phenomenon so totally real that I believed that there was somebody standing beside my bed now, when here I was 48 years old and this had happened when I was a kid, and I didn't even remember it. What amazing creatures we are, what strange brains we have, that we are capable of such a thing! [laughs] I was actually kind of chuckling out loud, in awe of the human capacity. I thought, “Boy, I'm glad people are made like this, I'm so thankful that we have this ability to make us heal. And I realized it was something close to love I was feeling. I was loving myself, my ability to do that. I thought, “Oh! This is a little way to put love into that scene.”

I've always been a very spiritually focused person. I've attended various religious groups, then explored Eastern philosophies and New Age things and whatever I felt drawn to at the time. I was attending a New Age meeting around then, and after it broke up, while people were socializing, there was this woman who frequently got messages from this Spirit Being friend of hers, Shepti. She was talking to somebody else with her back to me, when she suddenly whirled around and said, “Frieda! Shepti just told me to tell you that there's a gate. I don't know what that means, but that's what he said. There's a gate.”

So the next time I went to a counseling session, I said I had discovered I could bring love into this terrifying fantasy. But I still had trouble and turned away, “No, No, I can't.” Then what popped into my head was a gate, this really big heavy wooden old-fashioned gate, and I was standing uphill from it and felt really safe. And on the other side of the gate was the silhouetted figure. This was just a device to make me feel safe. I noticed there was a little girl who was me at the age of five, right up on my side of the gate on tiptoe, trying to peek over and see who was there.

So I asked, “Who are you?” I didn't get any words. A little more light came, but I still couldn't tell for sure. Still, I felt like the silhouette was probably my father. And this was the first time I had any clue as to who might have sexually abused me. I had imagined a cousin, an uncle, or several other people. It wasn't like I was necessarily expecting it to be my father, although intellectually I had figured out that he had the best access to me at night. Plus, I had all these negative feelings toward him.

All this was with my eyes closed. There was another man next to my father, and they were holding hands, and it became a little bit lighter. “Why did you do that to me?” I asked. And my father's face and voice were on the edge of crying as he said, “I loved him,” with great feeling. I already suspected that my father had been gay before he married. I had already had a flashback to when he and his lover were both present, and I was being sexually abused, with a penis in my mouth. It was brief, just a flash, but I knew it was two of them. I think I was between three and six months old then. I looked very much like a photograph of me as a baby.

Anyway, during this gate episode, I felt my own anger well up, and I pointed my finger and said, “Well, I don't care, even if you did love him, you shouldn't have done that to me. Now you two go off and talk about it!” And I saw them in my mind turn around and go away. Then the little girl at the gate ran to me, and as I picked her up, she turned from a five year old into an infant. And I cradled her in my arms. Then I did what I read in a book somewhere, that you imagine your own child-self going inside of your adult body and belonging in there. So I imagined it and felt like it really happened. And I felt like I could just hold my hands over my tummy, and it felt like I was cradling my baby inside.

From then on, for several weeks, a lot happened, dialoging with my father over the whole thing. [Her father was already dead.] It was just like the breakthrough. And after that, there was healing after healing, which would take a long time to describe.

About two years later, I thought I was just about finished with the memories, when I attended a seminar given by Ellen Bass, the author of The Courage to Heal. When I got there, I realized I was totally numbed out emotionally. My affect just was not there, so I knew that was an important sign. I always knew that when an emotion twinged at whatever somebody was saying, it probably had something to do with me, and I should pay attention to that. But that day, there were no emotions to go on. So I thought, well, I'll make a note in the margin of my journal whenever I have a physical discomfort. I made one mark in the morning when I had a real brief little twinge, then another one in the early afternoon. Late in the day, it happened again. And that third time, she had just done a ten minute talk about ritual abuse. Without gory details, she presented just the minimal facts, but just the idea that babies were sacrificed was so horrible the room was in shock.

And it was during that time that I put this note in the margin about physical discomfort. And I went back and looked, and the other two times were the only other times in the whole seminar when she'd even mentioned ritual abuse. And I thought, “Oh, no, oh, no! I can't deal with this, this can't be my story.” I mean, I didn't want this to be anything to do with me. And I had zero memories and no reason to believe it would be so. But I had to face the fact that it was there in my notes, three times that day.

I had an appointment the next morning with a co-counselor, and right away I started crying, the hardest crying I'd ever done in my whole life. This was so incredible, I was amazed that my co-counselor wasn't terrified, the way I was behaving. The noises I was making and the bending over and the—I didn't actually retch, but it was close to it. I wasn't saying anything, just “No, No, it can't be, not that, no!” And finally, “No, No, not babies, it can't be, not babies!” Finally, I was just exhausted. An emotional discharge played itself out. Then we talked about it. I had very little in terms of data, but an undeniable strong knowing. Yes, there were babies, and yes, they were killed.

[Frieda eventually recalled gory details of abuse by the Masons in their Temple. She could never identify any of the faces, however. She just “knew” that her father was one of them. She recalled most of the scenes by visualizing them during counseling sessions, but she had one flashback at night.]

That night I got into bed, not feeling good, restless, couldn't sleep. I lay on one side, then turned over, and when I did, I found myself looking at a ritual abuse scene, right there in front of my face. I was standing at the side of a sacrifice table with my eyes and face about six inches from a neck that had just been sliced, and the fresh blood was running down off the table, being captured in this silver goblet. The scene was so real, the blood was so bright, it was like I could smell the blood. And all I did was turn over in bed!

My memories of ritual abuse go from around six months old till when I was seven. In the earliest one, I was naked on a cold, hard floor like cement, and there were men standing around me in a circle, and they peed on me, and it was just humiliation like I could hardly believe, and I didn't expect it.

One of the worst memories I have is of being buried alive, and the sacrifice that preceded it. The basic message of the sacrifice was proving that love has no power at all. I was about five. They murdered a baby, then they cut off his mother's arm. I don't know what happened after that, because they buried me alive, put me in a coffin. When they dug me up, I was completely blue and stiff, yet I wasn't quite dead. Getting that particular memory up has been one of the hardest parts of my recovery. It's taken me more than a year to get the pieces I have.

I don't really know if I'll ever be finished with this process, where I'll know I've gotten all the memories, where I won't be just “in recovery” but “recovered.” I've made another big transition just in the last few months. I've gone from victim to survivor, and now I feel like—for lack of a better word—a warrior. I don't like the war imagery, but it's the only word I know that adequately conveys the sense of being a fighter, not just for myself but for all children everywhere. Just in the last few months, I've been feeling healed enough that I feel more capable of carrying on this work. I will have the coping skills that I learned to survive—all the dissociating skills that I learned during the abuse years. I will have those available to me for conscious use when I need them.

Oh, yes, the flashbacks and memories have been very real. I don't have any doubt, that was me, and that happened to me. It's so real, and I'm in it. There's just no way I can doubt that it's a real memory.

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Philippa Lawrence, British Incest Survivor/Therapist

In 1980, Philippa Lawrence, a hairdresser, took a course in London on bioenergetics with one of its inventors, the Greek John Pierrakos [his real name], who combined “basic Reichian therapy with the insights of modern physics, “ according to one of his book jackets. “He could read bodies like some people can read palms,” Lawrence explained. He told her very little, other than to look more closely at her relationship with her parents, despite her assertion that she “owed them everything.” Inspired by the course, Lawrence quit her hairdressing job to teach yoga and alternative therapies. She had practiced a number of them herself, including “rebirthing,” a process in which one hyperventilates for forty minutes and then attempts to recall one’s birth. In 1987 or 1988, while studying at the Chiron Center for Holistic Psychotherapy [real name] in London and attending private therapy sessions, she recovered her first memory of sexual abuse.
I had always remembered my mother abusing me when I was 12 years old. It never occurred to me to tell anybody. I used to have to sleep with her, to take care of her. She had six nervous breakdowns, and she used her inability to cope to make everyone look after her. I was her partner when Dad was working nights. I woke up in the middle of the night very aroused, and she was masturbating me. I just froze, then I pissed myself. Then I started a whole episode of wetting the bed. Yes, my mother is a very disturbed person.

It was during my training at Chiron that my repressed memories came up. At that time, I was also seeing John Mellon, a Gestalt therapist. I did dialogue work with my own body. He would ask me to concentrate on a particular body part and exaggerate it. So if he noticed me moving my hand, for instance, he might ask me to pay attention to that. This stuff comes from the gods, really.

The first time it happened, I was in a therapy session and talking about my mother. It was like a series of flashbacks. You know these strobe lights that make things look like fast jerky slides? It was like that. I’m very visual; I think in pictures. I saw an erect penis, a mouth, and at the same time felt my own mouth. I saw a very tiny female baby’s vagina. These were all combined with physical sensations in my body. I would feel a sensation in my vagina, then I would see a baby’s vagina. My body was trying to talk to me.

My head felt like it was going to explode. I was very distressed. John didn’t interpret; he let me be in control. I said, “Oh, my God, I’m scared I might have been abused as a baby.” He didn’t say Yes or No. He just asked what I’d seen, what was happening.

After this session, I drove over to Chiron for the training and I threw up. I just could not swallow anything, couldn’t put anything past my mouth for a few days. I think now that was because I had been orally raped and was reliving it. At the time, I thought it was my Dad, but I have since concluded it was my Granddad.

Then a few years later in 1989 or so, I was doing a body-and-energy session at Chiron. I felt really good and energetic. I ended up leaping off a stool onto a pool of cushions. It was glorious. Then I sat down and started getting this feeling in the backs of my legs. At first, I thought I had scratched something. It was like a carpet burn. I told my trainee therapist, “This is really weird.” I could tell from people’s faces that they knew something had come up. The leader said, “Just go with that, see what it is.” I had flashbacks. I was in my grandparents’ lounge. Then I wanted to start banging my head, the pain was so overwhelming. I didn’t want to know. The training therapist just kept saying, “Don’t hurt yourself, don’t hurt yourself,” so I didn’t.

In this flashback, my Granddad was sitting in the corner, and I sat on the settee in front of the fire. It was a horsehair settee, very rough. My mother had gone into hospital, and my father had gone to see her. I was 5 years old. I’ve since verified all of this with my family.

I was playing with myself as kids do, I was sort of playing with my vagina, and my Granddad was very excited. He dragged me off this settee, and I had feelings between my legs of being interfered with. Then my grandmother came in, and she was furious. I got punished for what was happening. She was slapping me between my thighs. I heard words as well, something like, “Silence! You must never do this again. Never tell anybody. You are a terrible girl.” That was my clearest memory, and it crystalized a lot for me. It all seemed to link up for me then. We lived at my grandparents’ house when I was first born, so I concluded that the previous memory was of my grandfather and not my father.

I also had a dream not long after that about an old man with my grandfather’s face, and this leer. I went to see a horror film as a teenager about a ghoul. I had a bizarre reaction. He had this particular look on his face that was terrifying and made me feel peculiar. I didn’t understand it at the time. Also, when I was little, I had a screaming fit at a television program, watching a mask that changed from smiling to frowning. “So that’s why.” It made complete sense. So now this clicked into place. The abuse by my grandfather continued from when I was a baby till I was five and he was found out by my grandmother, so that was the end of it.

I supposed it’s possible that my father also abused me, but I hope not. I really love my dad. On the other hand, many people who later have memories of their fathers say, “I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know about my Dad.” So I just don’t know.

I had one other memory that came first in a dream, then in a body memory. It was about a shop-keeper near my home when I was a little girl. I processed it in a therapy session. I had the sensation of being very near this big belly. I was watching this child being interfered with by this man, and at the same time, it got enmeshed with seeing his fingers and wanting to see them go through the bacon slicer. That was another huge piece of the jigsaw. In therapy, I saw how he slid his hand inside my bathing costume and played with my genitals and also my bottom. I was less than 10. I told my Dad, “Mr. Barker plays with me and Josephine inside our bathing costumes,” and he said, “Don’t talk such rubbish.” Mother would say, “He’s a very nice man, Mr. Barker, very good to us.” He used to give us credit. I remembered all of this conversation through therapy.

When I remember these things, my head and throat are pounding. I just want to cry and cry and cry. But I think it’s good for me. I need to process it. It’s natural that it is painful. Who would want to feel or remember that? That’s why it’s repressed and forgotten. I’ve actually read this in a book called The Courage to Heal. If a child did not go unconscious, the volume of pain would actually destroy them. I read the book long after the memories came back, but I found the book so validating.

Before I got these memories, I had never even heard of flashbacks. I didn’t know the words. None of my therapists have pushed or interpreted what I said. I really feel grateful for that; I’ve made sense of the whole thing myself. I’ve just been asked the right questions.

What do I think about false memory syndrome? I think it’s possible that some people are being misled. But I absolutely know my memories are real; I believe my experience in my therapy more than anything else. I can’t even describe the kind of strength it’s given me. It’s validated my experience. It did happen, and it shouldn’t have.

I don’t think I’ve got all the memories out yet. Certain things start to happen when they are about to come. I get a kind of dizzy pressure in the head, and that’s been happening recently. And from the very fact that I’m speaking to you, I think there’s something ready to surface. I wholeheartedly believe in synchronicity. It’s not a coincidence that you called.

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