Are The Memory Wars Over Yet?
Don’t Shoot The Messenger
Just last week, I was looking into new general liability insurance for my private practice location—so I had to answer some questions about my therapy activities. “This is routine enough,” I thought. That is, until it came to one particular question: “Do you engage in repressed memory recovery therapy?” I literally heard myself utter softly, “The f*#k?!” I am a psychologist specializing in the treatment of complex trauma and dissociative disorders, and therefore I responded ethically and resolutely with “No.” I asked myself where was this insurance underwriter’s wording of such a question coming from? I knew that the question was just another shopworn strategy to blame victims of abuse and to shoot the messenger (read: therapist) in the process. There’s good reason for the insurance industry to mistakenly believe that there is such a thing as repressed memory recovery therapy. To appreciate the insurance underwriter’s position, I had to understand the history of victim and therapist blaming in this context before reverse engineering the misguided reasoning behind it; enter the Memory Wars.
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation Emerges
Here’s the short version of quite a sad and seminal story that gave birth to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in 1989 and the national aftermath of the Memory Wars. Peter and Pamela Freyd were non-biologically related adoptive siblings who developed a romantic relationship and later married each other. They had a baby together named Jennifer Freyd. When Jennifer entered psychotherapy in graduate school and began to recall memories of incest from her father during childhood, she confronted her parents. Their response to her was to form the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), and “out” her in the public literature and newspapers while she was still a graduate student.
Since 1989 there has been a campaign by the FMSF to smear victims of abuse who did not recall until adulthood psychotherapy their trauma at the hands of the guardians entrusted with their protection and care. The nationwide campaign of the FMSF gathered much steam in the years following its inception from accused molesters and other alleged abusers intending to shift blame away from themselves and onto the victims—and their therapists—who, it has been assumed, plant false memories of childhood abuse. The FMSF has conveniently explained all alleged abuse discovered during the psychotherapy process as being an iatrogenic problem. FMSF’s assumption: If the childhood abuse were indeed real, why wouldn’t memory for something so horrible stick with people throughout their whole lives?
And the Misinformation Continues
Surprisingly, numerous academicians have joined the battle call on the side of FMSF as reflected in a recent article following the trend of reports of recovered memories of abuse in therapy (Patihis & Pendergrast, 2019). As a result of the Memory Wars, countless families have been split apart in bitter battle. Abuse victims have born the second quiver of arrows by being dismissed and vilified for their delayed disclosures of abuse. And therapists have seen their careers shattered from lawsuits and licensing board investigations launched by enraged family members who want revenge for “implantation of false memories of abuse.” In their empirical article, Patihis and Pendergrast (2019) reported that “therapists discussing the possibility of repressed memories of abuse were 20 times more likely to report recovered abuse memories than those who did not.” (p. 3) The prevailing point of view of the FMSF proponents is that “a belief in repressed memories” by therapists “creates” memories of childhood abuse; however, this notion is so misinformed, and here’s why.
Traumatic vs. Non-traumatic Memory Retrieval
The human condition automatically (read: without conscious direction) processes and stores traumatic experience as it’s happening in a different part of the brain as compared to non-traumatic experience (van der Kolk & van der Hart, 2019). For the highest survival value for the future, traumatic experience is recorded in sensory fragments without the fluid awareness of “storyline,” i.e., in the brain’s right hemisphere—mostly cordoned off from access by the brain’s left hemisphere where narrative memory (read: the integrated memory of experiences on the levels of sensation, emotion, thought and action sequence) is housed. Admittedly, this explanation is a super rough sketch here for a blog post, but it helps us to understand why many victims of childhood abuse have no clear awareness of their traumatic history until they get into therapy. At this point, the brain begins to search itself and make important connections between the left and right hemispheres. Over a natural process in therapy, previously existing mental schemas are invoked by trauma victims in a safe, skilled atmosphere eventually affording them to make meaning of sensory fragments, intrusive and disconnected mental images, etc.
The FMSF actually disbanded on December 31, 2019, without explanation. But given the fervor of its proponents, it will serve the mental health community to be aware of the misguided arguments the FMSF have used—just in case it pops up again under a different name. It will also serve the mental health community to know and be able to explain the difference between traumatic and non-traumatic memory capabilities since this is well known in psycho-neuro traumatology circles now. Knowledge is power. Let’s use this knowledge to raise awareness and stop blaming victims and their therapists.
References
Patihis, L. & Pendergrast, M.H. (2019). Reports of recovered memories of abuse in therapy in a large age-representative U.S. national sample: Therapy type and decade comparisons. Clinical Psychological Science, 7(1),3-21.
van der Kolk, B.A., & van der Hart, O. (2019). American imago, 1991 the intrusive past: The processing of ordinary and traumatic memories. Retrieved from www.researchgate.net/publication/338104134 on December 24, 2019.