Most old folks (like me!) remember the day care center sexual abuse trials (e.g., McMartin) of the 1980s and 1990s and the “Remembering Satan” New Yorker magazine article by Lawrence Wright about recovered memories, e.g., of animal and human sacrifices. To the best of my knowledge, My Lie: A True Story of False Memory
, is the only book by a person (Meredith Maran) who, with the aid of therapists, recovered memories of abuse and subsequently decided that those memories were false.
It is an interesting book for anyone whose memories are beginning to get a little fuzzy. My main memory defect is that I have difficulty remembering whether or not I’ve seen movies from the 1980s. Did I just read a detailed review of the movie or did I actually see it? When I hear about the title and a quick plot summary it seems familiar but I’m not sure if the familiarity comes from seeing the movie.
The author was married to a man and the mother of two children when she decided that she wanted a divorce, was in love with a woman, and that her father had sexually abused her. Her accusations against her family caused a lot of family strife and her children lost out on eight years of a relationship with their grandfather.
Why is that anyone would want to claim that he or she was sexually abused? Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist at University of Washington, explained it to the author:
“Seriously,” she continued, “people always look for an explanation for their dysfunctional thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Retractors like you came up with a good one. A colleague of mine called it ‘A-B-C’:“C: you’re crazy. No one likes that explanation for their behavior, so they go on to B. “B: you’re a bad person. No one wants that, either. “A: you were abused, so nothing is your fault. Needless to say, that’s the most popular explanation.”
Loftus described a plaintiff in a sexual abuse case:
“I can’t tell you what happened in Jennifer’s situation,” Loftus said, “but I don’t think she repressed and recovered it. Jennifer has gotten a lot of rewards for being a sex-abuse survivor. It’s her whole career now.”
Out hiking with a female friend, Maran describes the typical path to becoming an abuse rememberer:
“You started having strange dreams, crying jags, trouble with sex,” I went on. “You were seeing a therapist two or three times a week. Finally you remembered that your father had molested you.” “How did you know that?” Joanne asked. “I haven’t talked about it for fifteen years.”
Modern therapists who attributed problems to childhood sexual abuse were working within a tradition started in the 19th Century:
On April 21, 1896, forty-year-old Sigmund Freud delivered his first major address, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” to the Vienna Society for Psychiatry and Neurology. In it he reported that more than a dozen of his patients were suffering from a strange array of symptoms: nervousness, insomnia, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and “a tendency to cause trouble.”
Even the retraction of sexual abuse claim is an old tradition:
In 1933, Freud went public with the retraction that would alter the course of psychotherapeutic history—and would silence incest victims for generations to come. “Almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father,” he wrote. “I was driven to recognize in the end that these reports were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical symptoms were derived from phantasy and not real occurrences.”
Abuse claims were back in fashion by 1980:
Michelle Remembers was coauthored by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith, the patient who later became his wife. The book introduced a new phrase into the lexicon: satanic ritual abuse. During the course of six hundred hypnosis sessions, Pazder wrote, he’d helped Smith remember the satanic rituals she was forced to attend as a child.
Statistical studies were less dramatic:
A new national study . . . examined substantiated cases of sexual abuse involving 1,639 children at 270 day care facilities across the country. The researchers estimated that for every 10,000 children enrolled at the centers, 5.5 were sexually abused each year. By contrast they calculated that for every 10,000 preschool children, 8.9 were sexually abused in their homes each year, based on confirmed cases reported to the Government. (New York Times 1988)
Maran’s personal path started with a job:
One of them knew someone who knew someone who knew that a hero of mine, whom I’ll call Dr. Roselyn Taylor, was looking for a freelance editor. Taylor had founded several feminist organizations and had authored an armful of feminist books. Her antimisogynist antics had earned her a special place in my own Hall of Feminist Fame.
Roselyn’s house was easy to find. The car in her driveway was a bumper-stickered homage to contemporary feminism. Women Unite to Take Back the Night. Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. Porn Tells Lies About Women. I’d Rather Be Destroying Pornography. Pornography Violates My Civil Rights.
“More than one-third of American women were sexually abused as children,” Roselyn told me. I gulped, thinking of my beautiful five-year-old niece. “Thirty-eight percent, to be precise,” Roselyn said. “But the most commonly cited study still claims that incest only happens in one percent of the population.”
Maran sees a therapist regularly:
I brought my journal to my individual therapy with Angela and read her my latest incest dreams. When I finished she was perched on the edge of her seat, regarding me with the business end of her eyes. “What do you make of those dreams?” she asked. “I think I’m reading too many headlines. Watching too much TV”
“There could be an entirely different explanation,” Angela said.
Maran’s former husband facilitates Maran’s new life in Oakland, California: “My ex-husband bought me out of our San Jose house to cover the other half.” and then the guy moves there so as to be close to their children.
Maran finds her soulmate:
And so, although our relationship felt like a miracle to me—what were the odds I’d meet a lesbian who gave me the passion and intimacy I’d ached for in my marriage, a woman who loved my children as intensely as she loved me—Jane and I saw a lesbian-affirmative couple’s counselor once a week. “The issue between you two isn’t power,” the therapist said, looking from one of us to the other. “It’s trust.” “I’m an incest survivor,” Jane said. The therapist nodded, as if that explained everything, which I supposed it did. My turn. What to say? “I had an unhappy childhood,” I said.
And being in the Bay Area makes it easy to find other like-minded individuals:
In our last co-counseling class, Kathy instructed each of us to choose one of our classmates as our long-term counseling partner. Thank goddess, there was one person in the group whom I’d come to like and respect. Catherine and I had so much in common; there couldn’t have been a better-matched co-counseling couple than we two. Catherine and I were both in our late thirties, both moms, both in tumultuous relationships with women. Incredibly, both of us were journalists specializing in sexual abuse. …
“I’ll say.” Catherine laughed mirthlessly. “I can’t believe I joined a therapy cult to deal with the fallout from reporting on satanic cults.” She sighed. “When I was working on a feminist film project in L.A. last year,” she said, “the crew was kind of cultish, too. They were all incest survivors, and they’re the ones who got me thinking I’m one too.” “Sometimes I think that’s all life is,” Catherine said. “Trading in one belief system, one cult, for the next.”
Maran describes how co-counseling worked
“My father hurt me,” [Catherine] sobbed.
“Yes,” I said, validating her feelings. “He did.”
When it was my turn, I read her the list I’d been keeping. WHAT MAKES ME THINK I WAS MOLESTED 1. Croup – age 18 months – holding my breath til I turned blue; deciding whether to live or die 2. Nosebleeds – ages 4 on? – waking up in the night with blood everywhere 3. Constant nightmares and insomnia – always. The dream: a monster is in my bedroom, I run for the door, my feet are stuck to the floor, a scream is stuck in my throat… 23. He married a woman my age. 24. He had a terrible sexual relationship with and hated my mother. 25. The dreams
Maran’s partner spends a lot of time with paid therapists:
Jane added Rosen bodywork to her therapy schedule. She was seeing her individual therapist on Mondays, our couple’s counselor with me on Tuesdays, and her Rosen bodyworker on Thursdays. I’d asked Jane whether it was worth the two hundred bucks a week. She’d answered categorically. She couldn’t function without therapy, she said, so how would she earn a living if she stopped? “I can barely function even with it,” she’d said. I didn’t dare say so, but all that therapy didn’t seem to be helping. Jane was more fearful, more easily “triggered” than ever. Everything “brought up her memories” of being molested: a tiny earthquake, a fender-bender, Matthew and Charlie growing taller.
Maran’s mother expresses skepticism: ““Your father had his failings. But there’s no way he could have done something like that to you.” Maran’s answer?
I drove back across San Francisco Bay, back to Planet Incest, where the question was always incest and the answer was always incest and the explanation for everything was always incest, and no one ever asked, “Are you sure?”
Maran tries to kick the habit:
When Catherine moved to D.C., I put incest into a box and locked it and threw away the key. I stopped writing incest articles and reading incest books and writing in my incest journal and hanging out with incest survivors exclusively. I quit therapy cold turkey, got a regular job at a local firm, writing fundraising letters for nonprofits. I started doing regular things with regular people: shopping with old and new friends, cheerful friends; going out for drinks after work and to movies that made me laugh instead of cry. I sang along to Michael Jackson instead of the achy, angry wimmin’s music of Ferron and Holly Near. It worked—for me. No more incest dreams, no more sleepless nights, no more crippling depression—for me. There was just one thing about Planet Incest that I couldn’t avoid: my lover was still living there. As my nightmares and memories receded, Jane’s were becoming more graphic and disturbing. She upped her appointments with her incest therapist to two, three, sometimes four sessions a week.
The result of this extra therapy?
Shaking in my arms, Jane remembered being raped before she was five years old. She remembered men and women standing around a campfire in a forest, chanting in a strange language, wearing dark robes. She remembered them digging a deep hole. They might have killed a baby, she told me in a child’s tremulous voice, and buried it in the hole.
The way back for Maran turned out to involve therapy:
“I want to make up with my father,” I said. I was lying on Miranda’s table, face up, eyes closed, her hands cradling my head from behind. “Your body agrees with that,” Miranda murmured in that Rosen bodywork voice of hers.
The partner moves out:
Dust bunnies blew across the floor, tumbleweeds in a deserted Western-movie town. Her bed was gone, her dressers, her clothes. Her collections of incest books and lesbian anthologies and the gay-parenting book we’d written together.
The family regroups.
When you accused Stan of abusing you,” Gloria [the stepmother] interjected, “I started looking at him with totally different eyes. I couldn’t sleep at night. I thought, ‘Am I lying here next to a child molester?’ ” She gazed at me intently. “I almost left my husband,” she said. “I know,” I said, remembering our
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, by one of our most readable historians, Nathaniel Philbrick. I’m still working on the background section, but it is interesting to see how Massachusetts political sentiments have changed in the past couple of centuries and also how the professional historian’s view differs from what we learned in K-12 American history.
(highly recommended!) you’ll probably like this book.
or in a bike seat.
