A reader emailed me with concerns about false memory syndrome. This reader is in the same place that I was once and that many of you have been. When your repressed memories start pouring out through flashbacks, they seem unbelievable. You ask yourself if these horrible things could possibly be true because they seem so foreign to you. You don’t want them to be true, and you hope that they aren’t. However, they are so detailed and “warped” that you think that either they must be true or you are just plain “crazy.” At least, that’s what it was like for me.
This healing/flashback process is hard enough, but thanks to the propaganda in the 1990’s about false memory syndrome, many child abuse survivors worry that some unscrupulous person has implanted these memories into their heads. That’s even scarier than the flashbacks being true. You fear that there is something really “wrong” with you and lose the ability to trust yourself.
I am not saying that no unscrupulous therapist has ever implanted false memories into a patient. I cannot fathom why a therapist would do this, but I also cannot fathom why someone would abuse a child. I am not going to get into an unscrupulous therapist’s head. However, I do not buy into false memory syndrome being some sweeping, widespread issue as society was led to believe in the 1990’s. I believe that movement was a way to silence those of us who were recovering child abuse memories that certain members of society did not want recovered or believed.
I have had people email me accusing me of suffering from delusions implanted by a therapist. Here is my response to this ridiculous accusation:
- I did not enter into therapy until after I had already recovered numerous repressed memories, so nobody had access to my head to implant anything.
- My sister recovered many of the same memories even though we have never seen the same therapist.
- If these are all false memories, why is processing them resulting in my getting healthier emotionally instead of more unhealthy?
I also find the accusation of false memory syndrome to be insulting. I am not some weak-minded person who can be that easily manipulated by another person. I mean no offense to anyone who has fallen prey to false memory syndrome. My point is that I have a very strong will, and the thought of me allowing anyone else to implant that many memories into my head is simply ludicrous.
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Blooming Lotus 
I have the same problem with my earliest childhood memories. People refuse to believe that I can remember things that happened before I could crawl. I blame the “blank slate” and “childhood amnesia” theories for that.
I never “recovered” those memories. I always “had” them, if that makes any sense. For some reason, though, I never thought they were worth bringing up. I can verify that they were real, because I can describe every detail of a sweat-shirt my grandmother owned while I was an infant, which blankets were used on me, and where the crib in my grandmother’s house was before she moved it. (The sweatshirt and blanket were ruined before I turned two, and the crib was moved around that time, so there’s no way these were fake memories.)
The strange part is, all of my earliest memories involve my grandmother, yet I barely thought of those specific memories until after she died, and I didn’t bring them up until seven years after her death. I have no idea why…
Maybe as I aged I came to realize that normal grandparents don’t hang motion-sensitive screaming monkey stuffed animals over their infant grandchild’s crib, and they don’t hold elaborate tea-parties to manipulate you into breaking a tea set they happen to hate.
And what’s even stranger is that for all of these memories, there’s no sound attached to them. It’s like somebody turned off all the audio. It could be because I was one, and didn’t really completely understand English yet… But I still know what people were saying. I don’t know.
Does anybody else have this sort of soundless memory?
A lot of mine have no sound too, even later ones. I have a weird relationship to sound though, which I can trace back to the first time I was raped, when I was 3, as I remember
***possible triggers***
looking away from what was happening and screaming and screaming for help and then the crushing realisation that although my mouth was moving no sound was coming out; my lungs were still full to bursting with air but it was like my whole speech system had just frozen with terror. No-one was coming to help me and it was too late.
***end triggers***
I didn’t exactly recover that memory; it’s more that it was always there but I just subconsciously avoided looking at it. All the time I was growing up I hated the sound of my own voice (and wasn’t that keen on other people’s either), and it wasn’t until I faced up to that memory that I realised why; it betrayed me when I needed it most. Actually, I’d forgotten how upsetting I found this specific thing until I typed it out just now, it just makes me want to weep. (This “being betrayed by your own body” thing seems to be a big one for survivors.) I think there could be all kinds of reasons for soundless memories, but I think this is part of it for me. Also when I’m anxious, without meaning to, I tend to hold my breath until it hurts; I think it’s all the same thing.
I used to have soundless memories.Some of my memories still are. The soundtracks were stored separately.
It boggles the mind how deeply the evil (or whatever it is called that these people perpetrate) goes.
Sigh.
Me too! It bothers my mind and heart a great deal!!!!
Ah, false memory syndrome. Another thing that makes me question humanity.
I’ve been told that I have such negative perceptions of the mental health and social services systems, and the therapeutic industry, because at the time all the sh*t really hit the fan for me both feminist therapy and false memory syndrome were in full swing. Not such a good situation for someone with almost no childhood memories abused by a sadistic (and self-labeled feminist) mother.
But as to your post – the timing is interesting. Just the other day I came across an article on the origins of false memory syndrome. Turns out it was an organization started by the mother and father of a woman named Jennifer Freyd who had been raped by her father. It was started with its one and only purpose being to discredit her, and not only to silence her but to destroy her and her career. I found it so hard to read, because Freyd’s mother did things very similar to what mine did: she took to calling up Jennifer’s colleauges at the exact time she was being considered for a full professorship and, well, I’m sure you know the rest.
From that experience she developed a theory about “Betrayal Trauma”. You can find her current bio here: http://dynamic.uoregon.edu/~jjf/
From what I’ve read, almost all of the recent studies have validated that the ‘theory’ of recovered memories is valid, and is considered proven and no longer a contentious issue. Not to say, as Faith mentioned, that false memories couldn’t be planted by someone who is unscrupulous. How? Same way our abusers convinced us they were such wonderful people. But it’s *much* harder to do it than the general public was led to believe.
I really struggled with the idea of FMS for some time, and indeed wrote a post myself on the issue. Therein, I concluded it had to be rubbish because of the incredible detail present in the flashbacks: the path of trickles down the wall, where the branches of the hedge jutted out, the gaps between stones, etc. I don’t understand what the psychological point of such intricacy would be if the memories were incorrect.
I did, mostly, recover the memories after entering therapy; however, we did not discuss my issues of sexual abuse until I had recovered this stuff, so I doubt that my therapist ‘implanted’ these recollections. Like you, Faith, I believe that FMS can happen, but that it’s very uncommon. It strikes me too that the idea of its supposed prevalence was to undermine the genuine accounts of those that had been abused.
This very subject turns my insides out. 😦
I cannot even move forward, I am so frozen by it all. I try, but I cannot, at least not at this point.
Faith mentioned that being accused of having memories ‘planted’ by a therapist as insulting. I agree.
There’s another insulting thing that some survivors have been told: you have these ‘memories’ because you’ve watched pornography.
Interesting comment about the pornography. I always assumed my issues were because I’d been exposed to pornography at an early age, and since pornography was bad then I was bad. Not until my osteopath asked a key question (“What happened next?”) about a puzzling memory did I begin to realize that exposure to pornography was not the problem. Sexual abuse at the hands of my grandfather was the problem. (It is so healing to be able to type that sentence in a safe place! Thank you, Faith!!!)
I recovered parts of a memory of being raped by my father as a young child while I was in therapy. When I say parts, what I actually recovered were the pieces that made it make sense, what I had previously intact were the feelings and some of the sensation. That of course, felt pretty crazy, but I’d had them most of my life.
Almost 20 years later, during a pap test, I saw the physical scarring on my vulva from those rapes.
Brown university has a project where they collect recovered memories which were later corroborated with physical evidence or other witnesses (I think it’s called the memory project). FMS is bullsh!t created by abusers and their accomplices. Just because a person could plant a hypnotic suggestion in, for example a hypnotism stage show to make someone believe something that’s not true, doesn’t mean there’s a widespread plot to implant detailed memories of child sexual abuse by therapists.
If there were going to be such a plot, there would have to be a pretty compelling motive, and I don’t see one. Who would benefit? How would they coordinate secretly training therapists to do it? It’s not logical and just abusers grasping at straws, and exploiting peoples denial about child abuse to protect their interests.
The implanting memories is not as sinister as I think some people believe. Much of it comes from the early work of trauma. Remember that PTSD is only about 30 years old and was thought only to be about combat. There were mistakes made in the early treatment of memories not yet in normal consciousnesses. Reasonable mistakes in hindsight.
Implanted memories can mean suggestions made by the therapist. Lets face it a therapist likely has a pretty good idea they are treating a person with early childhood trauma. It is unethical meaning can lead to law suits for a therapist to “lead” an one including a child.
Part of the issue is one a case gets to court it is to late to follow good investigative procedures.
The therapists prejudice can get in the way. It is still not unusual to read therapist who only see trauma as happening by a caregiver. It is still not unusual for people to write about sexual abuse and only use the pronoun he when referring to an abuser.
I told 6 therapists “Something happened to me in the 4th grade.” non of them lead me or even asked what happened. This is good therapeutic practice now.
My memories come into my consciousnesses may ways. Some are like movies, some a story, some are in gray scale, some are in reverse images some have sound and some start with only sound etc.
There is something used that I call screen memories. This is an implanted memory by a perpetrator to cover and event or long period of time. As an example I had a screen memory of when I was supposed to be in camp. I have another one where a child was killed and I was told I was the one that killed them. I was there I did not kill them. For some reasons these screen memories are easy for me although some perpetrators were mot skilled than others. Police use the same method to manufacture a confession.
And of course there is the sinister aspect of the FMS,
I am MKULTRA. People tell me that I watched to many movies TV. When I tell them I do not watch TV or movies they ask if I read. I do read a lot. Pretty much the just keep looking for a reason to hold onto their delusions out of fear.
I have verified memories of before age 1. These are images of things moved. They are not trauma memories that are verified.
I find it helpful to think in terms of evidence. I was a ski instructor at age 14. I would have a hard time coming up with evidence to establish this. Now say someone wanted to disprove me it would be pretty easy to cast doubt.
my memories are not vivid. but reactions to them are, but i don’t know what i am reacting to. I don’t like it. makes me not believe anything I hear me saying, because I can hear my story telling sometimes.
This is very familiar to me…the way I experience memories. I hear myself, or parts, saying the words and they feel so true and yet false at the same time. I don’t know what to believe. The powerful emotional reactions are very, very real, though.
First thing when I confronted one brother about his abuse, he sent me a FMS book. This was in the mid-nineties, when people were saying ‘you’re just jumping on the bandwagon’, and several celebrities had come out about their sexual abuse. I felt like I was lying or crazy for years.
Most of my memories are of members of my family saying things to me, as if they were RIGHT THERE, in the present. Shouting, screaming, whispering, suggesting, accusing, whatever. I can identify them. My first memories were body ones; screaming and kicking my boyfriend for no reason, crawling around on the floor crying and saying ‘I don’t want too’ for no reason…very hard for me to believe once I recovered from these episodes.
oh jesus, what a horrible thing- to have an abuser actually use the FMS canon in such an abusive way…
I do think FMS is *always* used abusively. I went to a university psych conference, and there was a speaker who is a court expert on FMS. He *sounded* all reasonable and eg put in the caveats that there is abuse, etc, before launching in with the few examples of where FMS has been ‘proven’. At key points in the fluid and pretendingly reasonable speech, he’d make eye contact with me just to see how much I was suffering. Arsehole.
I only revealed abuse in therapy. I only developed PTSD in therapy. But I *always* had the memories (or at least some of them, including the first one), it just took therapy to be able to start processing them.
I do not wish to denigrate anyone’s experiences on this website. I can however say categorically that my own daughters accusation towards me of bring directly involved in her abuse through recovered memories in therapy has to be FMS. I KNOW I did nothing to her, nor EVER allowed anyone else to do anything to her – so where do these memories come from? This has completely devastated our family – I have always had a close, loving relationship with my daughter. In fact, ironically, I was, as usual trying to help and support her by paying for her therapy which started off as couples counselling when her marriage ran into difficulty and quickly turned into something very different.
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For me, usually, my memories of events are usually correct.
But at least once, some facts have been incorrect. Like, I remember, when I first talked about what happened to one guy, I remembered for almost a year after, that he was a ginger. I met him again 2 years later, and he is and was very dark haired. (Although, I can’t still recognize him when I see him)
It makes me quite vulnerable, because my childhood memories of my abuse are much less clear than the event described previously. I’m quite sure they happened, but I can’t describe them very well to anyone (huge caps are also included in there).
My point is, my brain likes to change some unimportant details very much. I don’t think I’d classify that as a false memory, but I always try to keep in mind that everything I remember may not be true.
Hi, Angela.
Sometimes my brain releases memories symbolically. For example, I recovered a flash of being locked in a box with a Russian Nesting Doll and much later recovered being locked in a box with my sister. Both were the same memory, with the doll representing my sister because I was not ready to deal with the memory of my sister.
Also, some flashback dreams will do the same thing. They might swap out particular facts, but the truth is in the feelings and sometimes even what happened. For example, I had the same recurring nightmare for decades. I follow someone I trust into a small room, and the door locks behind me. The trusted person leaves through a second door, which locks as well, leaving me trapped in the small room. This actually happened, but my dreams had different “trusted people” before I was ready to face the “who.” The “what” was dead-on accurate.
– Faith