More than 20 years ago, Meredith Maran falsely accused her father of molestation. That she came to believe such a thing was possible reveals what can happen when personal turmoil meets a powerful social movement. In her book “My Lie: A True Story of False Memory”, Meridith recounts the 1980s feminist-inspired campaign to expose molestation, which hit feverish levels in 1988 with a "Do it Yourself Therapy Book." As an early reporter on the story, Maran observed family therapy sessions, interviewed molesters and steeped herself in cases where abuse clearly took place. Maran began having nightmares about her own molestation and soon what had been a contentious relationship with her father turned into accusations of unspeakable crimes. Eventually, she came to realize the truth. She was the person who had done wrong.
Meredith: In 2007, I was out for a walk with someone I wasn’t even that close to. She asked me if I’d ever done anything I was ashamed of and had never forgiven myself for. And without hesitation I said, yeah, when I was in my 30s I accused my father of molesting me, and then I realized it wasn’t true. She stopped walking and stood still, just staring at me and she said, “The same exact thing happened to me.” When I came home from that hike I started calling people I had known back then and speaking to some of the therapists I had seen during that period. With the exception of my ex-lover, every other person I talked to who had accused her father in the ’80s and early ’90s now believed she had been wrong. Being a journalist, you realize there’s a story
For a reader new to your story, and perhaps even the recovered memory craze of the 1980s, can you explain briefly what happened to you?
Meridith: During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans — most of them middle-class, 30-something women in big cities, like me — became convinced that they’d repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy.
In the years leading up to that mass panic, I was working as a feminist journalist, writing exposés of child sexual abuse, trying to convince the world that incest was more than a one-in-a-million occurrence. In the process, I convinced myself that my father had molested me. After five years of incest nightmares and incest workshops and incest therapy, I accused my father, estranging myself and my sons from him for the next eight years.
In the early 1990s the culture flipped, and so did I. Across the country, falsely accused fathers were suing their daughters’ incest therapists. Falsely accused molesters were being freed from jail — and I realized that my accusation was false. I was one of the lucky ones. My father was still alive, and he forgave me.
Why write this book now?
Meredith: In 2007, I was out for a walk with someone I wasn’t even that close to. She asked me if I’d ever done anything I was ashamed of and had never forgiven myself for. And without hesitation I said, yeah, when I was in my 30s I accused my father of molesting me, and then I realized it wasn’t true. She stopped walking and stood still, just staring at me and she said, “The same exact thing happened to me.” When I came home from that hike I started calling people I had known back then and speaking to some of the therapists I had seen during that period. With the exception of my ex-lover, every other person I talked to who had accused her father in the ’80s and early ’90s now believed she had been wrong. Being a journalist, you realize there’s a story there.
There’s an interesting arc in the book. As reports of molestation increase, you begin to believe you too were molested. And as reports of false memory increase, you realize that you were not, in fact, molested.
It’s a little embarrassing for a person who’s always been thought of as a critical thinker. There’s a lot about writing this book and putting it out there that’s embarrassing. It’s not exactly the most flattering portrait. I think if it were a novel my editor would have rejected it, because the protagonist wasn’t sympathetic enough. It really shocked me, I must say, to see how much influence the external had on the internal. That the most intimate emotions and relationships can be so affected by the dominant paradigm.
There were no legal implications in your case, and you never directly confronted your father. Would it have sped the process toward realizing the truth had you talked to him directly?
Meredith: I was pretty terrified by my father. People ask, “What did your father say when you confronted him?” Well, I never confronted him. I withdrew from him, and I spent years sort of patching together this story and lining up the evidence.
Including a regular set of dreams that pointed to being molested. I wonder if you ascribe any meaning to those dreams now?
I felt a little stupid when I started interviewing the neuroscientists about how I could be dreaming something if it never happened. One of the doctors basically said, duh, a dream is a dream. It’s not reality. It’s not like something had to happen in actuality for you to dream about it, as those of us who like to dream about flying during dry sexual periods have experienced. But when I dreamed over and over about my father’s hands, and all around me people were losing their heads and blaming it on incest, I said, oh, see, I’m dreaming about my father’s hands. Obviously he molested me. It was just a few links that were a little extreme.
On the other end of the story, was there a moment when you could say, I have decided it did not happen?
Meredith: That too went on for years, just like the process of deciding that he had. But when I stopped believing, it was a little more dramatic, during the breakup with my incest survivor lover (Note: Meredith became lesbian after a broken marriage). Over time, I had been less and less able to believe her stories, which progressed from incest with a slightly older relative to satanic ritual abuse, to the extent where I thought she was becoming defined as an incest survivor. I knew I couldn’t say I don’t believe her without examining my own beliefs just because her story is crazier. To my family, my story is pretty crazy too. When she left me, that was the break I needed to realize it was not true.
There is this amazing scene in the book when your father calls after you’ve sent him a birthday card for the first time in years and you recall that you sort of floated to the ceiling and could look down at yourself. And you hear your therapist say floating to the ceiling is what little girls do when they’re molested. Can you tell me a little bit more about what happened to you that day?
That was a really good example of mind control, of brainwashing, that I had been so steeped in the symptomatology of incest survivors. How do you know it’s true and what happens to little girls when they’ve been molested? All that stuff had gone into my head. That is a symptom of mass hysteria. I was actually transposing what I had heard from these little girls into my own psyche. When I heard my father’s voice, I just went there.
Because the writing is so direct in that passage, I have to ask, what really happened?
Meredith: Well, you know that feeling when you hear a voice you didn’t expect to hear, that means a lot to you, and you feel weak-kneed? It was more like that. It was such an intense experience coming over my body.
At one point in the book you say, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be completely sure of anything again.” But at the end of the book it seems clear that you have become as sure as possible that nothing happened. That’s where it stands, right?
Yes. Not that I check my Amazon page or anything, but there have been some early comments that say I leave some room for doubt. That wasn’t my intention.
An important catalyst for you and many women who later recanted was reading the book “Do it Yourself Therapy” What’s your opinion of that book today?
I feel mixed. The two women who put the book out are people I know. I have great respect for each of them as human beings and I think their intentions were nothing but the best. I happen to know them well enough to know that no publisher called them up and said, “If you will just make these really deceptive lists of symptoms and if you will write phrases like, ‘If you think it happened, it happened,’ you will become rich and famous. It’s very hard now to understand the context in which that book was published. So if you take it now and say, how did they ever sell 10 copies of this book, it’s such nonsense, it’s easy to do. The movement that created that book doesn’t exist anymore.
There’s a scene in the book where you meet one of the major detractors of recovered memory, Elizabeth Loftus, and your old defenses return as you talk. It made me wonder if you feel like you betrayed your side.
Meredith: I’m getting letters and responses from people in the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Elizabeth Loftus gave me a blurb. You are so right. That is another example of conditioning. I spent years thinking the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and Elizabeth Loftus in particular, were the devil incarnate. They were cover-uppers of this horrible crime. That’s why I write about finding common ground with Elizabeth in the book, because it was so startling to me.
In the early 1990s the culture flipped, and so did I. Across the country, falsely accused fathers were suing their daughters’ incest therapists. Falsely accused molesters were being freed from jail — and I realized that my accusation was false. I was one of the lucky ones. My father was still alive, and he forgave me.
Excerpts of interview are from:
Meredith: In 2007, I was out for a walk with someone I wasn’t even that close to. She asked me if I’d ever done anything I was ashamed of and had never forgiven myself for. And without hesitation I said, yeah, when I was in my 30s I accused my father of molesting me, and then I realized it wasn’t true. She stopped walking and stood still, just staring at me and she said, “The same exact thing happened to me.” When I came home from that hike I started calling people I had known back then and speaking to some of the therapists I had seen during that period. With the exception of my ex-lover, every other person I talked to who had accused her father in the ’80s and early ’90s now believed she had been wrong. Being a journalist, you realize there’s a story
For a reader new to your story, and perhaps even the recovered memory craze of the 1980s, can you explain briefly what happened to you?
Meridith: During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans — most of them middle-class, 30-something women in big cities, like me — became convinced that they’d repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy.
In the years leading up to that mass panic, I was working as a feminist journalist, writing exposés of child sexual abuse, trying to convince the world that incest was more than a one-in-a-million occurrence. In the process, I convinced myself that my father had molested me. After five years of incest nightmares and incest workshops and incest therapy, I accused my father, estranging myself and my sons from him for the next eight years.
In the early 1990s the culture flipped, and so did I. Across the country, falsely accused fathers were suing their daughters’ incest therapists. Falsely accused molesters were being freed from jail — and I realized that my accusation was false. I was one of the lucky ones. My father was still alive, and he forgave me.
Why write this book now?
Meredith: In 2007, I was out for a walk with someone I wasn’t even that close to. She asked me if I’d ever done anything I was ashamed of and had never forgiven myself for. And without hesitation I said, yeah, when I was in my 30s I accused my father of molesting me, and then I realized it wasn’t true. She stopped walking and stood still, just staring at me and she said, “The same exact thing happened to me.” When I came home from that hike I started calling people I had known back then and speaking to some of the therapists I had seen during that period. With the exception of my ex-lover, every other person I talked to who had accused her father in the ’80s and early ’90s now believed she had been wrong. Being a journalist, you realize there’s a story there.
There’s an interesting arc in the book. As reports of molestation increase, you begin to believe you too were molested. And as reports of false memory increase, you realize that you were not, in fact, molested.
It’s a little embarrassing for a person who’s always been thought of as a critical thinker. There’s a lot about writing this book and putting it out there that’s embarrassing. It’s not exactly the most flattering portrait. I think if it were a novel my editor would have rejected it, because the protagonist wasn’t sympathetic enough. It really shocked me, I must say, to see how much influence the external had on the internal. That the most intimate emotions and relationships can be so affected by the dominant paradigm.
There were no legal implications in your case, and you never directly confronted your father. Would it have sped the process toward realizing the truth had you talked to him directly?
Meredith: I was pretty terrified by my father. People ask, “What did your father say when you confronted him?” Well, I never confronted him. I withdrew from him, and I spent years sort of patching together this story and lining up the evidence.
Including a regular set of dreams that pointed to being molested. I wonder if you ascribe any meaning to those dreams now?
I felt a little stupid when I started interviewing the neuroscientists about how I could be dreaming something if it never happened. One of the doctors basically said, duh, a dream is a dream. It’s not reality. It’s not like something had to happen in actuality for you to dream about it, as those of us who like to dream about flying during dry sexual periods have experienced. But when I dreamed over and over about my father’s hands, and all around me people were losing their heads and blaming it on incest, I said, oh, see, I’m dreaming about my father’s hands. Obviously he molested me. It was just a few links that were a little extreme.
On the other end of the story, was there a moment when you could say, I have decided it did not happen?
Meredith: That too went on for years, just like the process of deciding that he had. But when I stopped believing, it was a little more dramatic, during the breakup with my incest survivor lover (Note: Meredith became lesbian after a broken marriage). Over time, I had been less and less able to believe her stories, which progressed from incest with a slightly older relative to satanic ritual abuse, to the extent where I thought she was becoming defined as an incest survivor. I knew I couldn’t say I don’t believe her without examining my own beliefs just because her story is crazier. To my family, my story is pretty crazy too. When she left me, that was the break I needed to realize it was not true.
There is this amazing scene in the book when your father calls after you’ve sent him a birthday card for the first time in years and you recall that you sort of floated to the ceiling and could look down at yourself. And you hear your therapist say floating to the ceiling is what little girls do when they’re molested. Can you tell me a little bit more about what happened to you that day?
That was a really good example of mind control, of brainwashing, that I had been so steeped in the symptomatology of incest survivors. How do you know it’s true and what happens to little girls when they’ve been molested? All that stuff had gone into my head. That is a symptom of mass hysteria. I was actually transposing what I had heard from these little girls into my own psyche. When I heard my father’s voice, I just went there.
Because the writing is so direct in that passage, I have to ask, what really happened?
Meredith: Well, you know that feeling when you hear a voice you didn’t expect to hear, that means a lot to you, and you feel weak-kneed? It was more like that. It was such an intense experience coming over my body.
At one point in the book you say, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be completely sure of anything again.” But at the end of the book it seems clear that you have become as sure as possible that nothing happened. That’s where it stands, right?
Yes. Not that I check my Amazon page or anything, but there have been some early comments that say I leave some room for doubt. That wasn’t my intention.
An important catalyst for you and many women who later recanted was reading the book “Do it Yourself Therapy” What’s your opinion of that book today?
I feel mixed. The two women who put the book out are people I know. I have great respect for each of them as human beings and I think their intentions were nothing but the best. I happen to know them well enough to know that no publisher called them up and said, “If you will just make these really deceptive lists of symptoms and if you will write phrases like, ‘If you think it happened, it happened,’ you will become rich and famous. It’s very hard now to understand the context in which that book was published. So if you take it now and say, how did they ever sell 10 copies of this book, it’s such nonsense, it’s easy to do. The movement that created that book doesn’t exist anymore.
There’s a scene in the book where you meet one of the major detractors of recovered memory, Elizabeth Loftus, and your old defenses return as you talk. It made me wonder if you feel like you betrayed your side.
Meredith: I’m getting letters and responses from people in the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Elizabeth Loftus gave me a blurb. You are so right. That is another example of conditioning. I spent years thinking the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and Elizabeth Loftus in particular, were the devil incarnate. They were cover-uppers of this horrible crime. That’s why I write about finding common ground with Elizabeth in the book, because it was so startling to me.
In the early 1990s the culture flipped, and so did I. Across the country, falsely accused fathers were suing their daughters’ incest therapists. Falsely accused molesters were being freed from jail — and I realized that my accusation was false. I was one of the lucky ones. My father was still alive, and he forgave me.
Excerpts of interview are from:
www.sfgate.com/books/article/My-Lie-by-Meredith-Maran-3252611.php
http://www.amazon.com/My-Lie-Story-False-Memory/dp/0470502142
http://www.amazon.com/My-Lie-Story-False-Memory/dp/0470502142
NOTE: This retraction is a rare example of integrity and courage. Many live with the false memories their entire lives and rob their children of grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. Losing contact at a time when the children most benefit from that contact.
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WARNING
If you are seeking help for personal struggles and a therapist, counselor or friend says that "recovering childhood memories can help you get better" then IMMEDIATELY get up from your chair (or off the couch), run to the door, open it and flee. Hundreds of thousands have lost families, years of productive living and squandered immense wealth with tragedy inducing therapy that produces horrid false memories, splinters families, isolates the client and is documented to cause decline in mental health.
If you are seeking help for personal struggles and a therapist, counselor or friend says that "recovering childhood memories can help you get better" then IMMEDIATELY get up from your chair (or off the couch), run to the door, open it and flee. Hundreds of thousands have lost families, years of productive living and squandered immense wealth with tragedy inducing therapy that produces horrid false memories, splinters families, isolates the client and is documented to cause decline in mental health.
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ALL Pictures are of life before false memories were recovered.
Happy with our hike overlooking Phoenix
Grace and I while visiting family in New England
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