Olivia had a nervous breakdown and went to counseling with an "American Association of Marriage and Family Counselors" member named Tricia. Tricia arranged for medication, introduced her to "do it yourself therapy" books" and provided suggestive counseling sessions. Soon vivid detailed "repressed memories" emerged and based on the horrid memories she cut off her family. Olivia's older friends challenged her memories. While a camp counselor she had a child (in her care) tell of actual abuse. That 10 year old girl did not "repress" as Olivia had thought she should have. Olivia decided to quit her "recovered memory therapist" (Tricia) and go to another counselor. The new counselor heard that the memories were created in therapy and declined to counsel her. In 1993 she came to the realization that her "repressed memories" never actually happened. She reconnected with her family.
My name is Olivia.
I was the good kid. Everybody liked me. I was very compliant to people's faces. But there were a lot of things sleeping beneath the surface. I completely love my Mom, but she lives out a lot of dreams through me.
The pressure just kept building on me. One day in October of 1991 I just went berserk "I'm sick of being the perfect kid," And I went to bed. I just felt this coldness and started to shake. That was the beginning of my panic attacks.
The family doctor diagnosed me (Olivia McKillop) as clinically depressed. He put me on antidepressants and strongly suggested I receive counseling. My father distrusted the mental health profession, but his friend told him that local therapist Tricia Green had helped his wife through a bad depression, so he relented.
I was looking for a savior. Tricia lived only ten minutes away. I went in, and she had Georgia O'Keefe paintings on the wall, and it was so soothing and nice. I thought, "This is great, I'm going to get better." Tricia is divorced, in her 40s, has a masters in counseling, and is also an artist. She's licensed by the American Association of Marriage and Family Counselors. I told her what I was going through, but I got the feeling she didn't quite believe anything I said. She was after something. At the end of the hour, she said, "Well, Olivia, your prognosis is really good, but it's going to take a lot of time."
She gave me "More Self Help Therapy" by Enola Gay. It was a short little book. I thought, "This is funny. I don't remember telling her about abuse." But I read it from cover to cover, three times that week. Suddenly, I could not wait to go back to counseling. It wasn't so much the book, but her. The atmosphere was so soothing, and I loved the attention Tricia gave me.
I made sure I looked really nice the next week. I wanted to please her. The second session, she grilled me about my Dad and my older brother Jerry. She asked all these questions, but I never knew what she wanted. She never seemed to believe me, no matter what I answered. "Is he nice to your Mom? How does he treat Jerry? What would you say his typical day is? Olivia, would you say that your Dad is a very angry man?" I'd say, "Yeah," just to agree. Gradually, I began to see my family as really abusive and dysfunctional.
She asked me to bring in pictures of myself as a child. I poured over our family photo albums, and we worked from these pictures. I looked kind of sad in one. I said, "Oh, I hated wearing that sweater." And she said, "Oh, really?" as if she didn't believe that was all there was to it.
Then she made me visualize a safe place. It was like a ring, and I would lie down in the middle of it. She'd talk me through guided imagery, with this really soothing voice. "Now just imagine that you're this little girl in the white sweater. Imagine you're a helpless, vulnerable, defenseless little girl." I had told her how I used to go to a day care and lie under the piano, staring up at it. So she took me back to that scene. I was totally seeing all of this as she said it. "Are you scared?" she asked, and I found that I was. "Do you see somebody?" I saw this piano repair man. "Does he come and sit by you?"
And then suddenly I visualized him lying on top of me. Tricia was really silent at this point, letting me live this scene. Then I opened my eyes and screamed, "Stop! Stop! I want out of this." Tricia was calm, really calm, and she was smiling. I grabbed my stuff. I was hyperventilating. She said, "If you need to stay here a minute and settle down, that's fine. But I have another client coming." As I walked out the door, she said, "You're probably going to feel self-destructive, because flashbacks are really hard. So call me any time." I went straight out and bought another "Do it Yourself Therapy Book", which she'd told me to do.
That night, after everyone was asleep, I got up, went to the kitchen, and took out this knife. I started cutting myself up on my arms. I was very calm. I just cut and cut and cut, lots of little cuts. Then I put the knife away, cleaned everything up, and just stared at my blood. I liked it! It was so weird. I went to my room and stayed up all night.
I gobbled up the stories in "The Courage to do Self Help Therapy"—just read it, read it and read it." The phrase kept coming back, "If your life shows the symptoms and you don't remember it, you were still abused." I just lived with that phrase. And I bought Secret Survivors and Covert Incest and a bunch of other recovery books, too. I read them all.
By the time I went for my next appointment, I was an Incest Survivor, and there was no turning back. I did this drawing exercise with my left hand, showing what I felt like as a little girl. At this point, I wanted Tricia's approval. I wanted her to help me so bad. Sometimes I would exaggerate or even lie. My parents were turning into these monsters of dysfunction. I started to believe my Dad was an alcoholic and Mom was codependent and neurotic. Tricia wanted me to talk to my sister Casey, who's four years older than me, to form a liaison with her, but I resisted that.
Eventually, I came to believe that six men had abused me, including my grandfather, Dad, and my brother Jerry. Tricia would take a real incident and help me turn it into something awful. "Olivia, remember when you and your brother were fighting downstairs," she said during one guided imagery session. "He throws you up against the wall. What are you doing?" "I'm screaming back at him. Now I'm on the ground." "Is he on the ground, too?" I said, "Oh my God, we're rolling around on the ground together!" And then I saw him raping me. That night I went home and cut all my long, curly hair off, my pride and joy. I think I wanted to punish myself for thinking this about my brother.
I stayed in therapy once or twice a week for six months. I deferred college, gave up a potential music scholarship, and moved out of my parents' house on Tricia's advice. I went to be a live-in Nanny. I began to tell my friends that I had been abused, but I didn't confront my family. "You stay away from people who don't believe you!" Tricia told me. "Those people aren't worthy of you!"
[That fall of 1992, a friend got Olivia to go on a six-month Mission Quest program for young people. After extensive training, she volunteered in Central America with her group, but she continued to conduct weekly phone sessions with Tricia. After a near-rape by a Latino, Olivia told her group leader Fran, "I'm so afraid I'm going to have nightmares now and remember much more abuse now."]
Fran just stopped and said, "Olivia, you were not sexually abused." I said, "What?" I was livid. She said, "I'm sorry, but at the risk of you hating me, I have to say this. I've listened to you for the last four months, and I just don't believe it. You're the product of bad counseling. This woman Tricia is a psycho. It kills me to watch it. Every time you call her, you're worse the next day. I can't continue and not tell you the truth. Get out of it."
I didn't believe her, but this seed of doubt was planted. I thought, "Olivia, look at how much better you are. Look at your life. You're so much better than when you were in therapy." I said to myself, "Hey, I was a pretty happy person before." I wished for that peace again. This was a few days before my 19th birthday. I looked back at my past year, and it was just gone, wasted.
At the end of March, 1992, I came back home. I was different, really softened. My depression was gone. I came in the house and saw my family there in the living room by the fire, and I really saw them as this treasure. My God, after a year of being in this daze, I really saw them again. I thought, "I don't want to go back to Tricia. I don't want my family to turn into these horrible people any more." So I called her up that night and told her. She was really okay about it. She said, "Olivia, promise me that you'll continue to work on this, and if you need to come back, come see me. But get into a support group."
By this time, I was accepted to a few colleges. But I realized that my relationship with my parents was still just like ice. So I decided to go back into therapy again. I was having nightmares about the man who assaulted me in Central America. At first, I went to see a male therapist, but when I told him about my repressed memories, he said, "Let me get this straight. You didn't remember anything at all until you went into therapy?" When I told him that was right, he said, "I'm sorry, I can't take you as my client. I can't work from that basis." I was so pissed. He had a woman associate, so I saw her. On her advice, I bought "Do it Yourself Therapy" Workbook, and we started working more on my memories of my grandfather. I started getting nervous again, starving myself again. I started slipping back. I couldn't afford the $85 sessions, though, so I stopped. But I was still doing the workbook and telling people I was a Survivor, even though some of my oldest friends were confronting me about it, saying "That didn't happen to you."
Finally, what really turned me around was an experience that summer, when I was a camp counselor. I was in a boat on the pond with this beautiful, sweet, sad little ten-year-old girl. She was really quiet and shy and never dressed in front of anyone. She said, "Counselor, my Daddy is doing something bad to me, when he sleeps with me in my bed." I turned around and looked at her, and I started to cry. And I thought to myself, "My Dad did not rape me." I was not like this child. She remembered. She always remembered. So we reported what she said to the authorities.
[Even after the camp experience, however, Olivia continued to waver. "The hold these therapists can have over you, it's so bizarre," she observes. She discovered the FMS Foundation, but she still hadn't rid herself of her "memories."]
In the fall of 1993, when I was a freshman in college, I was crying one day about this whole mess. A male friend who knew my story said, "Tricia still has a hold on your life. Can you say out loud, ‘I was not sexually abused’?" So I said the words out loud, then again, then screamed them in the middle of my dorm, three or four times. It was a liberating moment. After that, I wrote Tricia a letter and told her the same thing. In a ceremony, I ripped up and burned my copy of "Do it Yourself Therapy".
My Dad is an amazing man, and he is really trying to rebuild a relationship with me. And I love my brother to death. But I still have nightmares from these "flashbacks." Sometimes I still say to myself, "Maybe something happened," just to give myself some peace. It's like security, like your savior. It's like coming out of a cult. Something so powerful doesn't just disappear.
Looking back, what makes me the angriest is how Tricia turned me into this pathetic victim. When that man nearly raped me, I froze, and all I could hear was Tricia saying, "You're a helpless, vulnerable, defenseless little girl." She practically told me that I would be revictimized because of what had happened to me, and she led me into cutting myself. Also, I think she had kind of a sick relationship with me. She said I reminded her of her daughter. She kept my picture on her desk and my poetry by her bed. She gave me these long hugs.
Before therapy, I was always a strong person who could stick up for myself. I grew up in a good family. I'm bright. I'm the kid next door. If this could happen to me, it could happen to anyone.
Something that has been really difficult for me is realizing that my relationship with my father will never be the same. I can feel it. I'm not the same person to him, and I know that's hard for him. We're adults now. I don't need him like I did as a little girl. It's different now. He's Harry, not Dad. I mean, he'll always be my dad, but it's not the same. The whole natural process of breaking away from parents and coming of age was sped up and distorted. I came of age by turning into an incest survivor. Yeah, I had to break away from my parents, but it shouldn't have been out of fear and hate.
The pressure just kept building on me. One day in October of 1991 I just went berserk "I'm sick of being the perfect kid," And I went to bed. I just felt this coldness and started to shake. That was the beginning of my panic attacks.
The family doctor diagnosed me (Olivia McKillop) as clinically depressed. He put me on antidepressants and strongly suggested I receive counseling. My father distrusted the mental health profession, but his friend told him that local therapist Tricia Green had helped his wife through a bad depression, so he relented.
I was looking for a savior. Tricia lived only ten minutes away. I went in, and she had Georgia O'Keefe paintings on the wall, and it was so soothing and nice. I thought, "This is great, I'm going to get better." Tricia is divorced, in her 40s, has a masters in counseling, and is also an artist. She's licensed by the American Association of Marriage and Family Counselors. I told her what I was going through, but I got the feeling she didn't quite believe anything I said. She was after something. At the end of the hour, she said, "Well, Olivia, your prognosis is really good, but it's going to take a lot of time."
She gave me "More Self Help Therapy" by Enola Gay. It was a short little book. I thought, "This is funny. I don't remember telling her about abuse." But I read it from cover to cover, three times that week. Suddenly, I could not wait to go back to counseling. It wasn't so much the book, but her. The atmosphere was so soothing, and I loved the attention Tricia gave me.
I made sure I looked really nice the next week. I wanted to please her. The second session, she grilled me about my Dad and my older brother Jerry. She asked all these questions, but I never knew what she wanted. She never seemed to believe me, no matter what I answered. "Is he nice to your Mom? How does he treat Jerry? What would you say his typical day is? Olivia, would you say that your Dad is a very angry man?" I'd say, "Yeah," just to agree. Gradually, I began to see my family as really abusive and dysfunctional.
She asked me to bring in pictures of myself as a child. I poured over our family photo albums, and we worked from these pictures. I looked kind of sad in one. I said, "Oh, I hated wearing that sweater." And she said, "Oh, really?" as if she didn't believe that was all there was to it.
Then she made me visualize a safe place. It was like a ring, and I would lie down in the middle of it. She'd talk me through guided imagery, with this really soothing voice. "Now just imagine that you're this little girl in the white sweater. Imagine you're a helpless, vulnerable, defenseless little girl." I had told her how I used to go to a day care and lie under the piano, staring up at it. So she took me back to that scene. I was totally seeing all of this as she said it. "Are you scared?" she asked, and I found that I was. "Do you see somebody?" I saw this piano repair man. "Does he come and sit by you?"
And then suddenly I visualized him lying on top of me. Tricia was really silent at this point, letting me live this scene. Then I opened my eyes and screamed, "Stop! Stop! I want out of this." Tricia was calm, really calm, and she was smiling. I grabbed my stuff. I was hyperventilating. She said, "If you need to stay here a minute and settle down, that's fine. But I have another client coming." As I walked out the door, she said, "You're probably going to feel self-destructive, because flashbacks are really hard. So call me any time." I went straight out and bought another "Do it Yourself Therapy Book", which she'd told me to do.
That night, after everyone was asleep, I got up, went to the kitchen, and took out this knife. I started cutting myself up on my arms. I was very calm. I just cut and cut and cut, lots of little cuts. Then I put the knife away, cleaned everything up, and just stared at my blood. I liked it! It was so weird. I went to my room and stayed up all night.
I gobbled up the stories in "The Courage to do Self Help Therapy"—just read it, read it and read it." The phrase kept coming back, "If your life shows the symptoms and you don't remember it, you were still abused." I just lived with that phrase. And I bought Secret Survivors and Covert Incest and a bunch of other recovery books, too. I read them all.
By the time I went for my next appointment, I was an Incest Survivor, and there was no turning back. I did this drawing exercise with my left hand, showing what I felt like as a little girl. At this point, I wanted Tricia's approval. I wanted her to help me so bad. Sometimes I would exaggerate or even lie. My parents were turning into these monsters of dysfunction. I started to believe my Dad was an alcoholic and Mom was codependent and neurotic. Tricia wanted me to talk to my sister Casey, who's four years older than me, to form a liaison with her, but I resisted that.
Eventually, I came to believe that six men had abused me, including my grandfather, Dad, and my brother Jerry. Tricia would take a real incident and help me turn it into something awful. "Olivia, remember when you and your brother were fighting downstairs," she said during one guided imagery session. "He throws you up against the wall. What are you doing?" "I'm screaming back at him. Now I'm on the ground." "Is he on the ground, too?" I said, "Oh my God, we're rolling around on the ground together!" And then I saw him raping me. That night I went home and cut all my long, curly hair off, my pride and joy. I think I wanted to punish myself for thinking this about my brother.
I stayed in therapy once or twice a week for six months. I deferred college, gave up a potential music scholarship, and moved out of my parents' house on Tricia's advice. I went to be a live-in Nanny. I began to tell my friends that I had been abused, but I didn't confront my family. "You stay away from people who don't believe you!" Tricia told me. "Those people aren't worthy of you!"
[That fall of 1992, a friend got Olivia to go on a six-month Mission Quest program for young people. After extensive training, she volunteered in Central America with her group, but she continued to conduct weekly phone sessions with Tricia. After a near-rape by a Latino, Olivia told her group leader Fran, "I'm so afraid I'm going to have nightmares now and remember much more abuse now."]
Fran just stopped and said, "Olivia, you were not sexually abused." I said, "What?" I was livid. She said, "I'm sorry, but at the risk of you hating me, I have to say this. I've listened to you for the last four months, and I just don't believe it. You're the product of bad counseling. This woman Tricia is a psycho. It kills me to watch it. Every time you call her, you're worse the next day. I can't continue and not tell you the truth. Get out of it."
I didn't believe her, but this seed of doubt was planted. I thought, "Olivia, look at how much better you are. Look at your life. You're so much better than when you were in therapy." I said to myself, "Hey, I was a pretty happy person before." I wished for that peace again. This was a few days before my 19th birthday. I looked back at my past year, and it was just gone, wasted.
At the end of March, 1992, I came back home. I was different, really softened. My depression was gone. I came in the house and saw my family there in the living room by the fire, and I really saw them as this treasure. My God, after a year of being in this daze, I really saw them again. I thought, "I don't want to go back to Tricia. I don't want my family to turn into these horrible people any more." So I called her up that night and told her. She was really okay about it. She said, "Olivia, promise me that you'll continue to work on this, and if you need to come back, come see me. But get into a support group."
By this time, I was accepted to a few colleges. But I realized that my relationship with my parents was still just like ice. So I decided to go back into therapy again. I was having nightmares about the man who assaulted me in Central America. At first, I went to see a male therapist, but when I told him about my repressed memories, he said, "Let me get this straight. You didn't remember anything at all until you went into therapy?" When I told him that was right, he said, "I'm sorry, I can't take you as my client. I can't work from that basis." I was so pissed. He had a woman associate, so I saw her. On her advice, I bought "Do it Yourself Therapy" Workbook, and we started working more on my memories of my grandfather. I started getting nervous again, starving myself again. I started slipping back. I couldn't afford the $85 sessions, though, so I stopped. But I was still doing the workbook and telling people I was a Survivor, even though some of my oldest friends were confronting me about it, saying "That didn't happen to you."
Finally, what really turned me around was an experience that summer, when I was a camp counselor. I was in a boat on the pond with this beautiful, sweet, sad little ten-year-old girl. She was really quiet and shy and never dressed in front of anyone. She said, "Counselor, my Daddy is doing something bad to me, when he sleeps with me in my bed." I turned around and looked at her, and I started to cry. And I thought to myself, "My Dad did not rape me." I was not like this child. She remembered. She always remembered. So we reported what she said to the authorities.
[Even after the camp experience, however, Olivia continued to waver. "The hold these therapists can have over you, it's so bizarre," she observes. She discovered the FMS Foundation, but she still hadn't rid herself of her "memories."]
In the fall of 1993, when I was a freshman in college, I was crying one day about this whole mess. A male friend who knew my story said, "Tricia still has a hold on your life. Can you say out loud, ‘I was not sexually abused’?" So I said the words out loud, then again, then screamed them in the middle of my dorm, three or four times. It was a liberating moment. After that, I wrote Tricia a letter and told her the same thing. In a ceremony, I ripped up and burned my copy of "Do it Yourself Therapy".
My Dad is an amazing man, and he is really trying to rebuild a relationship with me. And I love my brother to death. But I still have nightmares from these "flashbacks." Sometimes I still say to myself, "Maybe something happened," just to give myself some peace. It's like security, like your savior. It's like coming out of a cult. Something so powerful doesn't just disappear.
Looking back, what makes me the angriest is how Tricia turned me into this pathetic victim. When that man nearly raped me, I froze, and all I could hear was Tricia saying, "You're a helpless, vulnerable, defenseless little girl." She practically told me that I would be revictimized because of what had happened to me, and she led me into cutting myself. Also, I think she had kind of a sick relationship with me. She said I reminded her of her daughter. She kept my picture on her desk and my poetry by her bed. She gave me these long hugs.
Before therapy, I was always a strong person who could stick up for myself. I grew up in a good family. I'm bright. I'm the kid next door. If this could happen to me, it could happen to anyone.
Something that has been really difficult for me is realizing that my relationship with my father will never be the same. I can feel it. I'm not the same person to him, and I know that's hard for him. We're adults now. I don't need him like I did as a little girl. It's different now. He's Harry, not Dad. I mean, he'll always be my dad, but it's not the same. The whole natural process of breaking away from parents and coming of age was sped up and distorted. I came of age by turning into an incest survivor. Yeah, I had to break away from my parents, but it shouldn't have been out of fear and hate.
This case about Olivia McKillop was obtained from:
http://www.stopbadtherapy.com/retracts/mckillop.shtml
Originally from
Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives, by Mark Pendergrast. Upper Access Books, Hinesburg, Vt. Copyright (c) 1996. All rights reserved. The book is at Amazon.com. My review of this book is on this website as well.
Originally from
Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives, by Mark Pendergrast. Upper Access Books, Hinesburg, Vt. Copyright (c) 1996. All rights reserved. The book is at Amazon.com. My review of this book is on this website as well.
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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