Pseudomemories: Personal Story: Vicky

Vicky experienced difficulties with her 9 year old son and sought the help of a prayer partner therapist. The therapist thought Recovery of Memories would help overcome a depression and therefore manage her son better. Vicky was hospitalized and had "flashbacks" which detailed "repressed memories" of horrid parental abuse. Over the next six years Vicky was separated from her family, hastened her mother's death with the horrid tales, disrupted her marriage, harmed her children and immersed her entire family in pain and anguish. She now realizes that none of the repressed memories were real.

My name is Vicky.

I’m writing my story so that perhaps it might help one of the families to have some hope or encourage a retractor to come forward. Telling my story to others is also a way for me to heal myself and to make some amends to my family, especially my mother.

I entered therapy in the late fall of 1985 because I was unhappy at the way I was dealing with my son, age 9. I thought he might need some counseling because he had seemed very angry for a young child. I wanted a therapist who could work with both of us. At the same time that I began therapy, I also became aware that I was an Adult Child of an Alcoholic. My therapist was a real leader of this movement attending national conferences and beginning meetings in this area.

Soon the therapy began to focus only on my adult child issues and we did no work with my son. As I described my childhood, my therapist would say things like "being a adult child is like growing up in a concentration camp."

I will agree that my home was quite dysfunctional because in fact my dad was an active alcoholic throughout my childhood. I did indeed have some real memories of some pretty chaotic and scary times. As this "therapy" proceeded to dredge up everything negative about my childhood I began to get very depressed. Clinical depression unfortunately runs in my family and I had previously been treated for it. I began treating my depression with alcohol until I realized that I was drinking every night. I entered a rehab and got sober and have never had a drink since.

My therapist, however, kept me involved in digging up my past. He kept looking for more, more, more! He kept asking me if I had any memories of being sexually abused and I kept saying no. He then began telling me that I had all the symptoms of an incest victim and that the only way out for me was to "recover a memory, relive it and heal from it." I was so depressed and I desperately wanted to feel better. I began to have a series of hospitalizations as I grew more depressed and suicidal. I asked a psychiatrist at one hospital if my psychological testing showed any indication of sexual abuse and he said no. He thought my main issue was my marriage. My outside therapist disagreed and kept pushing. I was finally hospitalized in a women’s program whose main focus was on sexual abuse issues. I still continued not to have memories. I felt like I was flunking therapy. At the hospital, I watched real victims really struggle with their issues. As I look back now I am convinced that there was another woman whose memories were false. I didn’t believe her even then. I began to have periods of severe anxiety and I was told these were probably "body memories" and "flashbacks." I thought this is what I had to do to get better. By now I was diagnosed with PTSD and MPD. The hospital was trying to teach me how to "manage the flashbacks."

When I left the hospital in March of 1989, I still had no memories and I was obsessed with finding one. All my energy was focused on journals, therapy etc. I had to get help taking care of my children and my house. My therapy was my life. When I was not in the therapist’s office, I was thinking about all the time of talking to him. I spoke with him on the phone every night for about 20 minutes.

Finally, I recalled having been given an enema as a child. The therapy became focused on regressing me to an early age around five and reliving the enema over and over again. He tried to convince me that my mother took great pleasure in inflicting this kind of pain on me. He called her a sex addict and sexual pervert. He said my parents were toxic for me and that I should screen all my phone calls and not see them.

This was so painful for me because I really did love my parents. I was incredibly torn between my loyalties to my family and the clutches of this therapist. He had created such a sick dependency that I thought I had to let him know my every move. He also was trying to convince me that an older uncle and my older brother had also molested me.

Twice a week, I would go to therapy and be told the only way to feel better was to relive these memories. He would sit next to me on his couch covering me with a blanket while I, in a regressed, hypnotic state would start to have these "body memories." This therapy continued and I had to be hospitalized six or seven weeks at a time. I’m now convinced that my depression and suicidal were mainly caused by the incredible conflict between wanting to be with my parents and pleasing my therapist.

He had never done this kind of therapy before and he kept telling me how much he was learning from me. By now I knew that I was very special to him especially when he told my "inner child" that she could be his little girl. I would do anything that he wanted me to do to please him and to keep this "nurturing" relationship going.

Everyone around me saw me going "down the tubes" and were really concerned. My brothers actually found out the home address of the therapist and were very tempted to hurt him physically. They were tired of watching me destroy the family. I couldn’t listen to anyone. I was totally "owned" by the therapist.

In the meantime, my mother’s health was deteriorating mainly due to stress. She had idolized me, her only daughter and the pain she was in over this was incredible. I saw my mother in September of 1990 and was shocked at her appearance. I then became acutely aware that I wanted again to be close to her. I started to ask my therapist to help me heal the relationship. It never happened because his own issues got in the way. My mother died in January, 1992 and I never had a chance to tell her how sorry I was. I now have to make my apologies at her grave. You cannot imagine how painful this is.

After her death, I stopped working on my earlier issues and began dealing with my loss and my marriage which was falling apart. I began to slowly wean myself from the therapist. My husband and I had started marriage counseling with another therapist who I began slowly to trust. In the meantime I had been reading the case of Dr. Bean-Bayog and Paul Lozano and heard about pseudo memories. It took me eight more months to finally get clear. I went to see the marriage counselor and sobbed my way through an hour session telling her what I believed now to be the truth.

I then typed my therapist a four-page letter stating what I thought had really happened in our relationship. I also told him I was not going to pay him any more money, although he was claiming that I owed him $3,800. As it was I had paid him out of pocket around $10,000 and I am not a rich woman.

In the meantime I contacted a lawyer who sent him a request for my records. He didn’t reply to either of us for about two months when he sent me a brief note congratulating me for making so much progress in therapy with him and asking for payment.

This past year has been very painful to me as I’ve really begun to acknowledge what I lost as a result of this therapy. I went from being a very productive woman who was raising three children and was serving on a school committee, (I had formed a parent-teacher organization and was quite known and respected in my community) to a dependent depressed, regressed, and suicidal woman.

I’ve lost six and a half years of my life, a chance to have an intimate relationship with my mother, time with my three young children, and my marriage of 21 years. I also was forced to drop out of a graduate program which had only accepted 49 students out of 750 applicants. I have lost so much in terms of self-esteem and confidence. It is amazing to me that this situation could have occurred and wrecked such havoc in my life. I will forever carry the burden of probably hastening my mother’s death and for the grief that I had caused my family.

I hope so much that telling my story will save at least one child-parent relationship. I strongly believe that these stories must be told because I suspect that similar situations have occurred all across the country.

Editor’s Comment: A recurring theme in the reports from retractors is one of the presenting problem going untreated. Instead the therapist switches the patient’s initial concern to that of child abuse. For further reading on this topic:

Campbell, T. W. (1992) Therapeutic relationships and iatrogenic outcomes: The blame-and-change maneuver in psychotherapy.Psychotherapy Vol. 29 Fall 1992 No 1 pp 474-480.

Williams, M.H. (1985) The bait-and-switch tactic in psychotherapy.Psychotherapy, 22, 110-113.

This case was obtained from (3/19/16):

http://www.fmsfonline.org/?qmemories=RetractorsOwnStories#jan98
Pseudonym assigned to personalize reading.

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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Pseudomemories

Saturday, July 4, 2015

Personal Story: Vicky

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