Revised on March 20, 2005
Millions of adult children, mostly female, have gone into therapy or read a book and then decided they were victims of abuse, usually at the hands of their father or mother. They seem to believe they have simply repressed all memory of such abuse until such a time as they feel they have found a safe place to remember and to tell. Supposedly, that place is the office of some therapist.
Although they may be told by others that their newly constructed beliefs are a delusion and that the real source of their "memories" is their imagination, acting upon suggestions from therapy, pop psychology, and stories of others they have heard, these phony abuse victims continue to believe in their manufactured memories.
It matters not to them that there is no scientific support for what they believe.... or that the founders of the recovered memory movement are fast becoming discredited.
Many of the recovered memory experts are being sued and some of them have already been found guilty of misdiagnosing satanic ritual abuse or multiple personality/DID.
Most notable of these is Dr. Bennett Braun, self-styled expert in MPD/DID diagnosis and treatment and Renee Fredrickson, therapist author who once trained hundreds of therapists in how to retrieve repressed abuse memories.
Dr. Braun settled a malpractice suit which awarded his former patient, Patricia Burgus, $10 million in damages for his gross incompetence which harmed both her and her two sons. Dr. Braun had also diagnosed the two boys as being MPD and kept them hospitalized for a year or more.
Apparently, the hospital administration backed up Dr. Braun in his bizarre endeavor and by the recent comments on public television by his supervisor there, they still take no responsibility for what happened.
Rush Presbyterian hospital in Chicago did pay a large part of the Burgus settlement and has now closed its MPD ward. MPD hospitals in other states have also closed as a result of the Braun malpractice award. Most notable of these being Bethesda in Denver, Colorado. This hospital, over fifty years old, had been used for long term care for those given the label of MPD.
The State of Illinois is now embarked on proceedings to revoke the medical license of Dr. Bennett Braun.
Renee Fredrickson lost a malpractice case brought against her brought by a former patient. She paid $175,000 which was the limit of her malpractice insurance. In May, 1999, the Minnesota Board of Psychology placed severe restrictions on her license. Dr. Fredrickson was also fined $15,000 for 15 violations of ethical regulations for psychological practice.
The Board of Psychology mandated that Dr. Fredrickson must now undergo a series of psychological tests herself to determine if she is mentally fit to practice and if her license should be continued at all. She is also to attend classes in such topics as boundaries and records-keeping which are mandatory in response to areas of deemed insufficiency.
Ms. Fredrickson, who authored one of the landmark books of the recovered memory movement, Repressed Memories is no longer allowed to do therapy involving cults, ritual abuse, or satanic activity. Nor is she allowed to consult on such cases with other practictioners.
A federal grand jury in Houston handed down indictments against two psychiatrists, a psychologist, a hospital administrator, and a therapist. They were charged with using silly and bizzare diagnoses such as SRA and MPD to obtain maximum insurance money and keep patients under therapist control. Psychiatrist Dr. Bennett Braun and Psychologist Dr. Roberta Sachs were named as unindicted coconspirators.
The trial in federal court lasted over six months and resulted in a mistrial. Juror comments reported in the press showed mixed results. Apparently if the trial had gone to its conclusion jurors would have found malpractice but not conspiracy. Not all of the evidence had been presented on the conspiracy charge.
These are points to ponder for those who refuse to heed the warning against the doctrines being taught to them by the psychotherapy cult.
Recovered Memory requires ignoring one's common sense in favor of "expert" opinion. One should think very carefully before accepting unproven theory and opinion as if it were fact.
There is a link between Recovered Memory, Hypnosis, MPD/DID, SRA, UFO Abductions, Amnesia, and Past Lives. All involve deception and therefore should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. Total belief in deceptive doctrine leads one into self-delusion.
The list of delusions could go on to include werewolves, vampires, homosexuality, and thinking one can sin without consequences.
The therapy industry is not reforming itself or requiring its member therapists to adhere to safe or truthful standards of practice. The public is being greatly harmed by therapists who involve their trusting patients in experimental treatments based upon nothing more than unproven theory and opinions.
To their credit, the Minnesota Board of Psychology and the State of Illinois Licensing Board are notable exceptions to the above statement. One wonders what took them so long to react, and where all the consumer protectors are in other states?
Recovered Memory Therapy has not been widely accepted by the scientific community even though it is almost totally accepted by the clinicians who make a very good living from such practice. There is a good reason why RMT has not been accepted by scientists. It is a total fraud and pseudoscience at best.
Philosopher Sir Karl Popper showed that psychological theories such as those by Freud, Adler, and Marx were not in the same category as those of scientist Einstein. He considered them to be only opinion and pseudoscience because there was nothing that could disprove them.
When every outcome becomes proof that a theory is correct, this means to a scientist that the theory is not sound, quite the opposite to what one might think at first. In other words the very fact that so many millions of people believe that they now remember being abused as children after years of not knowing, is evidence that such "memories" are probably false.
The mental health industry has a checkered history of going off track from truth and into harmful misdiagnoses and treatments. Recovered Memory Therapy is certainly not the first example of quackery by this group of professionals.
Remember lobotomy, bleeding the patient, straitjackets, electroshock, insulin shock, malaria infection? Some of these are now making comebacks in today's "anything goes" mental health industry.
Who is minding the store? Not the Congress, not the professional associations, not the legislatures, not most churches, nor the ACLU. A few in the media have spoken out. So have many of the more research-oriented colleagues of the clinical psychologists. Yet their warnings have gone unheeded.
One wonders who really belongs in the asylum? Who is really not dealing with reality? the recovered memory therapists or their patients?
This question which I asked on this page last year is now being answered by the Minnesota Board of Psychology. They have ordered psychological testing of at least one therapist to see if she is mentally competent to do therapy due to her bizarre beliefs which harmed several of her former patients. This wouldn't be so bad except this psychologist is an "expert" and one of the founders of the recovered memory movement. She is also the author of books on this pop psychology creation which has enlisted millions of unsuspecting women into the recovered memory cult of false doctrine.
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Many of these therapists when questioned state that they don't care if their patient's memories are true or not. It only matters to them that their patients believe they are true. These therapists apparently don't see it as their job to dispel delusions in their patients. What then, is their job? Could anything be more important to the health of their patients and to their families?
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When a patient is led to dwell on vile images of rape and incest in her imagination, she will begin to have dreams of such scenarios, perhaps flashbacks, and sensations of "body memories." All of these are due to overtaxing the imagination. Everyone knows that the imagination can play tricks on us at times when we overexercise it.
Continuing to recover ever more vile "memories" or scenes of abuse guarantee that the patient will severely decompensate, become psychotic and helpless, and become overly dependent on the therapist.
This is very dangerous, since the therapist does not admit his/her mistakes and is interested in extracting maximum insurance money. Hospitalization is practically guaranteed, and totally unnecessary if this process of divining for abuse memories had never begun.
Such a process is a prescription for insanity and that is exactly what RMT therapists are offering to their unsuspecting clients. From this point on, the patient's health, relationships, and finances usually deteriorate.
A client totally dependent upon the therapist, when the insurance money runs out and the therapist withdraws his/her "unconditional love," may turn to suicide in anger over the therapist's rejection and abandonment. Of course the therapist will blame the parents as being the cause of both the anger and the patient's death.
The FBI has investigated thousands of claims of SRA and has now concluded that almost all such claims are fabricated or due to suggestive therapy.
We know how normal memory works by experience and it does not involve amnesia nor require therapist assistance.
In real cases of abuse, the more severe the trauma, the more likely one will be unable to forget an event, rather than repressing it as RMT theorizes.
Normal memory is something remembered, not something imagined. Nor does it require going to a therapist for recall. Memory involves remembering, simple forgetting, and then perhaps remembering again when a stimulus triggers that memory.
The judicial system is now saying it wants nothing more to do with recovered memory. Earlier, the courts embarrassed themselves by admitting cases based upon such testimony. It seems the courts also were influenced by the prevailing child abuse hysteria in our culture.
The higher courts are now overturning criminal convictions in case after case. These judges are saying that recovered memory testimony is unreliable and similar to that elicited by hypnosis.
Many personal injury and malpractice cases have been brought against therapists by their former patients who allege that they were encouraged to label imagination and dreams as "memories." These retractors once believed totally in the accuracy of their recovered memories of being horribly abused.
Only after they removed themselves from the influence of their therapists did most of them begin to doubt their recalled memories to the point of seeing that they had been brainwashed by the therapist to believe a pack of lies.
The recovered memory psychologists and psychiatrists are consistently losing these malpractice cases. Several huge monetary awards have been made against formerly renowned mental health "experts" who have now fallen into disrepute for all to see.
Those experts totally discredited include Bennett Braun, Roberta Sachs, Judith Peterson, Gloria Keraga, Renee Fredrickson as well as many others. Being sued are Colin Ross, Lenore Terr, et al.
Therapists losing these malpractice suits continue to deny any responsibility even as the malpractice insurance pays for their faulty judgment and wrongful actions. This is the reason that criminal indictments for therapist malpractice are necessary.
If therapists would simply admit their error and try to help reconcile families instead of breaking them up, they could avoid prison and total disgrace for their involvement in what amounts to quackery. It is their choice and the consequences are due them.
Apparently many therapists are so cock-sure of their own righteousness that they cannot discern their error and so proceed down the path they are trodding, the landscape littered with their product of demolished families, marriages, and patient suicides.
Some therapists grudgingly admit that a few therapists somewhere may have created a few false memories, but admit no personal wrongdoing or error. In their minds it is only a few rotten apples doing bad therapy and not the mainstream of the mental health industry.
They continue to believe in the theory of repression due to trauma and that the FMSF is a band of perpetrators rather than a group of falsely accused parents trying to save their families. Therapists see no need for therapy reform. They are happy as "pigs in slop" as long as the insurance money keeps rolling in.
This is not only unprofessional but extremely dangerous. Apparently the therapists do not realize the harm they are doing to patients and to their falsely accused fathers or mothers. But how is that possible?
It is a serious matter to break up a family. To break up twenty thousand families is a disaster. According to some estimates, over three million families have been affected by the practice of recovered memory therapy which continues to spread worldwide.
Because the established church seems unable to discern the truth about the deception of recovered memory it is unable to help those caught in the delusion, much less assist those falsely accused. This is shameful, tragic, and ungodly.
Many "survivors" use their newly recalled memories to dishonor their father or mother. They disrespect their parents through slander and false accusation. These newly proclaimed "victims" justify their anger, rage, bitterness, and unforgiveness because they feel betrayed by the authorities whom God placed over them.
Dishonoring parents directly contradicts and rejects the word of God in the holy Bible. No exception is given for those who wish to justify their rebellion against authority or parents due to that authority lacking virtue. Since only God can ordain any authority, only God has the right to overthrow any authority.
Those who support rebellion against parental authority set themselves against God and the bible. Napoleon was not a Christian. His men even shot arrows into the wall mural at the face of Jesus in Da Vinci's Last Supper. The damage to that famous painting has now been partially repaired after a twenty year restoration effort ending in 1999.
Napoleon is quoted as saying these very profound words:
"The bible is no ordinary book. All who set themselves against the book will be conquered by the book."
Those who call evil "good" and good "evil," pervert justice and encourage wickedness. Attempting to help others without basing that help on truth does nothing but harm patients and their families. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The group-thought is maintained by cult-approved publications recommended to the members to continue their brainwashing. Those in the cult believe they are more enlightened than the rest of us due to their constant learning of cult and psychotherapy doctrines. They do not realize that they are only deluding themselves further since these doctrines are false. The only reasonable purpose for learning is if what one is learning is absolute truth.
Recovered memory patients are striving to become well. It is tragic that they are led by therapists to a break with reality so that they accept a delusion in the place of truth. This delusion takes them on a journey further from truth and further into deception.
Until truth, reality, and common sense can be restored, their decisions are based upon false beliefs and the doctrines of the group. They cannot allow themselves to consider that the therapist and the entire mental health community has led them and their fellows astray.
It is difficult to determine who is the more deluded, the therapist or the patient. The fantasies become shared delusions in many cases. In others, the therapist is well aware that the stories being told are false, but the money is sooo good.
Those who retrieve memories of abuse consider themselves to be victims. Many react to their new identity of victimhood by blaming the ones to whom they most owe respect. They make scapegoats those who have given them most. Rather than see parents as imperfect people who did their best and made mistakes, therefore needing forgiveness, these people come to see their parents as monsters.
Those who sacrifice for us cause us to experience feelings of guilt over our personal selfishness. A guilty conscience reacts by biting the hand which feeds, so as to relieve the burden of guilt which we cannot carry without painful feelings.
Believing totally in their memories of being done wrong by those who they used to believe had loved and nurtured them, allows the survivor to deny that her father or mother ever loved her.
Today's therapists facilitate this process. John Bradshaw made his fortune doing this. According to him all families are dysfunctional. Could it just be that all family members make mistakes and that forgiving is the only way for any family or marriage to remain intact? Could it even be that John Bradshaw is himself dysfunctional?
A person cannot voluntarily harm one who she believes loves her. She must come to believe that the parent does not love her but intends harm her to be able to do them dirt.
Once this perceived love is denied, or at least determined to be faulty in relation to the therapist's touted "unconditional love," there is no further restraint on doing harm to the father or mother.
The formerly beloved and respected parent can then be attacked as being a monster, perhaps Satan, or being a cancer on the family and on society who can be deemed unworthy of love, respect, or fair treatment.
The true former relationship is forgotten and replaced by an imagined scenario based upon therapist suggestion and brainwashing. The real "conditional love" of the parent is replaced with the flattery offered by the therapist.
Survivors are often encouraged to seek vengeance against those who they perceive to have hurt them. Forgiveness is the only way to restore relationship between family members. Time doesn't help the process but only makes it harder.
Forgive now!
Go to the one who has harmed you and tell him that YOU are sorry for your part in the fiasco.
This doesn't feel natural and seems to let abusers off the hook but is the way the bible prescribes to be right with one's neighbor and to be right with God. The bible says one must do this if his prayers are to be effective and unhindered.
No one will sacrifice for a child as a parent will when the chips are down. The therapist is only there as long as you keep paying for his interest and friendship. Parents love you even when you cost them money. They may complain but they still love you and their love is not empty flattery so as to obtain money.
When accusations are made and parents are not allowed to visit their children or grandchildren or be a part of their lives there are evil consequences. Perfectly normal and loving parents are being denied one of the most basic joys of life. Many looked forward to this time with great expectation.
The grandchildren also are cheated and deprived of attention and education by these sages of experience-based wisdom. All members of the family are damaged by the misguided therapy of recovered memory and its resulting misadventures.
Former believers in recovered memory report that their therapists pressured them to create scenarios of abuse and then use these imagined "memories" to cut off relationship with their parents unnecessarily. Through the process of suggestion and their desperate need for answers as to why their lives had quit working, these patients listened to the wrong counselors.
What they got instead of healing was a nightmare. They endured years of wasted therapy working on phony issues, often psychotic or out of touch with reality, angry, bitter, engaging in destructive acts, with damaged relationships, painful emotions, and increased guilt over their own wrongful actions towards others.
Life is too precious and too short for these tragedies to continue while the therapy industry finds its moral compass and decides to finally confess its error.
When will congress and state legislators come to the aid of the families devastated by a decade of toxic therapy? Do they even care what has been happening?
Thinking on vile events such as rape and incest will not make anyone well or whole, contrary to what the therapist may have told you. It only brings one to the point of despair and to total mental breakdown. Don't subject yourself to such a process.
The bible says not to delve into the past, to always honor your parents{no matter how good a job they have done}, and to think on things that are admirable, true, noble; praiseworthy things of good report, so as to be healed.
When therapists advise you to dwell on vile things instead of honorable things of virtue, they condemn you to illness. When therapists advise you to focus on self, rather than on God and your neighbor, they condemn you to foolish pride, a wrong identity, confusion, and possible insanity.
Confabulations by Eleanor Goldstein
Creating False Memories, Destroying Families
True Stories of False Memories buy the book
Manufacturing Victims by Tana Dineen Review
What the Psychology Industry is Doing to Peoplebuy
Making Monsters by Richard Ofshe buy the book
Victims of Memory by Mark Pendergrast Review
buy the book
The Myth of Repressed Memory by E. Loftus
buy the book
Only God Can Heal a Wounded Heart by Ed Bulkley
Our Home Page
The Pandoras Box of Recovered Memory
Pandoras Box--Page Two
Pandoras Box--Page Three
don't miss any of these--each has unique information
Other interesting pages
Iatrogenic Suicide
The MPD/DID device
Abuse Survivors Syndrome
Recovered Memory Light Factory
Send us email with your comments
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Spectral Evidence by Moira Johnston
Diagnosis for Disaster by Claudette Wassil-Grimm
Beware the Talking Cure by Terence Campbell
Psychotherapy May be Hazardous...
The Unknown Freud by Frederick Crews
The Memory Wars by Frederick Crews
Unauthorized Freud : Doubters Confront a Legend
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Telling the Truth by Lynne V. Cheney Excerpt
Remembering Satan by Lawrence Wright
Ingram Organization buy the book
Talk of the Devil by Richard Guilliatt Review
Satanic Panic by Jeffrey Victor-{winner of Mencken Award}buy the book
Survivor Psychology by Susan Smith Review
buy the book the Dark Side of a Mental Health Mission
Return of the Furies by Underwager and Wakefield
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The Child Abuse Industry by Mary Pride
Bedlam by Joe Sharkey
MPD: Multiple Identities and False Memories
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Satan's Silence by Debbie Nathan buy the book
Lost Daughters by Reinder Van Til buy the book
Searching for Memory by Daniel Schacter Review
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Second Thoughts by Paul Simpson Review buy the book
Suggestions of Abuse by Michael Yapko
Whores of the Court by Margaret A. Hagan
buy the book the Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony
Hoax and Reality: the Bizarre World of MPD
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Psychology Astray : Fallacies in Studies of Repressed Memory and Childhood Trauma by Harrison G. Pope, Jr.
Jeopardy in the Courtroom : A Scientific Analysis of Children's Testimony by Stephen J. Ceci, Maggie Bruck
A Dose of Sanity : Mind, Medicine, and Misdiagnosis
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House of Cards : Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth by Robyn M. Dawes
Recovered Memories and False Memories (Debates in Psychology) by Martin A. Conway
Hypnosis and false memories : how false memories are created by Ronald L. Stephens
The Emperor's New Clothes/the Naked Truth About the New Psychology by William Kirk Kilpatrick
The Useful Lie by William L. Playfair
The End of Sanity : Social and Cultural Madness in America
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Witch Hunt : A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justice by Kathryn Lyon
Smiling Through Tears
by Pamela Freyd and Eleanor Goldstein buy the book
Vile Suggestion, Vain Imagination, and Strong Delusion
Shining the Light on the Recovered Memory Cult