Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives

This book was real help to get out of the Hell my family has been in since falsely accused of abuse. The irresponisible therapists have NO idea the pain they have caused.

I found this book as I was beginning to question my own experiences trying to recover memories of sexual abuse with "Courage to Heal" and the even more irresponsible book "Repressed Memories." Using the exercises in CTH, I had sent myself into a downward spiral of self-absorption, self-pity, and depression that I didn't climb out of until I packed away my copy of CTH and walked away from my therapist.It was only recently that I started to question whether my experiences had any basis whatsoever in some real trauma. I read "Victims of Memory," and what I found particularly striking was how much my experiences mirrored those of the "Retractors" -- men and women who had recovered memories, termed themselves "survivors," and then had finally realized that it was all a lie, the nightmares and terrifying images induced not by past trauma, but by irresponsible therapy and books like CTH.While the other portions of the book were interesting -- Pendergrast's examination of the often-quoted study where various survivors found confirmation of their memories was particularly revealing -- I found the chapter of stories by retractors to be most compelling. This section helped me to realize that my experiences made sense: if you take an otherwise reasonably healthy adult or adolescent and have them focus twenty-four hours a day on their worst thoughts, their most negative feelings, their fears, their insecurities, etc., etc., etc. -- well, ANYONE will start having nightmares, panic attacks, etc. I didn't get better by "working through" the feelings described in CTH; I got better by getting out of therapy and getting on with my life.I don't entirely exclude the possibility that people may repress (or simply forget) traumatic memories, and remember them later; however, I think advocates for Recovered Memory Therapy wildly overstate the number of people who do this. I wish that everyone who is pursuing the "memory recovery" techniques promoted by books like CTH would take the time just to read the chapter in this book about Retractors.

I found the book fascinating, enraging, depressing, only sometimes uplifting. What is encouraging is the fact that, where courage and good sense and humility for a moment combine, people caught up in this monstrous charade that is destroying families can get themselves out of the chasm and re-discover a modicum of serenity. What is so depressing is the thought that this appears to happen rarely; because most - but by no means all - of the people responsible for this nonsense are acting in good faith, one is up against a quasi-religious fervour that is impervious to calm, reasoned argument. Patients themselves are obviously feeling rudderless on the seas of life, and vulnerable, and this makes them suggestible in the incapable hands of zealous psycho-missionaries. What a tragic social phenomenon. The tragedy also remains, apart from the shattered lives left behind by this "in-yer-face" movement, that it risks obscuring the plight of those genuinely abused. Read the book.

Written by a father who saw his family ruined by recovered memories of abuse, this wonderful book tells the sad story of the recovered memory movement. The book is both exciting and horrifying as he tells his own true story and then carefully presents the evidence of the tragic development of the idea of recovered memories. This heartbreaking story has been repeated in too many families across the US.

For the interviews with parents and former believers in recovered memory alone, this book is worth reading. It is long (about 600 pages) but there is little padding. I could not stop reading it, and found the authors' way of presenting their arguments very fair, despite the sensitive nature of the subject. They do not at all seek to minimise the importance of real abuse of children, but give ample evidence that psychotherapists and others are - sometimes with good intentions - abusing their positions to create a theory according to which even the most appaling abuse in childhood can be completely forgotten until the therapist recovers it, sometimes in horrendous ways. The authors don't believe it. Those who've been abused remember something, and don't need suggestions made to them. The best chapter is 'Why now?' which seeks to explain what seems like a contemporary form of witch hunting. I have always been very suspicious of arguments about memories being invented, but I can see, having read this book, how it can happen.