OHIO ASSOCIATION OF RESPONSIBLE MENTAL HEALTH PRACTICES

December 2000

Wishing you a season of simplicity…..Happy Holidays!

NEVER GIVE UP HOPE

Our daughter came back to us last August 99, after almost 8 years! Our relationship is getting stronger and stronger. Believe it or not, it started thru E-mail messages and after almost a year, she called us and apologized for ever accusing us and asked for our forgiveness, which we readily gave her. Since she lives out of state, we have only been together 3 times in the past year but we exchange E-mail and phone calls almost on a daily basis. I don't know if you remember our story but besides her accusation against my husband for molesting her and myself for knowing about it and letting it continue, she and her husband at the time (they are now divorced) sued us for one million dollars. The lawsuit was eventually dropped but it still cost us over $6,000 in attorney fees. We were also on the program "Nightline" where she was also interviewed and made her accusation against us. We had agreed to appear on Nightline in order to expose this horrible therapy. The first 2 years of our ordeal, I was totally devastated and at times, didn't even want to keep on living. I finally realized that it was completely beyond our control and out of our hands and I turned her over to God. I truly gave her back to Him and finally accepted what had happened. In another word: I surrendered! Of course the hurt was still there but I can honestly say that I was able to start enjoying life again and appreciate the rest of my family. At the bottom of my heart, I always knew that some day she would come back to us, when??? Only in God's time. I had also accepted the fact that I might never see her again and if that was God's plan, I again accepted it and asked God to help me cope every day. Then the miracle happened... she came back to us. She has been having a lot of physical problems in the past year and even asked us last week if she could come and live with us for a few months so that she can get the tender loving care of her parents and hopefully get her life back on track!!!! Yes, it is indeed a miracle!

I am in the process of reading a book titled: "Answered Prayers” and in it there is a chapter on what they call: "Prayer of Relinquishment” which is to "LET GO AND LET GOD". The author of this chapter Catherine Marshall says what this prayer says is: "This is my situation at the moment. I'll face the reality of it. But I'll also accept willingly whatever a loving Father sends.” Acceptance therefore never slams the door on hope. She also says that even with hope, our relinquishment must be the real thing, because this giving up of self-will is the hardest thing we human beings are ever called on to do! Let's keep praying for our children, for their return and for each other. Let's also pray for all the therapists that have not seen the light yet and be thankful for those who have. I hope I was able to help you Carol and I pray that you will have your own "miracle" soon.

Sincerely,

Nickie

By DAVE SCHEIBER © St. Petersburg Times, published November 26, 2000

A decade ago, Laura Pasley was consumed by rage at her mother, who, she believed, had abused her as a child. But she eventually retracted her allegations and found peace as a pioneer in a movement supporting the accused.

Pasley, a retired secretary in the Dallas police department, is the first "retractor" in the ranks of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Hundreds of others have since disavowed their charges. They have lent immense credibility to the foundation's efforts.

Pasley filed a suit against her therapist on Nov. 18, 1991. She has spoken freely of her experiences on behalf of the foundation and posted her own graphic story on the Web

(http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Pointe/3171).

She had gone into therapy suffering from bulimia and went to see a church counselor. Before long, he was demanding that she probe her memory for recollections of being sexually abused. He relied on hypnosis, made her stare at a photo of herself as a little girl and think about her inner child, and had her do "trance writing," journaling while under hypnosis.

She had a vague flashback of being abused in a bathtub, and her therapist concluded that it had to be her mother. Soon, she started having memories of her mother abusing her with a coat hanger. In group sessions, the counselor screamed at her to talk about her mother and have more flashbacks.

Her therapist of four years often berated Pasley for not working hard enough to dredge up memories of abuse. Finally, weary of the steady harangue, she ended her therapy.

Pasley filed her suit because she had read a newspaper story focusing on two accused parents who sounded like nice people. She had been in a group with their daughter, who had described them as satanic monsters. Pasley sought the parents out. "They were no more Satanists than me," she says.

Pasley eventually realized that some of the horrific flashbacks she had were actually from movies she had once seen, Sybil and Deranged. She has patched up her relationship with her mother and continues to counsel accusers-turned-retractors.

“In my case, I had this deep, insatiable hole inside my chest, and here was a man who would listen to me," she says.

"With that kind of therapy, there are no boundaries. It's not a healthy environment."

The courts have agreed with her. For example, in 1995, a Pittsburgh woman was awarded $272,000 after suing a teacher and social worker who helped her "remember" that she had given birth to three children who were killed and that she was raped in a restaurant.

Then came the multimillion-dollar judgments in false memory cases, including two $2.5-million judgments against a single psychiatrist in Minnesota. In 1997, a patient in Wisconsin settled for $2.4-million with a psychiatrist who implanted memories of extreme satanic abuse.

Recently, another development undercut the repressed memory movement. Dr. Bennett Braun, a major force behind satanic ritual abuse beliefs in repressed memory cases, turned in his license for two years.

“If not for some professionals with credentials who were a driving force behind -- people like Bennett Braun," says FMS foundation director Pamela Freyd, "this whole fad would never have gone as far as it did."