O  A  R  M  H  P

July 2002

Happy Fourth of July everyone! Watch out for those firecrackers!

This month we are featuring Theophostic Counseling. I have received many questions, articles, and comments about this type of Church Counseling and wanted to share some of them with you. Kathleen is a retractor, who has spoken at our meetings. Tom Rutherford needs no introduction and here is one article about this counseling. We will send another next month. Carole

From Kathleen, a retractor

Dear Tom,

        I am writing to you as Carole in Cleveland gave me your email address. I hope you don't mind. I heard you and your family speak once in the Cleveland area, maybe 3 or so years ago. Like your daughter, I came under false memories while in therapy. I had been sexually abused by my brother but while in treatment I came to believe I was also abused by my dad, which is not true. My dad is an alcoholic but he has never been physically or sexually abusive.

        I am a counselor myself, so I know both sides. What I was interested to, know is whether or not you are aware of a type of Counseling called TheoPhostic Ministries founded by a pastor by the name of Ed Smith. There is a Christian counseling place in my area that is really into this approach. While SOME of their principles don't sound bad, such as exposing the lies people receive and having them set free by the Truth, I have great concern about their methodology. It seems to me it has potential danger for opening people up to False Memories. Ed Smith does not even believe in False Memory Syndrome. Their approach is to utilize prayer, but to have the person close their eyes. The counselor then starts with a feeling and asks the person who has their eyes closed what they are feeling or seeing. In this process the idea is that the Lord will show up and be seen or heard and speak the truth to the person, which will set them free. It sounds a lot like guided imagery or visualization, though followers of this approach adamantly deny this.

        I heard of this approach because I started to go to counseling at this place, then began to do some research of my own. I am not receiving this type of counseling, as I told the counselor I did not want to do this. I went to counseling to address some other problems I have been having.

        If you have heard of this or have any thoughts about it, I would like to hear from you.

In Christ,

Kathleen

Tom Rutherford's reply

Dear Kathleen:

Theophostic Counseling is deadly. There is a lot more that I will add to this subject but time is a premium for the next 2 days. I have put together several things - there is a litigation going on right now in Penn. regarding a church that has practiced this voodoo therapy - I will get you in touch with those working on the case. This is another form of Age Regression Therapy and has being embraced by many in the church counseling community and is very strongly defended as a having great benefit for helping people. Yet, in reality - is so very WRONG.

Will be in touch,

Tom

Theophostic Counseling (TPM; a.k.a. TheoPhostic Counseling, Theophostic Ministry) is based upon Recovered Memory Therapy (RMT), to which beliefs have been added about:

· Indwelling demonic spirits,

· The role of Satan in people's emotional problems,

· Direct communication by the client with Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit, and

· Unique concepts about the inner workings of the mind.

TPM contrasts strongly with mainline mental health therapy; secular therapists  abandoned the possibility of possession by demonic spirits many generations ago.

Theophostic Counseling appears to be a rapidly growing therapeutic technique within counseling services at many conservative Protestant churches. Like most emerging mental health counseling methods, its safety and efficacy have not been independently studied and published in peer-reviewed journals.

If TPM is safe and effective, then it is a powerful force for good. If TPM is unsafe and ineffective, it is a powerful force for evil. We urge extreme caution  to anyone considering undergoing TPM.

For more information go to: http://religioustolerance.org/theophostic.htm

More on Theophostic Counseling next month.

EducationPlus+, a small, non-profit, loosely organized group of people interested in educating professionals about memory and false accusations of child sexual abuse is in need of contributions.

Please send donations to:

Kathy Begert, EducationPlus+

1134 Rathburn Road

Wooster, OH 44691

REMEMBER the National FMS Conference is October 5-6, 2002 in Glenview, IL (Chicago.)

Sponsored by

FMS Foundation and the Illinois-Wisconsin Society.

Paul McHugh and Elizabeth Loftus will be speaking.

Hope to see you there

Watch that pedophile priest purge not become a witch-hunt

By Stephanie Salter

So much good is coming out of the purge now taking place in the U.S. Catholic Church; it would be a shame for it to get diluted by blind anger, scapegoating, and an insidious kind of mob psychology.

Thanks to the dogged reporting efforts of the Boston Globe -- and a volume of church-wide mendacity that reached the spillover stage -- the issue of pedophile priests finally is out in the open. Dioceses all across the nation have been forced by revelations around the former Rev. John Geoghan in Boston to come clean with their own histories of hushed-up sexual abuse.

After years of being bought off in secret, discounted or victimized again by a hierarchy in denial, Catholics who were betrayed as children are at last sensing some vindication. Further, as more light and air spread over the pathology of pedophile priests, some of the church's least attractive structural characteristics also have been exposed to scrutiny. It is, in the purest sense of Catholic tradition, a "teaching moment."

But there is grave danger, too. I see it every day in scores of vitriolic e-mails, on the op-ed pages of other newspapers and even in quotes from some high-ranking men of the church.

The danger is twofold: First is the tendency to equate allegation with guilt. As is often the case with sexual abuse -- particularly child sexual abuse -- anyone who is accused is presumed guilty as hell. Proving one's innocence becomes as daunting (if not impossible) as it was in 17th century Salem, when all it took to brand a woman or a man "Satan's disciple" was someone else's claim that it was so.

While U.S. bishops and cardinals busy themselves making up for lost time -- releasing the names of hundreds of clerics who've been accused of sexual abuse over the past several decades and placing many of them on leave -- they need to remember that false accusations can be made.

During a 1990s wave of "recovered memory therapy," for example, thousands of women and men were led to believe they had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, incest and even satanic cult murders. Adult children accused their parents, siblings, and other childhood figures of hideous crimes. Families were ripped apart forever. Truth became a national casualty.

Among the more public accusers was a former parishioner of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago. The young man's "memories" of childhood sexual abuse by the prelate were specific, detailed, and credible. They also turned out to be false, as the troubled young man finally revealed.

Am I saying that most of the current charges of priest pedophilia are probably false? Hardly. From what has been documented, most seem to be true and admitted. But the gap between never believing an alleged victim and always believing an alleged victim is huge; no one is served by trading one extreme for the other.

Which brings me to the second danger of the pedophile priest purge: robbing the guilty of their humanity and labeling their souls – not just their actions -- as "evil."

Only a handful of the hundreds of letters and e-mails that I've received about such men have mentioned pedophilia as a sickness, let alone acknowledged that somewhere in a pedophile's distant past is likely another sexual abuser. Angry at the church for so many different reasons, Catholics have an obvious target for their ire in pedophile priests. Even fellow clergy refer to them in animalistic terms; laypeople write vividly of the brutal physical punishment they deserve.

This reaction is understandable, but it is the antithesis of what Christ preached his followers must do. If Catholic officials or laity forget that, the damage to our church will be compounded for decades to come.

By Cathy Young

SEXUAL ABUSE of children by clergy is hardly a new discovery: the case of the Rev. James R. Porter, the Fall River priest who reportedly molested more than 100 altar boys, made headlines a decade ago. But today, charges of abuse and cover-ups in the Catholic Church are the focus of unprecedented national attention. The horror of sex crimes against children is compounded by a shocking betrayal of trust. It seems clear that many church officials were more concerned with avoiding scandal than with protecting the most vulnerable of their parishioners. Yet, as a long-overdue spotlight is turned on these outrages, it is important to remember that almost every story has another side - in this case, the danger of false accusations.

There was a time when our culture was largely in denial about child sexual abuse in general. In the 1960s and 1970s, the efforts of child advocates and feminists raised public consciousness about this issue. However, this new awareness of a very real problem sometimes backfired.

In the 1980s, America was shaken by reports of an epidemic of sexual abuse in day care centers. Sensational trials of day care providers, with lurid details of torture, animal sacrifice, and satanic rituals, unfolded from coast to coast. ''Believe the children'' was the mantra of the day.

Eventually, however, many of these cases began to unravel – though sometimes only after people who were almost certainly innocent spent years in prison.

Thus, in New Jersey in 1985, kindergarten teacher Margaret Kelly Michaels was accused of forcing more than 20 children to play sex games and penetrating them with knives and forks. She was convicted and sentenced to 47 years of imprisonment.

In 1993, the conviction was thrown out after the court of appeals concluded that the alleged victims were subjected to aggressive, highly suggestive questioning. When the children denied being abused, the investigators badgered them until they gave the ''right'' answer.

In other cases, scrutiny revealed a typical pattern. A single complaint of abuse, sometimes made by a mentally unstable parent or based on a likely misinterpretation of a child's remark, would spark mass hysteria.

Parents were told to watch their children for signs of possible abuse. Investigators and therapists were brought in to elicit ''the truth"; they would start out with the assumption that abuse had taken place and that the children who said they were never abused were ''in denial.’’ The charges that eventually emerged were contradicted by physical evidence and filled with implausible details.

There is no question that some children have been sexually abused in day care centers. But there is also little doubt that the day care child abuse hysteria of the 1980s ruined many lives. In the notorious Fells Acres case in Massachusetts, day care worker Gerald Amirault remains in prison, despite fairly compelling evidence that the charges against him had no substance.

The day care hysteria coincided with the rise of ''recovered memories'' of sexual abuse. Typically, a patient suffering from psychological problems would be told by a therapist that her or his symptoms suggested sexual abuse, which could be remembered with the help of suggestive techniques such as hypnotic regression. More recently, studies by psychologists such as Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington have demonstrated that traumatic memories can be implanted. Some accusers have not only recanted their charges but sued their therapists and won.

One dubious case of ''recovered memory'' involved a prelate of the Catholic Church. In 1993, 34-year-old Stephen Cook claimed that Cardinal Joseph Bernadin had molested him as a teenage pre-seminary student and that he only remembered this in therapy. Many in the media were quick to conclude that where there's smoke, there must be fire. Yet Cook eventually retracted his charges and came to see his memories as a product of therapy.

Today, the climate with regard to charges of sexual abuse is much healthier than it was 10 years ago. Accusations are taken seriously, but it is widely acknowledged - even by plaintiffs' lawyers - that there may also be some false charges by people eager to cash in on the scandals. The recent charges by a psychologically disturbed woman that she had been molested by

Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles 30 years ago were examined skeptically and found to be without substance.

This balance of concern for the real victims and for the rights of those who may be falsely accused is important, and should by all means be preserved. Otherwise, the laudable desire to redress serious wrongs may turn into a new witch-hunt. THE BOSTON GLOBE 4/23/2002