THE GLOBE AND MAIL (Canada) Oct. 18, 2003

REUNITING WITH YOUR DAUGHTER

Letters from Lloyd & Carmen Corney and Adriaan Mak

Lloyd's advice below makes very good sense. I pass it on. Reuniting with my accusing son went through several steps.
1. My daughter and former spouse urged my son to contact me after the birth of my first grandchild.
2. My son invited the contact, but told me that he was not retracting.
3. I made several visits to my son and his family. We did not discuss the allegations of abuse.
4. After about a year of regular visits with my son and his family, my son spontaneously retracted most of the allegations, but still insisted that there had been emotional abuse.
5. I did not deny such abuse, but suggested he make a list of the emotional abuses and we bring this to a family "tribunal".
6. Two weeks later he admitted there had not been emotional abuse.
7. He told the story of his therapy, accusations and retraction to a Globe and Mail reporter, but to my surprise still maintained that he had always been afraid of me.
8. He has since also retracted that final allegation.
Adriaan Mak

From: "Lloyd & Carmen Corney"
Cc: "Adriaan J.W. Mak"
Subject: reuniting with your daughter

Firstly I want to tell you how happy I am for you and I wish you continued great success in reuniting with your daughter. I lost my family in 1990 and still have hopes that one day at least one of my daughters (there were two of them) will awaken to reality and the truth. News like yours helps to keep that hope alive.
I have been in contact with a few other parents who have reconnected, sometimes tenuously, with accusing daughters and have heard their stories and setbacks (strange actions of these returning daughters). At times it is difficult to understand when suddenly one of these daughters, seemingly without cause, will renew her accusations.
While observing theses "ups and downs" as a third person friend of the parents, I began to wonder, how could I avoid some of these setbacks if one or both of my daughters ever indicated a desire to make contact with me?
Obviously each case will have some different twist and I don't wish to give the impression that I have all or even any answers. However I would like to pass on one suggestion. I hope you don't think me intrusive. (I did pass this idea on to one of the fathers in this situation and he seems to find some merit in it.)

Here it is.
When speaking with your daughter, do not directly deny the accusations such as saying, "That is not true." or, "That did not happen". My spin on this is that such statements were probably discussed in the therapy and the "therapist" has brainwashed the accuser to expect and to regard such declarations as indications that the person making them is "in denial". So when the returning and confused daughter hears such a definitive negation she is reminded of what her "therapist" has predicted. Such statements are capable of validating not only the "in denial" prophecy of the "therapist" they can appear to authenticate the "therapist's" therapy induced abuse accusations. (The thought processes of the perplexed accuser can be, "If the therapist was accurate about the "in denial" statements s/he must be correct about the accusations.)
My recommendations, the only qualifications I have to make such recommendations is 13 years of being in this situation myself; try not to speak/defend in definite negatives.

Use such terms as:

· "I know you have been brought to believe that and I hope some day you will see this from another prospective."

· "What is it that brings you to believe that?"

· "Would you like to discuss this more?"

You can side step:

· "Would it be OK if we talk about this another time?"

I believe that as long as you and your daughter are communicating there is erosion in the influence of the "therapist" and friends met in group therapy.  I am sure that many have had similar ideas but I have not seen them written.  Once again I hope you do not think me intrusive. I wish you much luck and happiness.
If you are using a similar approach I would appreciate your observations and any other ideas you put into play which, I hope to be able to utilize if one or both of my daughters ever contacts me.
Cheers, Lloyd

New Scientist Reviews McNally Book Remembering Trauma
Yes, I remember it well

David Canter decries the notion that memories of abuse can be "recovered" 

          CAN psychology ever be really dangerous? With the thorough, low-key style of a UN weapons inspector, Richard McNally, professor of psychology at Harvard, shows in this important book that debased psychological ideas can indeed generate weapons of mass destruction. Unlike Hans Blix, he has been able to ferret them out and show how they have been misused.
          McNally illustrates in a measured, sometimes wry tone how contagious the pathogens of flawed psychology can be if they infest and spread through that most fundamental of psychological processes, memory. If, as is widely believed, remembrance of trauma, especially sexual trauma, is inherently destructive, then the germs are present for a plague of post-traumatic stress and its damaging sequelae. The next stage in the production of the weapon is to modify what people think they remember.
          McNally highlights the political significance of debates about the impact of memories of abuse, citing what he rightly calls the "egregious example" of the US Congress. In 1999, these politicians condemned a paper published in a major journal reporting a thorough meta-analysis of 59 studies of the impact of childhood sexual abuse. The results challenged the commonly held belief that such abuse inevitably produces psychological dysfunction.
          McNally dispassionately explains what is now understood about the essentially constructive nature of memory. In an exhaustive and commendably up-to-date review of clinical reports, laboratory studies and neuroscience examinations, he shows that experience of some traumas under some circumstances can of course be psychologically destructive, but that does not relate to how, or if, they are remembered. The central psychological challenge we all face with severe traumas is, as with all other emotionally significant events, that we remember them all too well.
          We can cope with painful memories by not dwelling on them and pushing them out of daily awareness. But that is very different from losing access to them in the way proposed by many psychotherapists. The extremely well-documented finding that "repressed memories" are very unlikely is of widespread significance. It provides a potential cure for the madness that has destroyed hundreds, possibly thousands, of families whose members had memories "recovered" in therapy - memories that had no basis in reality. There are still people languishing in prison, convicted on the basis of memories that were created by invasive psychotherapeutic intervention.
          The mechanisms by which therapists, police interrogators and others can lead people to believe that they remember events that did not occur are carefully described by McNally. He discusses recent archival research that reveals how these have their origins in Freud's manipulative psychoanalytic techniques. This led him to draw out remembrance of sexual abuse in childhood that had no actual basis. Even more damaging to his later Oedipal theory, was that the memories he recovered about his patients' childhood did not relate to abuse by their fathers. His view that he was drawing out fantasy, not fact, from his patients was deformed by how Freud himself distorted his memory of what those fantasies were.
          Anyone interested in understanding how trauma is remembered must read this book. And anyone who has been poisoned by "recovered memories", as victim or accused, will find it a powerful antidote.
David Canter

David Canter directs the Centre for Investigative Psychology at the University of Liverpool. His book Mapping Murder will be published by Virgin Books in the autumn

Remembering Trauma by Richard J. McNally, Harvard University Press, £23.50/$35, ISBN 0674010825

New Scientist vol 178 issue 2399 - 14 June 2003, page 54

The Exorcists
Reviewed by Debbie Nathan

REMEMBERING TRAUMA By Richard J. McNally, 

NO CRUELER TYRANNIES Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times By Dorothy Rabinowitz

          Ritual sex abuse is back. Recently I heard that a conference on the topic was being held for psychotherapists. It was planned not to critique a nasty period in the annals of American hysteria but rather so that attendees could learn to ask patients if they've ever been raped in day care by secret devil worshipers. This stuff was debunked in the 1990s as a type of urban myth. Yet it keeps cropping up, complete with pseudo-scientific theories about the psychology of so-called victims -- theories that likewise refuse to die.
          One such theory is that children who are molested often grow up to deny that the crime ever happened. Many do so, the theory holds, because people commonly repress or dissociate from memories of horrific trauma -- particularly sex abuse. This idea has been repeatedly discredited by research psychologists. But other researchers continue to produce studies that they claim support it. No matter that, from a scientific perspective, those studies have serious flaws. In pop culture and among many child-protection workers, it's still de rigueur to think that a child who was fondled or raped is at risk of burying the memory.
          Richard McNally calls this theory of amnesia "psychiatric folklore." As a therapist and a professor of psychology at Harvard, he has spent years studying the effects of trauma on people's mental processes -- including memory. He is on top of the research and has done some of it himself. The investigational literature is vast, and Remembering Trauma covers virtually all of it (the Works Cited section lists some 1,400 journal articles). With so many academics and statistics weighing in, this could be a murky book, interesting only to psychology-minded professionals. Instead, it is plain-speaking, elegant and impassioned. It makes a supposedly complex topic simple. Or at least simple enough to make readers wonder about the ready acceptance of a notion that goes against common sense and experience.
          Take the idea that people may completely forget threatening events -- not just sexual assault but also natural disasters, violent crimes and war. McNally cites several solid studies that show the contrary. People suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder typically complain not of amnesia but of dwelling too much on what happened. No one who was at Auschwitz after around the age of 5 has said he or she forgot being there. Combat veterans, even when shell-shocked, remember that they were in battle. There is no disputing these facts. Yet proponents of massive, post-traumatic amnesia use sloppy data and misinterpretation to bolster their point.
          One article that McNally skewers cites a study of several children who saw a playmate killed by lightning. Two young witnesses could not remember the event, and this is evidence for traumatic forgetting, says the article. But it fails to mention that the children probably didn't remember because they themselves were struck by the lightning. Several other studies supporting traumatic-amnesia theory have asked adults who say they were child sex-abuse victims if there was ever a time they could not remember the abuse. Many answered yes, and this is taken as evidence by people who believe in repressed memory. As McNally notes, however, saying yes "implies that the subject has spent a period of time unsuccessfully trying to remember having been abused. But if a person has repressed all memories of abuse, on what basis would he or she attempt to remember it in the first place?” It would be better to ask, "Has there ever been a time when you did not think about your abuse?” But not thinking about something is different from being unable to recall it.
          McNally cites studies mentioning people who were going about their business and remembered out of the blue that they were abused years ago -- then verified that it happened. Does this imply repressed memory? No, because people forget many things for years, then suddenly recall them. This sounds like ordinary forgetting, and there is no reason to doubt that it encompasses child sexual abuse. After all, McNally points out, many studies show that children thus victimized typically grow up with minimal psychological after-effects or no effects at all. Sexual abuse, it seems, is not especially traumatic for most kids. So it should be no surprise that many forget about it, for a long time or forever.
          But why are people incredulous -- even outraged -- at such findings? Reversing a quote from the philosopher David Hume, McNally speculates that child-protection advocates want to turn "ought" into "is.” Because of its moral vileness, they think child sex abuse ought to be very harmful to the psyche. Therefore, it is harmful. So harmful that repressed narratives of the crime must be wrenched from damaged victims. During the heyday of such thinking, in the 1980s and 1990s, even children who said nothing happened were relentlessly questioned until they changed their stories. Thanks to many studies done since then and cited by McNally, we now know that such coercion can create false memories of abuse.
          Here is where No Crueler Tyrannies comes in. Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Wall Street Journal writer, has spent years sifting the wreckage of lives ruined by bad science and venal jurists. She has a stylish, gripping way of conveying her indignation about the fate of adults who have been falsely convicted of sex crimes. The most chilling case in her book involves an elderly Boston-area woman who ran a daycare center with her daughter and son. These are the infamous Amiraults. They were imprisoned in the late 1980s after preschoolers accused them of rape with deadly weapons and blinking robots in a "magic room.” There was no physical evidence of the assaults. Records show that children at first said nothing happened, but interviewers spent hours insisting that something had and supplying details of the supposed crimes. The Amirault son, Gerald, remains behind bars. Rabinowitz asserts that Massachusetts appeals judges will not discredit their lower courts by overturning his conviction -- out of nothing more than the judges' own boorish pride. Nationally, several other innocent men and women are incarcerated. Rabinowitz makes you angry about this injustice. With McNally, she makes you worry deeply about the tyranny of "ought" becoming "is." *Debbie Nathan is co-author of "Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt.” The Washington Post May 04, 2003, BOOK WORLD