Dear “Psychology Today”: Believe Incest Survivors

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Incest survivors are the neglected heroes of the #MeToo movement. In the last few years, survivor activists have bravely shown the world that adult sexual assault and harassment are far more commonplace than many had formerly realized or wanted to acknowledge. The same is true of incest: sexual abuse by a family member, usually when the victim is a child. Yet, while terms like catcalling, campus sexual assault, workplace harassment and date rape have by now become everyday phrases, the word incest remains taboo.

What we don’t speak about, we can’t analyze. Progressive culture has been steadily dismantling the victim-blaming tropes that have stigmatized adult rape survivors for centuries, like “what was she wearing?” Yet when it comes to entrenched narratives that silence incest survivors, mainstream media continues to propagate these harmful myths unchecked.

It’s time for us to change that.

Anti-Survivor Propaganda and the Myth of “False Memory Syndrome.”

The most insidious and enduring attack on incest survivors in modern times is the myth of “false memory syndrome.” I’ve published an in-depth history of this harmful campaign, which originated in the 1990s, when a seething backlash erupted to squash an emerging movement of incest survivor activists that took shape in the 1980s—an outgrowth of the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s.

Every anti-oppression movement has its backlash—racial justice movements in the U.S. are always met with rises in white supremacy, and demands for gender equality are countered with surges of patriarchal power jockeying. When adult incest survivors began speaking out about childhood sexual abuse and bringing their perpetrators to court, the accused organized their own backlash movement in the form of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF).

Founded in 1992, the FMSF was on its surface an “advocacy group” created by and for parents who’d been accused by their children of sexual abuse. The group’s supposed agenda was to provide support and fellowship to families that had been “destroyed” by accusations of incest. They launched a well-funded media campaign purporting the existence of an epidemic of “False Memory Syndrome”—not a scientifically researched condition, but rather a slogan concocted by accused parents to discredit the testimonies of their children.

“False Memory Syndrome” was an enticing decoy, much like Trump crying “fake news” whenever someone points to his misdeeds. And like Trump, who remains unscathed by numerous allegations of sexual abuse, the accused parents of the FMSF were right to assume that a culture steeped in patriarchy would side with them over their accusers simply based on the power differential between parents and their children.

This blind deference to power enabled the FMSF to pass off a blatantly hollow defense strategy as science. In fact, they didn’t even try to hide this when recounting how the foundation came up with its pseudoscientific catchphrase:

“…since the parents were convinced that what their children thought were memories were really incorrect beliefs, the term ‘false memory’ seemed appropriate.” (False Memory Syndrome Foundation)

In other words, “False Memory Syndrome” was nothing more than an authoritative-sounding way for alleged incest perpetrators to call their accusers liars.

The Persuasive Power of “Science”

The FMSF’s “false memory” campaign was highly effective with popular media, which eagerly gobbled it up. It eased the dissonance between an image of the “perfect American family” and an emerging consciousness of staggering rates of child sexual abuse across the U.S. and worldwide. The campaign also meshed well with predominant cultural biases of the early 1990s—a time when, for example, Anita Hill’s credibility was put on trial at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings when she accused him of sexual harassment.

“False memory” propaganda made its way into the scientific community as well. Much like other disinformation campaigns that masquerade as science to reinforce patriarchy and white supremacy, such as gender essentialism and eugenics, “False Memory Syndrome” became deeply entrenched in scientific literature and research.

To this day, popular psychology magazines like Psychology Today reference Elizabeth Loftus as the world’s leading memory scientist and authority on “false memory.” Loftus, a member of the FMSF’s scientific advisory board, has made a career as a highly paid expert witness for the defense of such clients as Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson and Harvey Weinstein, as well as countless parents accused of sexually abusing their children. By her own admission, she has no clinical or research experience working with sexual abuse survivors—the population whose memory she claims to have expertise on.

While the FMSF and their advisory board claimed to be champions of science and truth, “false memory” research has always been politically motivated. It emerged as a response to sexual abuse accusations and its aim has been to exonerate the accused, not to improve psychotherapy outcomes. “False Memory” advocates uniformly ignore the ample evidence and research studies that support the validity of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. And while repressed memory is a phenomenon that is commonly observed in survivors of military combat and other traumatic experiences, the “false memory” debate centers uniquely on the more politically charged topic of child sexual abuse (Goldsmith and Barlow).

Attitudes Toward Incest Survivors Are Stuck in the 1990s

Despite the changing times and the gains of the #MeToo movement, incest has yet to make its way into the public conversation about sexual abuse, and “false memory” rhetoric continues to be paraded on the pages of mainstream publications without critique. It is as harmful to survivors as other outdated victim-blaming notions like “she was asking for it” or “men can’t be raped.”

When incest survivors look to sources like Psychology Today, GoodTherapy or BetterHelp for information and support, they are likely to find material that leaves them feeling gaslighted, invalidated and re-traumatized. Below are some live examples:

  • This Psychology Today blog post refers to traumatic amnesia—a phenomenon widely acknowledged by trauma survivors and experts like Bessel van der Kolk and Judith Herman—as “arrogant fiction.” The author then tellingly suggests that Jerry Sandusky’s accusers may be victims of “false memory”—a fallacy that has been thoroughly debunked by trauma experts.
  • Another Psychology Today article on “false memory” offers this ominous warning to child sexual abuse survivors who dare confront their abusers: “A malleable memory can have especially dire consequences, particularly in legal settings when children are used as eyewitnesses… This becomes highly problematic when a case involves alleged sexual abuse…”
  • A post on BetterHelp uses the above Psychology Today article as an authoritative reference on “false memory,” and implies that this issue is particularly prevalent with “children who have been abused or assaulted.”
  • Following the “false memory” disinformation bandwagon are also GoodTherapy, Healthline, Verywellmind and many, many more.

While “false memory” propaganda abounds, finding any information at all on healing from incest can be challenging. Search the word “incest” on these mainstream psychology websites and here’s what you’ll find:

The range of attitudes expressed by Psychology Today reveal that, while mainstream culture has finally come to understand the power dynamics underlying sexual abuse of employees by bosses, students by teachers and congregants by clergy, many of us fail to understand the power dynamics that enable older family members to sexually abuse younger ones. Perhaps it’s harder to acknowledge abuses of power that hit so close to home.

Social Impact

Not only is the media’s inept handling of incest harmful to survivors seeking resources on healing, but it also enables perpetrators seeking validation for their behavior—which they will readily find in mainstream psychological resources that fail to make clear the harm they are causing to their victims.

At a time when social justice consciousness is on the rise, it’s imperative that we stand up for incest survivors and hold these media outlets accountable for their part in colluding with rape culture. If we truly want to reform the abuses of power that underlie our social structures, it’s vital that we acknowledge and address the injustices hiding in plain sight within our own families and homes.

Where Do We Start?

In order to lift the taboo on talking about incest and start correcting the misconceptions that popular psychology magazines continue to perpetuate, it’s necessary to start with the basics and define incest. In doing so, we can shed light on the spectrum of abuse that falls under the umbrella of incest, much in the way that we now recognize the spectrum of adult sexual abuse, from microaggressions to violent assault.

Rather than looking to forensic or psychological experts to define incest, I advocate listening to those with lived experience. Below is the definition given by Survivors of Incest Anonymous, an organization of peer support created by and for survivors:

“We define incest very broadly as a sexual encounter by a family member, or by an extended family member, that damaged the child. By “extended family” member we mean a person that you and/or your family have known over a period of time. This may be any family member, a family friend, clergy, another child, or anyone who betrayed the child’s innocence and trust. We believe we were affected by the abuse whether it occurred once or many times since the damage was incurred immediately. By “abuse” we mean any sexual behavior or contact with the child. Sexual contacts may include a variety of verbal and/or physical behaviors; penetration is not necessary for the experience to be defined as incest or sexual abuse.”

If we’re ever going to be able to talk about incest openly as a society, we must also expand our language in order to facilitate that discussion. It may be helpful to build off of terms for adult sexual abuse that have already gained cultural acceptance and understanding. For example, we could talk about: Parental sexual harassment, mother-son rape, sibling sexual coercion, familial non-consensual touch. As we’ve seen with #MeToo, when we begin to put words to abuses that have been normalized or denied in our communities, we start to realize that abuse is not an anomaly but rather an expression of systemic inequalities, and that we are all impacted somewhere along the spectrum.

Believe Survivors

One of the most difficult and damaging consequences of incest is the crushing self-doubt that survivors commonly struggle with. It can lead to severe psychological distress and, at its worst, suicidality. That’s why it’s so vitally important that popular psychology resources, at the very least, refrain from reinforcing survivors’ self-doubt with perpetrator-protecting tropes like “False Memory Syndrome.”

Self-doubt for incest survivors is driven by internal and external forces knitted together, forming a tightly woven tapestry that is painstaking to undo. During childhood, when incest victims are often dependent on their abusers for primary caretaking—love, food, shelter—a common automatic survival mechanism is for the child to deny, minimize or dissociate from the abuse. Researcher, professor and incest survivor Jennifer J. Freyd wrote about this phenomenon in her 1998 book Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Many survivors repress their memory of the abuse completely until a time in their lives when it is safe enough to remember—and even then, memories often emerge in non-narrative forms such as emotional responses to triggers, physical sensations, intrusive images, etc.

A similar survival mechanism often propels non-offending family members to deny, minimize or dissociate from the abuse as well. Confronting an abuser can cause upheaval to an entire family or community system, destabilizing the financial ties and social cohesion that the group depends on for survival. Therefore, when incest survivors do disclose the abuse, they are often met with persistent and widespread gaslighting—manipulation of truth that causes one to doubt one’s own reality.

Added to this are the denial and threats that abusers commonly use to keep their misdeeds a secret, as well as the enduring cultural conditioning to disbelieve survivors of childhood sexual abuse, aided and abetted by “false memory” jargon. In the face of all these overlapping layers of denial and dissociation, reclaiming self-belief becomes a Sisyphean challenge for incest survivors.

Healing Happens

Despite the obstacles, survivors can and do heal. An important part of the process is regaining trust in oneself and reclaiming authority over one’s own lived experience. Survivors often find that creative expression and mindfulness practices offer pathways back to a sense of inner trust and self-connection. For many, it’s also essential to find reflections of their own experience in the words of other incest survivors. If gaslighting leads us to feel “crazy,” affirmation of our lived experience can help us repair our sense of reality and self-trust.

Because many popular psychology publications are still rife with incest denial rhetoric, survivors frequently look outside the mainstream for support. Below is a compilation of some excellent resources created by and for incest survivors on the healing journey:

Books and Films
Group Support
Resources
Moving Forward

What can each one of us do to make the world a safer place for incest survivors and to support inclusion as we collectively strive to end rape culture? All successful anti-oppression movements are founded on consciousness raising. That is what #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have used as fuel for cultural and political change. Why not build on the armatures that have already been so bravely constructed? Share the words of incest survivors with the hashtag #believeincestsurvivors. Correct community members when they perpetuate myths that harm survivors. Be an empathetic and affirming listener when a survivor discloses to you. Demand accountability from media outlets that promote anti-survivor propaganda. Be an agent of change. We already know that these actions, with collective participation, can have culture-shifting impact.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

30 COMMENTS

  1. I wish that the “false memory” perception hadn’t taken off because it’s so pervasive and it makes adult survivors of abuse doubt themselves and the very real things that happen to them. I’ve discovered in my own adult life that I am prone to blackouts during highly traumatic situations. It’s very annoying when trying to work through trauma.

    I suppose I’ll share this here since I could really use some validation. I’ve told this to friends before and got a “Something happened, you should tell a therapist.” but I’ve told a few therapists about this and none really know what to do and just end up dismissing me.

    So, I’ll put up a disclaimer that I don’t know many specifics and I’m not even sure if anything happened, but the implications are really fucked up, for lack of a better term.

    When I was 7 or so I was taken to a psychologist who recommended that I receive therapy for my “disordered” anxiety. In reality, I had been the victim of abuse from my father whenever he was angry. If I didn’t behave and he was in a certain mood, the results were disastrous.

    So I was sent to a therapist, Jim, who worked out of my pediatrician’s office. I saw him once a week for months. I don’t know why I stopped seeing him, but I do know that I remember *nothing* from any of his sessions. Not a damned thing.

    What I do remember is as follows:

    – The therapy room was always very dark with one or two lamps. The light was very low to the point where it was hard to read anything in there.

    – I was completely alone. My mother was made to wait in the waiting room.

    – The only thing that I remember vividly and with detail is that after each session, he always walked me across the parking lot to the Walgreens and let me buy any candy I wanted, which he would pay for.

    – Around that time, I started “itching” at my clit until it was raw, sensitive, and hurt. I only did this for a brief period and then never hit the phase of puberty where you start getting sexual feelings until I went to college.

    – And around that same time, I started to get frequent UTIs. It was such a problem that I went to see specialists who confirmed that there was nothing wrong with my physically. I also remember *hating* that sometimes they’d have to examine my urethra. I did *not* like anyone looking at me down there. After I stopped seeing Jim, the UTIs stopped.

    On a scale of one to “fucked up,” where would you say this rates at? Am I projecting too much or imagining things? I keep getting told by professionals that if anything had happened, I would have remembered it, but I know that as an adult I’m prone to dissociation, derealization, and blackouts during highly stressful events.

    Eventually, Jim stopped practicing (maybe that’s the reason why I stopped going to him) and neither of my parents remember his last name or any other information about him.

    I apologize if this is neither the time nor the place for this, but I figure that if “extended family” stretched to clergy, then it may cover other people who provide a similar role.

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    • It does sound very suspicious, to say the least!

      I agree, the “false memory syndrome” thing was originally about implanting memories by asking questions to kids the wrong way. Somehow it got altered into the idea that recovering memory from moments of limited awareness somehow never happens. It’s bullshit, but met the needs of those who want to blame clients or their brains for what happened to them.

      Steve

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    • There is a huge child abuse covering up problem with the clergy, and it goes all the way up to the bishops, at least within my former religion.

      https://books.google.com/books?id=xI01AlxH1uAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

      And an ethical pastor of a different religion, after reading my family’s chronologically typed up medical records with my medical research listed along side, which included the medical evidence of the abuse of my child. He confessed that the clergy – of all mainstream religions – entered into a faustian deal with the “mental health” workers long ago. And he called the clergy/”mental health” workers’ systemic child abuse covering up crimes “the dirty little secret of the two original educated professions.”

      And covering up child abuse is, in fact, the number one actual societal function of both the psychological and psychiatric professions.

      https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/01/23/18820633.php?fbclid=IwAR2-cgZPcEvbz7yFqMuUwneIuaqGleGiOzackY4N2sPeVXolwmEga5iKxdo
      https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/

      Today, “the prevalence of childhood trauma exposure within borderline personality disorder patients has been evidenced to be as high as 92% (Yen et al., 2002). Within individuals diagnosed with psychotic or affective disorders, it reaches 82% (Larsson et al., 2012).”

      Part of the reason for all this misdiagnosing of child abuse survivors with the other DSM disorders is that no “mental health” worker may ever bill any insurance company for ever helping any child abuse survivor ever, unless they misdiagnose them. And it’s all by DSM design.

      https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1

      I absolutely agree, the “mental health” workers do need to start addressing our society’s huge child abuse problems in an ethical manner instead. Or better yet, since they can’t bill to help child abuse survivors, and have been betraying them for decades, or longer. It’d be better if our society found some other group of people to actually help child abuse survivors. I know I will never trust another psychologist or psychiatrist or pastor ever again.

      But I do agree, “survivors can and do heal.” At least if the mother can get her child away from the child molesters quickly, and is able to keep her child away from the psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. Since the psychiatric profession thinks the best way to help a child, who’d been abused four years prior, is to neurotoxic poison him. And the social workers want to want to get their grubby little hands on a child who went from remedial reading in first grade, after the abuse, to getting 100% on his state standardized tests in eighth grade. But they think the well behaved and healing child is the problem, not the child who just suffered from abuse. The psychologists, psychiatrists, and pastors want to neurotoxic poison – attempt to murder – that child’s legitimately concerned mother, just after the abuse.

      Thanks, Anna, for pointing out that the crime of child abuse needs to be taken seriously, not just covered up by the psychologists and psychiatrists for profit.

      30-watt-lightbulb, I’m so very sorry for what you’ve been through. “Am I projecting too much or imagining things?” Likely not, the “mental health professionals” are systemic child abuse cover uppers, and often perpetrators of such abuse, and that needs to end.

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      • I’m not sure where you are getting this idea that counselors can’t bill to help child abuse survivors. They definitely can, whether they call the resulting problems “PTSD” or some other diagnostic category.

        And while some counselors cover up abuse (and some are even abusers), many others are very active in increasing awareness of the dangers of child abuse and of the needs of survivors.

        In fact, some counselors have been too willing to believe that their clients were abused. They have asked leading questions, been too sure that even dreams of abuse were the beginnings of recovered memories of abuse, or they’ve been willing to completely believe even fantastical tales of abuse (where supernatural things happened, for example.)

        I work as a counselor, and I know that these issues are not always black and white. Sometimes people do not have clear memories, and it is necessary to just hang out with the uncertainty. I have seen things like someone over the course of weeks start to remember that a certain family member abused them, then get uncertain about that, then recall it as a different family member (all without pressure from any other family members, who were not told about the memories.)

        False memories are not impossible, but it is also terrible to just assume that something is a false memory when it may be quite accurate. Counselors may not be able to know for sure what happened in particular cases, but they can be trained in ways to interact with people about their stories and their memories in ways that are sensitive and respectful, and help people on their own search for what is true.

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        • “I’m not sure where you are getting this idea that counselors can’t bill to help child abuse survivors. They definitely can, whether they call the resulting problems “PTSD” or some other diagnostic category.” Why must a trauma survivor be given some nasty name, rather than perpetrators?

          “And while some counselors cover up abuse (and some are even abusers), many others are very active in increasing awareness of the dangers of child abuse and of the needs of survivors.” Your odds are better in Vegas.

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          • Yeah, I noticed the original comment hadn’t been understood there too Caroline.

            And the gamble? That’s the point with an ‘unregulated industry’ (which has means of ensuring that abusers are not dealt with but rather enabled). At least in Vegas the odds are published. They didn’t even give me the chance to roll a pair of dice when they ‘set me up’ with a ‘spiking’ and planting items to procure a police referral and make kidnapping and torture appear lawful.

            A bit like the people running the three card monte can now force you to play the game, even if your aware of the con. You WILL bet your human rights, and you WILL pick a card, if not, this nice police officer is going to shoot you. We call that coercion, and we win every time. And the ‘sore loser’ will not be listened to.

            Goffman covered it in Cooling the Mark Out where he wrote something along the lines of “the street hustler needs to use his poise to con, the white collar criminal uses position”. Hence the Community Nurse need only rely on other criminals (public officers) supporting him to enable his use of torture and kidnapping, and the police can then be used to facilitate a ‘cooling out’ of the marks, if not, shoot them (or drop them at an ED for a doctor to outcome them)

            They are old cons repackaged for the social media generation.

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          • ” Why must a trauma survivor be given some nasty name, rather than perpetrators?”

            According to allen frances and others, it is the suffering that gets one a nasty name. If the perpetrator is not bothered by his behaviour, it is not an “illness”. All these many years, the victims were victimized more by psychiatry and it’s ilk than the original perpetrators had done. It has always been their damn hoax of being a “doctor” that gets unsuspecting folks. I’m glad for the day I started to sense something was off, and deconstruct the scene of psychiatry within my primitive head.

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          • ” Why must a trauma survivor be given some nasty name, rather than perpetrators?”

            Like the children in institutions labelled “Liars” and the people raping them “character flawed”? Surely the people who knew about the ‘character flaws’ were aware the children were also not Liars? Blessed are the peacemakers huh? I had no idea these people concealing these offences were such good people.

            Who is the Saint of the Cover Up? lol “Holy Fraud Batman, The Penguins have been in on it the whole time”

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        • Thanks to all for explaining it to Ron. And I’ll just add, when you label a child abuse survivor, or anyone, with one of the DSM disorders like PTSD or depression or bipolar, this results in the crime survivor being given the neurotoxic psychiatric drugs.

          And, as pointed out in one of the articles I sited above, “Individuals with psychiatric illnesses and a history of trauma also appear to display significantly higher functional impairment than the remainder of the sample (Cotter, Kaess & Yung, 2015).” In other words, trauma survivors don’t have brain diseases or “chemical imbalances,” so the drugs harm them.

          Not to mention, labeling a person with a supposed “life long, incurable, genetic illness” distracts both the client, and especially the therapists and psychiatrists, from the real issue at hand. Plus, the “mental illness” stigmatizations function to both defame and discredit the child abuse survivor.

          The best way to help a child abuse or rape survivor is to take the person to the police, report the crime, and see that justice is done. And that’s the opposite of what the majority of “mental health” workers have been doing.

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          • I owe you a big thank you SomeoneElse.

            And despite the way I feel about the people who tortured and kidnapped me (though I believe they may have a good faith defense, this does not mean that I was not tortured and kidnapped, just that they were deceived into doing something they thought was lawful) I think your right about taking the victim to police. Just because certain individuals have set up corrupt networks within the mental health system (lookin at you Doc/Father “i’ll sign the script for the ‘spiking’) does not mean police will not look into certain individuals and perhaps provide them with a similar scenario to ‘test’ them. Not unlike the doc who attempted to overdose me being tested. Lets see if he really means it or is a boaster (you a heart breaker, a life taker Doc?).

            The one problem I have with all that has occurred is that I have made it clear to police I was not a “patient” and simply because a flag was placed on me to give the appearance of lawfulness does not mean they get to continue uttering with that fraud for convenience.

            I would suggest that many of the victims of Institutional abuse in this country were silenced via the mental health system. So I agree, take them to police, but also protect them from the slander and fraud of the mental health system.

            My experience when I presented police with proof of the ‘spiking’ and they had (behind my back) called mental health to come pick me up (as they claimed I was ‘hallucinating’) has exposed something rather nasty about our system to me. It really is as simple as paying the right people for a favor to systematically dismantle a persons life. Mind you, the psychologist was never going to get along with me (as I assume you guys would understand given my anti psychiatry beliefs) and her husband being a psychiatrist. So she fixed me up real good, and I guess I should laugh about it in the end.

            The one problem I have is that in my Book it says clearly ‘Do Not conceal the Truth when you know what it is’. Why then do these people in authority continue to conceal the false flag placed on me to enable these criminals? Why have I been denied my human and civil rights for 9 years because the lie suits them?

            I know, and I know that they know what was done. Though they conceal the truth and deny me access to remedy.

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          • Thanks, boans. I’m quite certain, both you and I, dealt with the underbelly of the medical industry, thus must point out these systemic crimes. And make it clear that the right of the psychiatrists, or any doctors, to force or coerce drug anyone, for any reason, needs to be made illegal.

            “many of the victims of Institutional abuse in this country were silenced via the mental health system.” And that’s been going on for centuries worldwide.

            Look at the history of psychiatry in Bolshevik led Russia and Nazi Germany. We’re just reliving the worst of history, thanks to the globalist banksters, and their historic and continuing support of the fraud of psychiatry and big Pharma.

            “It really is as simple as paying the right people for a favor to systematically dismantle a persons life.” Yes, I’m quite certain that’s what the school board member of my children’s school – who I eventually learned was also a “cocaine dealing,” Bohemian Grove attending, child sacrificing, child molester – that my family had the misfortune of dealing with, did. Unfortunately, I was not expecting my childhood religion to partake in these crimes, but they’re intimately involved.

            Let’s hope we may someday be able to “laugh about it in the end.” “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” We just need to keep spreading the truth right now. Thanks for all you do too, boans.

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          • Only one person wants us to be afraid of speaking the truth, the Man of Lawlessness mentioned in 2 Thessalonians. And what I find fascinating is the way he uses others who may be totally unaware they are doing evil deeds until ……. that “Altruistic Evil” we hear about.

            i think about police and mental health being like the driver who doesn’t know they have hit someone with their car in the dark. Sure they may have acted in ‘good faith’, but this does not change the fact they tortured and kidnapped me. The car still injured me whether they were aware of hitting me or not. And it’s not quite as simple as that, the Community Nurse was fully aware of the ‘spiking’ so he had a fair idea that the dent in the bonnet of his car might have something to do with the bang he heard when he was driving home drunk, and the news item describing a hit and run with someone dying in hospital. Fortunately he has ‘friends’ who can pull a few strings for him.

            I guess if I had been aware of the ‘forces’ I was up against, I would have surrendered a long time ago, coward that I am. But as a result of these criminals trying to remain unseen I was simply unaware of how far they would go in order to pervert the course of justice and ensure their preferred outcome was achieved.

            Who would have thought my wife asking this clinic psychologist to help her have me ‘assessed’ when they knew I would resist any such attempts would result in this mess. The one piece missing being the ‘flag’ placed on me by her husband to create the appearance of lawfulness when the Community Nurse called police for assistance with a “patient”. I made police aware of that act of fraud many years back now but ……. like the knife they didn’t find that was planted for them (Man plans, God laughs), they don’t like the look of a psychiatrist using the police service for their own personal torture and kidnapping service (procuring being a crime where I live). And well, the less said about events in the Emergency Dept the better. Police don’t even want to know the methods being used to ‘harvest’ morphine for use in unintentionally negatively outcoming inconvenient truths. (“it might be best I don’t know about that” says Senior Constable who calls mental health services to pick up victims of their crimes and deal with them while they look the other way). Such selective “editing” of evidence corrupting our courts to the point where we can have little faith in the administration of justice. And the idea of holding a psychiatrist to account for anything is laughable, and doesn’t the clinic psychologist know it? (or so they thought, trouble with unbelievers is they really don’t think they are being watched).

            The Criminal Code is quite clear about these matters. If you commit an offence in an attmept to make what would otherwise be unlawful, that does not make everything you do after that offence lawful. It means you have attempted to conceal those offences and done so with malice. It would be easy for anyone with access to check WHEN I was ‘flagged’ on the police system, and by whom. I’m not even claiming that this proves the crimes, but it would lead one to suspect on reasonable grounds that this was a person attempting to make what was unlawful, appear to be lawful. The pattern of telephone calls from my wife to the clinic psychologist holds the key to the truth. They needed this to be done in a specific manner, psychologist obtains the flag, wife now deceives Community Nurse, C.N. deceives Police, Police find planted items and make what appears to be a lawful referral based on false flag……

            Taken me a while but I never was the sharpest tool in the shed, and have often been cheated by people I should be able to trust. And still they maintain the fraud, and deny any response to my allegations. Don’t like the truth, ignore it being the method to conceal it where I live. The Minister with his head up the elephants ass claiming nothing to see here lol

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    • I do not have a license to practice medicine so nothing that I say should substitute for professional medical advice: I believe that you describe a pattern of behaviors that suggest that your time with Jim was extremely traumatic – too painful for recall.

      “I keep getting told by professionals that if anything had happened, I would have remembered it.” This is confusing to me; I thought that most psychologists and psychiatrists believed in “repressed memories” of extremely traumatic experiences.

      Have you read any of the books by Jennifer Freyd? I understood her to be the daughter of parents who started one of the original “False Memory Syndrome” groups and a leading advocate of “repressed memories.”

      Best wishes, Steve-2

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    • It’s a touchy subject and so it should be. Kids are vulnerable to adults and kids, in fact adults are vulnerable where there is a power or ‘knowledge’ inequality. If a kid remembers something, one would hope it is absolutely not ignored.
      I have also had it suggested to me that “something happened”, but I also know that there are obsessed therapists who are fixated on the latest theories and I know that kids should not be alone with therapists DUH. Especially delving into weird shit that the kid does not have a mental power over…such as the adult “investigating” a kids mind. Kids know. Kids often feel really weird being put into the position of being “talked” to. They can sense something is off and all they feel is that it is them. They feel uncomfortable unless it’s a really nice play time. A fun time.
      I never appreciated this “digging”. Why make trouble? Perhaps EVEN if something happened to me, perhaps THAT is not my issue or biggest issue and perhaps when the therapist gets all tingly and excited that THEY discovered the issue, it just adds to me brooding over shit that does not have the biggest meaning.
      And adults should not make the subject become the subject, getting the kid or now adult to question everything, or that what happened is why they are “broken”. Because too often, it just leads to victimization all over again. And then for more money, one can “work through stuff” etc etc.

      There is a ton of crap I don’t remember from childhood, but so do many others. 30watt, what I myself find suspicious is that you were treated for YOUR anxiety when it was actually your dad that had the anxiety, which would have made you feel really weird to sit in “treatment” for it. Your mind could not have comprehended it. Psychiatry and psychology haul in the wrong people. Besides, most treatment is garbage.
      Most “treatment” should from the getgo focus on that “shit happens” and how to gain confidence.
      There is a ton of barbaric dehumanizing that can happen to people, to kids that will always feel weird or be painful.
      I think it is a fallacy that we need to “address” everything that ever happened. And that would be up to the individual but I know there are many, many therapists that operate in a “trained” style and can be more damaging than helpful. There was this huge focus on “repressed memories” which went way south and I know one adult who became much worse after seeing “mental health” people. It was my cousin where it came out that her dad abused her sexually. Now her mom died when she was 4 and there were 3 kids, one a baby. The mom died just shortly after birth and my uncle lived in a very isolated rural place with the kids. My cousin was never as fucked up until she started therapy and then drugs. I was not involved since she lived elsewhere and she had been older, but now when I look back, I know that her life would have been shit living in poor squalor conditions, without a mom, in the woods, with a father that knew nothing about anything. I wish she would have had a bright person to work with, or a community to support her missed childhood. Her issues were not JUST the one thing. Because one should know that a perpetrator would do more harms than just the sexuality part of it.
      I question “repressed memory” and I very much question “false memory”
      And often I think if we feel something was “off”, it might have been something about the person that we were around. Most kids are highly confused as to “why” they are in “therapy”. why is this person looking at me, making me colour, asking me questions. I know I have been very weirded out even as an adult.

      It should be up to you how and why you investigate as an adult.

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      • “Psychiatry and psychology haul in the wrong people.”

        Money in the bank, or insurance that pays for $200 hand shakes? Haul em in.

        Nope, they got the right people. lol

        The ‘confessional’ is still a place where the eavesdropper can obtain information to discern truth from untruth, though I have questions regarding the ethics of this method. “Would you spy on your brother? Would you eat your dead brothers flesh? Nay, yea would abhor it” (Al Hujurat Ayat 12).

        For example “Who else has got the documents?” from a psychologist to obtain information for police who, wish to have their criminal negligence in regards certain matters concealed from public view. Not a good look, though as is the case with many abuse victims, you find yourself surrounded by abusers enabling each other in their time of need.

        Consider the child who (as an adult) reported to the Royal Commission that he escaped from the Institution where he was being repeatedly raped, only to have the police he complained to return him to the same Institution where he was locked in a cage the size of a tea chest and repeatedly assaulted over days for daring to think police would assist him. It would seem Sargent “we don’t have a copy of the Criminal Code in this Station” gets around and has been in the ‘job’ for some time.

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        • “insurance that pays for $200 hand shakes? Haul em in.” So they claim, but it was more like a few $10,000 handshakes, at least in my case.

          The good thing is, though, when a psychiatrist is that lazy and greedy, and doesn’t listen to her client. The second time that criminal psychiatrist has you medically unnecessarily shipped a long distance to her. If you ask all the doctors she’s supposedly teaching, “Does anyone here speak English.”

          Oh, a bunch of hands proudly pop up. But that psychiatrist looks pretty stupid, if her supposed client doesn’t even know whether she speaks English.

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          • Ouch, that’s some handshake lol. I wonder if they are still taking the money during covid and not even bothering with the handshake?

            I must admit that I laugh when I watch the news these days SomeoneElse.

            Australian journalists fleeing China because they may be arbitrarily detained and making statements like “It’s good to be back in a country with a Rule of Law”. Really? They should have a look at the grounds considered ‘reasonable’ for detention in my State (nothing more than a suspicion according to our Chief Psychiatrist, fully supported by the Minister). Snatched from my bed because someone went to the trouble of planting items for police. How much more arbitrary does it get when their justification is that the person was collapsed in their bed as a result of being spiked? And then take a look at the fraudulent justification on the Form 1 referral by the Community Nurse. No concern for the Chief Psychiatrist that in order to make his “observations” he needed to travel through time and be able to read minds? And without these observations his detention was based on nothing more than hearsay (something the law supposedly protects us as citizens from).

            I hear complaints about the poisoning of Navalny by Putin. And yet the use of ‘chemical weapons’ by my State a reality when they are allowing citizens to be ‘spiked’ without their knowledge, and concealing this via acts of fraud and slander. They won’t even specify what drugs a person can be spiked with or by whom (and I have asked).

            Amnesty International calling for the release of Assange and claiming he was psychologically tortured. A denial of his rights when he can only speak to his lawyer during his trial. At least he gets to speak to a lawyer, I have even been denied that right. And not only was I subjected to the most vicious psychological torture, I was also subjected to physical torture due to the ‘spiking’ (which is a physical assault on my person, and therefore constitutes ‘hard torture’). So the signs at the protest read “Free Julian, but ‘Fuking Destroy’ Boans”, “Journalism is not a Crime, but complaining about Torture is” lol

            Oh the hypocrisy of it all.

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  2. Hmmm…
    Well, I guess I should state first that my wife and I feel fortunate that we really didn’t have to deal with incest issues in her past, but that doesn’t mean many of the issues brought up by this author had no bearing in our healing journey. and her extreme position on many of these issues, imo, hurt the cause of survivors rather than help.
    1) Her critique of the FMSF is rather simplistic. The d.i.d. world is extremely familiar with this society and its attempts to discredit survivors while protecting offending family members, and yet that doesn’t mean there is no credibility to the malleability of memories and how therapists of the past blatantly manipulated survivor memories and produced wild claims of satanic ritual abuse and more and paraded d.i.d. patients around talk shows like circus freaks while they stoked their own careers and egos.

    Dealing with dissociated memories is a delicate dance of validating the person and what is uncovered while at the same time understanding that these memories can be vague, symbolic at times, trapped in childish understandings, and fragmentary until other pieces of the puzzle are revealed later in the journey, etc.

    The FMSF’s disingenuous attempts to discredit survivors doesn’t mean survivors’ memories are infallible. I ALWAYS validated my wife, but I also gave her the space and safety to later alter those declarations of memories as other pieces of the puzzle were added to clarify things, and some pieces may always be lost to the fog and mist of things that happened 4 and 5 decades ago.

    2) The author’s definition of incest is so wide as to render it meaningless. If she’s going to expand it to mean family friends, other children, pastors/priests, or ‘anyone who betrayed the child’s innocence and trust’, then it loses power as it alienates thoughtful people who might otherwise affirm the horror of incest. It’s an overreach that does NOT help survivors. Incest is clearly defined as sexual abuse (in all its forms) within the family and relatives, period.

    3) Validating and believing the survivor doesn’t automatically transfer into a legal ability to bring justice against the perpetrators and recognizing that reality seems to be a problem for some. It’s a conundrum that is frustrating and upsetting.

    I would love to see the stigma removed from all topics of abuse, but unfortunately this author seems to fall into the tribalism and culture wars our country is experiencing and thus adds to the confusion and division in general rather than capitalizing on the common views most people have on this topic.
    Sam

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  3. Hmmm…
    Well, I guess I should state first that my wife and I feel fortunate that we really didn’t have to deal with incest issues in her past, but that doesn’t mean many of the issues brought up by this author had no bearing in our healing journey. and her extreme position on many of these issues, imo, hurt the cause of survivors rather than help.
    1) Her critique of the FMSF is rather simplistic. The d.i.d. world is extremely familiar with this society and its attempts to discredit survivors while protecting offending family members, and yet that doesn’t mean there is no credibility to the malleability of memories and how therapists of the past blatantly manipulated survivor memories and produced wild claims of satanic ritual abuse and more and paraded d.i.d. patients around talk shows like circus freaks while they stoked their own careers and egos.

    Dealing with dissociated memories is a delicate dance of validating the person and what is uncovered while at the same time understanding that these memories can be vague, symbolic at times, trapped in childish understandings, and fragmentary until other pieces of the puzzle are revealed later in the journey, etc.

    The FMSF’s disingenuous attempts to discredit survivors doesn’t mean survivors’ memories are infallible. I ALWAYS validated my wife, but I also gave her the space and safety to later alter those declarations of memories as other pieces of the puzzle were added to clarify things, and some pieces may always be lost to the fog and mist of things that happened 4 and 5 decades ago.

    2) The author’s definition of incest is so wide as to render it meaningless. If she’s going to expand it to mean family friends, other children, pastors/priests, or ‘anyone who betrayed the child’s innocence and trust’, then it loses power as it alienates thoughtful people who might otherwise affirm the horror of incest. It’s an overreach that does NOT help survivors. Incest is clearly defined as sexual abuse (in all its forms) within the family and relatives, period.

    3) Validating and believing the survivor doesn’t automatically transfer into a legal ability to bring justice against the perpetrators and recognizing that reality seems to be a problem for some. It’s a conundrum that is frustrating and upsetting.
    Sam

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