In 1991, when I was 17 years old, I had a breakdown and entered talk therapy for the first time. Over the course of my last year in high school, my first psychotherapist blamed the breakdown on repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and I believed her.
Two years later, as a first-year student at the University of Washington, I read an article in the campus newspaper about Elizabeth “Beth” Loftus, and her theory that some repressed memories of sexual abuse were false, particularly those recovered during the course of “talk” therapy. I called Dr. Loftus and told her that my repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse were not real, even though my former psychotherapist had told me otherwise: could I speak with her about it?
Beth, and her colleagues both at The University of Washington and at the False Memory Syndrome Foundation soon made me, along with several other women, ambassadors of the “false memory syndrome,” even asking me to speak to the media about my experiences. Beth later featured my story and several others in her 1994 book The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegation of Sexual Abuse. One other author and several journalists published my story, too.
Over three decades have passed and I’m now a licensed psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice as well as a child psychotherapist in training, having experienced my first analysis in London in 1998, where I lived and trained as a classical actor after the false memory experience. Since I work mostly as a clinician to children and adolescents and am now a parent myself, reexamining this darkness is a necessary way for me to ensure that as a clinician, I, too, do no harm.
In the two-year aftermath of my retraction, I felt my story was more about furthering the agenda of Beth Loftus’s research and her “false memory syndrome,” and less about my and other retractors’ pain from this experience. This is one of several forces that have kept me silent on a thorny and dark topic, along with my concern that sharing a personal story publicly could potentially burden or even confuse past, present and future patients of mine who have or will come to me for play and talk therapy, since they (and not I) are the most important person in the therapy room. That sharing my story could further shame, silence or be conflated with the lived experiences of sexual assault and abuse has also kept me quiet. In the wake of #metoo, the additional fact that known perpetrators like Harvey Weinstein, along with unknown retractors like me, had links to Beth Loftus, and that our stories might be marshaled to sanitize, erase, or retract false memories of abuse adds to the complexity of all these issues. To be clear: we cannot exist as a society without law, research, medicine, science, and mental health care. Moreover, Beth is right that we must establish the validity of our past experiences to determine just and fair treatment for all as a necessary part of these institutions. Yet this is also not its sole purpose.
Victims matter; sexual abuse and assault are real; and it can be repressed. Saying this does not make anyone guilty of these crimes. False memories do happen and they happened to me, and putting into words a clinical process dominated mostly by manufactured images of abuse, combined with the fact that I have also been in a long analysis, makes me even more susceptible to the terrible stigma of being a less reliable narrator or arbiter, even clinically, of what was true and false for me.
Yet this is my story, and it’s a cautionary tale about the largely unconscious need for power and dominance that mental health clinicians have over patients’ narratives, especially for children and adolescents who seek mental health treatment, and how even well-meaning mental health care providers without training can wreak havoc.
The gravitas of this was, of course, completely unknown to my seventeen-year-old self when I entered my therapist’s office in 1991 and sat down, speaking hesitantly to her about my life and the recent breakdown. I mostly remember her silence and the many Georgia O’Keeffe prints enveloping me in a feminine gentility, so when she handed me a book called Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families, the cognitive dissonance was immediate: I’d never said anything about dysfunction, but I read the book cover to cover when I went home. When I was told, and not asked, in the session after, to bring in a current picture of myself, I also complied, my new therapist then placing the photo on her office desk and announcing she would “think of me” in between sessions and that I “reminded her of the daughter she had lost in a recent divorce.”
The clinical reenactment now clear, the stage was set for false memory-making to begin in earnest: therapist “mommy” pored over every picture I brought in of myself as “her lost daughter,” and the leading questions asked of me were startlingly easy to answer: “are you sad in that photo?” (me: yes) or, “you’re alone and scared in that one” (me: I really am) or “ I think someone is in the room with you, and they’re hurting you” (me: you’re right) and “I can see the pain on your face” (me: yes, there is pain on my face).
That I was medicated during this time was a sad and important aspect of this story — it was a different era for psychopharmacology and medication was, at least in my own experience, more quantity and less quality, a fact which is still up for debate even in 2024. My limbs and mind were lethargic, and the other terrible side effects from the Wild West of 1990s psychiatry only increased my desire to feel human again, further fueling the making and believing of false memories of abuse. My seventeen-year-old self had not a fucking clue as to what my five-year-old self felt, and since I lacked the developmental and physiological ability to have perspective from my temporarily diminished state, in the absence of any other mental health treatment options available to me, I told my therapist whatever the fuck she wanted to get out of the inertia I was in. Even if that meant confirming her belief that I was a sad and abused five-year-old girl, I was all for it.
I was also keenly aware that following her lead would contain both she and I and the therapy. Although false memory-making was a terribly maladaptive clinical endeavor for me, I was trying to get better, or at least, to not make a bad situation worse. Was I lost in the memory-making process? Yes, but being lost in it didn’t mean that my inner compass was broken, so I did try to mitigate the damage she was doing to me as best I could. Locked in a strange and subversive tango of falsehood, I kept one foot out of our crazy dance simply by going along with her agenda for the therapy. Children and adolescents use their innate creativity to survive terrible things, including unethical and abusive mental health treatment, and in this case, I was no exception.
Forcing the seventeen-year-old that was me to “remember” past sexual abuse because my therapist wanted me to was abuse, and the sad and hurt child she was desperate to find was right in front of her, though the repressed memories created in and out of the therapy room obfuscated this from view. In between our sessions, I would lie in bed after school and over the weekends reading countless books on sexual abuse she’d recommended to me, trying to match the words I read to pictures of myself as a child, willing the images of abuse onto my younger self by whispering her suggestions like incantations: “Yes, abuse did happen to me. I can see it in my expression in this photograph, and in the shadows behind me. Someone was lurking.”
I never experienced a single concrete image of sexual abuse; nothing organically came to my mind in or out of the therapy room, like the flashbacks I’d read about in books, but it was more than enough for me to co-opt the identity of a sexual abuse survivor. Wanting to escape the present circumstances of my life — the effort I put into becoming a survivor, modeled to me by my therapist, fueled the practical aspects of creating false memories, not so much because they were real, but because I needed something to feel true to escape my current emotional and psychological state. Convincing myself to feel, act, and think like an abuse survivor in a book allowed me to engage with life again, as my creative and attention-starved mind easily conflated and combined the stories with my therapist’s leading questions. The therapy itself took on a routine, as week after week my “memory foreman” therapist eagerly awaited stories of the abuse I’d “recovered” in the week prior: I would parrot back to her in a regurgitated form all I’d read in the week prior, and the encouragement I received from her was all I needed to keep creating an identity and a past I’d never had.
I turned eighteen several months into the therapy, my coming of age marked by a literal Winnicottian false self that further legitimized and made more acceptable the breakdown I had experienced. My low self-esteem and deep shame were temporarily kept at bay, but the guilt from believing family members had sexually abused me, combined with the blunt denial of these events from childhood friends, slowed the false memory-making down and was ultimately one of the first things that saved me from more psychological destruction.
Emerging adulthood also began to rear its head, and the very practical considerations of continuing to pay for the sessions after moving out of my parents’ house, along with applying to college, forced me to stop the therapy altogether. My identity as a survivor of abuse was now on shaky ground, yet the false memories remained. It wasn’t until I worked as a camp counselor the summer after high school ended to make ends meet that retraction became imminent. On the shores of the camp’s lake one morning with a thirteen-year-old girl assigned to my cabin, words tumbled out of her that changed everything for me: “I was sexually abused when I was little. It’s not happening anymore, but I’m so angry and ashamed.”
Staring at the still waters, I waited for something inside of me to meet her pain, but it was only her fear and anguish that filled the air between us, not mine, and I knew immediately that what she spoke of had never been mine. This pain of hers was different than anything I’d ever known, and the words she used to describe her revelations of earlier abuse were flat and delivered in a detached and clipped tone, her rounded shoulders joining with her eyes in a downward defeat. In contrast to the oddly victorious way I’d shared my own memories of “abuse” with my own therapist and then friends, hers were transmitted with a quiet anguish. “I believe you,” I whispered to her, and the air surrounding us registered not only the truth of her past experiences, but also the utter falseness of mine.
Wanting to release these terrible burdens from her, I picked up a handful of rocks underneath our feet and began to throw them into the lake, saying, “Let’s throw your pain into this lake. I’m going to name every rock with a feeling I want to release, too,” and we each began to hurl rocks into the dark and cool waters, calling out our emotions as they flew across the lake: anger, shame, sadness, pain. Our inner treacheries were suddenly released to each other, the air, and the world. Yes, our stories differed, yet our individual afflictions could now be held in the collective arms of mother nature for safekeeping, the combined weight of our experiences forming a distance and release from the respective memories that were real and created.
Rock throwing with this thirteen-year-old girl was one of the truest retractions of false memories, along with the false self I’d built around them, that I’ve ever had. It extracted severed pieces from within me and merged them towards a truer self, even though another twenty-five years would pass before I returned to graduate school to train first as a clinical social worker and then later, as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Yet, a demarcation line was set that morning on the lake shores, and even when I went on the false memory circuit shortly afterward as a retractor, dredging up those heavy stones all over again for Beth Loftus, her researchers, journalists and accused parents, the real me would eventually rise from the depths of those waters. I was shame-filled, yes, but by finally and fully becoming aware of how unethically and abusively I had been treated, the beginnings of my true self were found.
Making up stories as a way to distract from psychic pain is the human experience. Children and adolescents are especially good at this, as they naturally create their own narrative within the larger context of their suffering through creative expression in the form of play, their peers, and at the right time, talking, which good child and adolescent psychotherapists recognize when they facilitate developmentally appropriate symbolic play and inter-personal talk therapy that is non-coercive. In the absence of any of this, my seventeenyear-old self knew only to follow my therapist’s lead, and psychological coercion from clinicians, and mental health Institutions public or private still happens. Children and adolescents who survived COVID suffered tremendously during the shutdown, and we as adults had an obligation to protect our children and bear witness to the terrible losses they endured in COVID from no more school, play, friends or learning. Their inner and outer worlds died in our manic search to stay healthy, and my first therapist and therapy experience was no different, though the circumstances were not the same.
What caused harm with my first therapist, in addition to her drawing her own conclusions about my life and history (that then became the only thing that mattered in the therapy), was the speed with which she did it. I’ll never know why — and yet, psychoanalysis has helped to slow me down, personally and professionally, and it has allowed me to not only stare down the sometimes inhospitable inner landscape I have, but crucially, that my patients live with, thereby giving me the courage to help them change their own relationship with themselves.
In the absence of this, my first therapy experience became an acting out, and even a possible projective identification with my therapist of both her and my own primal aggression and rage at the major authority figures and structures in our lives. Though I will never know what was going on with her, my own feelings of shame, along with all the “diagnoses” I was given while being doped up on crazy doses of meds kept me the “identified patient” in almost every relational dynamic I encountered, including with my first therapist. In layman’s terms, I kept giving everyone around me a reason to dislike, punish and hate me as much as I hated myself, and even now, decades later, I don’t believe it was an accident that I ended up creating false memories with my first therapist to further entrench me in this role, which I’ve slowly grown out of.
As Freud said, we repeat until we remember, and the pain of trying to find my true self after so much falsehood might be another kind of memory-making, too, albeit one that we all do when we try to heal and then transcend our suffering.
A terrible circumstance that has happened to people, no doubt. Not my own as someone that has experienced repression and can confirm the abuse happened. I share my sorrow with the writer in that she too was harmed by the mental health system. That she could have had such a horrible thing happen and still go into the field feels off to me. But this being a fair publication, I guess everyone deserves a voice. It stands true that what happens to victims in the system is a tragedy and in my case nearly killed me. Typically we’re not believed and I’ve never had a therapist implant the idea in my head, just total shock of what I can remember and confirm with other victims, even the disturbed perpetrator himself.
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I also think it’s odd the writer think only in flat and detached tones can a victim describe their abuse. As if reckoning with that reality is in any way calm for the majority. Definitely plus into a narrative there is one right way to be a survivor, and it’s by throwing rocks in a lake and letting it go.
I find it inappropriate to include a teen’s story, too. And what happened to that kid? Most kids that confess, and even adults, retract it. The normal thing to do would have been to report it, not do a therapy exercise.
MIA has been so important to me in my healing from the trauma psychiatry caused me. I was abused and then taken to a therapist and told to never speak about it. There were parts of my story I couldn’t understand because I grew up in constant terror. I was drugged. Forced into treatment by my parents into adulthood.
Everyone harmed should have a voice here, but when MIA publishes work like this it gives me pause in donating money. It need not become an echo chamber but thousands of your readers experienced child abuse. I promise there’s more of us than what unfortunately happened to this woman.
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The amount of people having experienced and encountered what’s labeled as false memories, and have had such horrendous stuff, whether from sexual abuse, or mind control experiments involving such, and the rest of what society thinks it’s not nurturing when it believes it needs to train, pay and maintain others whose task is to wage trauma as population control (military, judicial, grades in school, religions going on about who goes to Heaven or Hell or who knows what, who gets paid and who doesn’t, etc.) and they can’t express what happened to them without being called crazy, or wouldn’t even feel free to remember given how they’d be treated would they, or are still controlled by their abuse because there’s no place for them to remember or in remember would be punished by either their abusers or the system that says it would protect them from such……
And then there’s the other side. A friend of mine who had two warring parents, the one abused the wife that the police were called regularly in her youth. And he actually was the first one that had their daughter admitted to an asylum, from what I remember because she was kissing someone in the halls of the college a friend of his reported her as doing. She was carted around from institution to institution for awhile. Came out of such in her later 20s, still regularly ending up in such places, although was fine most of the time and much loved and popular. But the mother so hated the father, understandably, that she coached the daughter as if she had been sexually abused by the father, followed a therapist doing the same. I remember talking to the mother going on about this as if she was uncovering something precious and would get points akin to the pastel colors on a hallmark card or the sentiments in so many family oriented movies with appropriate themes and then heralded as a wonderful saint who could smile at and bless people from her goodliness. Years passed, the daughter still going back and forth between acting like the overly loving mother or the aggressive willful father; after awhile she uncovered what the sexual abuse was. No, the father hadn’t sexually abused her, she had been on a boat with him, a trip or cruise, and had been raped by one of the sailors or crew on the boat. But with the mother coaching her to find something against the father, and the father’s anger, she was stuck for years trying to appease one or the other side. Then, even after the father had died, the mother had her daughter AGAIN put into an asylum, I had told her and the “friends” around the poor daughter what could happen was she once again put into an asylum, that they could loose her, but the mother even stated that she and Lilly’s father [posthumously] both thought she should be in the asylum. Then, because I had warned them, and also exposed the amount of lying that went on to have her put into an asylum, rather than acting like their concoctions of what she never did, but they thought she would, as if she had, and had told the police etc. then I’m made out to be something dangerous……. This is after I warned them that they could loose her, and she committed suicide a few months after having been put into an asylum, along with quite a few lies. That while she was still be “helped” by these “friends” that had her committed.
WHERE is a person supposed to go with all of this? I wouldn’t be able to warn them what happens when someone is institutionalized without being labeled as who knows what, can’t say that what others say really happened to them isn’t from the satanic scare or a false memory.
There was a whole slew of stuff coming out when the satanic scare, and false memory syndrome was introduced. There are a whole populace of people who know why, and they have their own network. I do have to add that again, when all sides are wanting to harness control, or a penal system set up to excuse using trauma as a means of population control through punishment or reward what’s called deterrent, and this sets up AGAIN the very institutions that excuse and promote the study of mind control through such means, whether for good or for bad, that it’s self perpetuating, especially for the “good” side……
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Erin, it is hard for me to process all of this but coming as a psych survivor and one of the people who worked within the area of sexual abuse I have some thoughts that I would like to share..
I am sorry your first helper over generalized. That was a big thing thing back then and humans do have that over generalize issue. In medical school and training it is common except when the med student correctly identifies a healthcare issue and because of the common over generalization issue the truth of that medical student thinking and assessment chalked up to a mental health problem. I know of one person who fit that and died because he was not listened to. So it goes wrong both ways. And it seems that Ms. Loftus usedyou in a way to bolster her own professional strength after helping you? .
Her name creates anxiety for me because she was the the go to person for alleged sex offenders and she got many many people off because of her false memory theory. Her own story is a tangled web and should somehow be explored hereat MIA and her history of legal testimony.There are some journalistic accounts that span the decades.
We all walk in a multiplicity of life and some of us run into problems in living in a variety of ways and causes . I think most people want to help and sometimes professionals do and sometimes they instead cause harm and hurt. It would be great if the professional associations like other systems acknowledge at last harms and hur though I don’t see a great way to completely stop hurt and harm.
What we and others can do is to tell our stories and acknowledge both the good and bad and hold each of us accountable to our best selves.
I think the influence of the legal profession who has no knowledge base at all for understanding human development and psychology has created some harm with all of this as well.
We really need to think for the ongoing life of our planet and all of us that live in it a new way.
My latest idea is a global medical school local abd regional and online with an emphasis on healing traditions of all kinds and ways. I woukd have all healthcare professions part and parcel and a continuing ongoing dialogue between patients and the vast spectrum of healthcare then change professions every eight to ten years because one gets bogged down in any caring position. Breaks and the old idea of sabbaticals. not a bad idea
For those in countries like the United States and not in any contact with healthcare would recommend the old club idea for at and 4 H. It
has the frameworks with guidelines and it hasn’t been updated in sense of real change since its beginnings.
Good luck and thanks for writing. You are the tip of an iceberg.
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Marey OMalley…. “I think the influence of the legal profession who has no knowledge base at all for understanding human development and psychology has created some harm with all of this as well.”
The legal system does have a slight nuance allowing for understanding, sometimes, regarding….. what I try to explain……
I perhaps should state that I go into the nuance here regarding how what’s deemed a mental illness, to give some perspective on all sides, and it might seem to others it goes into left field, or off topic, but in reality it doesn’t, nor is it off regarding the initial post’s topic, you just have to read to the end……. And I know there’s stuff difficult to believe, but you’re not going to convince my I’m crazy in that I’m non reality based have I actually experienced them, nor am I going to believe such miracles go flying into oblivion when others say or think or try to convince anyone they aren’t real. It’s a good thing they don’t, and it doesn’t scare me, no matter what others say to the contrary regarding their reality…….
Since the legal profession seems to usually believe that further traumatizing someone (put them in jail, fine them, set up territorial disputes) who is expressing trauma, one could argue, that then further trauma is made out to be the solution to their behavior. But then you do have a little nuance when “mental illness” is involved, which actually is said can be caused by trauma, marginally, or more than that hopefully acknowledged, but then you have the added traumatizing of forcing “treatments” that in reality cause further trauma, again. Every psychiatric drug causes chemical imbalance, causes biological disease. In disabling natural brain functions it disables marginally and temporarily the expression of symptoms (along with a whole lot more, but people are so alarmist about symptoms they see this as being a profit, as do the drug companies)…. and so you have this interim where they say a chemical imbalance is being treated qualifying this because a real chemical imbalance (that usually isn’t really shared with informed consent) has suppressed symptoms, then after that interim everything statistically gets worse, although again you have those in a statistical minority that get points from the mental health system as being “functional” in a society that does all of that.
But yeah, you do have a slight nuance when someone is deemed mentally ill, as if not everyone has experienced trauma, and acknowledging that as an influence isn’t a challenge everyone has in understanding behavior, forgiving people, and moving away from what causes trauma, rather than investing in it more in order for population control.
Now I, after experiencing stuff that I wasn’t supposed to know beforehand, not knowing how to interpret that and needing someone to talk to about that rather than it being dismissed as nonsense, and the whole aftermath (I also had severe trauma from controlling parents, controlling school system, controlling social situations, bullying, ridiculing etc. etc.)…… I ended up being diagnosed as “schizo-effective” after getting slightly paranoid regarding stuff that WAS going on, but I couldn’t talk about, my mother actually having talked to a psychiatrist friend of hers, as if what was going on that I talked about beforehand never had been (all she had to do is talk to the neighbor lady, to find out, EITHER ONE)…. But then comes the nuance, you see. Being trained as a musician, already (not that that’s necessary, it’s innate to the human condition, you can learn all over the place, or simply from being alive), I had that outlet, and instead of it becoming entertainment, I could experience how music is healing, all the arts actually, more than religion, I might say, because you’re born with the response, no one has to tell you what to believe in or what not to believe in, or what “Heaven” is etc. Science, in observing natural harmony, might also be the same, actually. I was put on disability, and so didn’t have to deal with deadline, etc. only the drive of wanting to accomplish what I was told I had in me, already. Also by quite a few spirits via a trance medium. Before diagnosis, I then had been with a trance medium, and talked with Mozart’s mother so many times, the last time I talked with her, and she brought up a time in the Renaissance when she was my wife, and after this supposed drill where she as a spirit through a medium is supposed to ask me what questions I have, and I completely couldn’t think of a thing, only shrugging my shoulders at the pretense of the drill (spirits also are just friends, not some resource for special guidance etc.) and when she just started talking about a memory, I actually wondered whether she had flipped her lid, since I had now gone to the at least THIRD medium, or fourth, (fifth sixth!? or more depending on what you call communication through a medium 7th at least, but that includes what any simple child can do given they are fresh from “Heaven”). OK THAT’S enough musical chairs, and the first response of mine was: “What did you say?” as if I couldn’t hear her, which I had no problem with, I just thought it was…….. since THEN, we haven’t gone through another person so much, actually, maybe I hear her better that way, no more static from any else’s “ego” perhaps..… That did actually emerge, hearing her better, although again it would be “Schizo….”
OK! So there is a nuance there allowing me to relate to art at a whole other level, because I couldn’t function with “schizo-effective” to work with this system. And really to say I couldn’t have, isn’t some false interpretation to avoid working, because I worked INCREDIBLY HARD, more than others that were functional actually. AT times, knowing I could lose it or go and “compose” and just let music be there, giving my responses, my brain, my fingers, ears, eyes, everything something to do, rather than feeling I had nothing to do, was just……. dysfunctional, dismissed, marginalized, disenfranchised…… I went to what surrounded me with a white light (I think it’s sometimes called the white light of Christ, but whatever…… it’s light from forever, all the colors come together to make white, all the chakras, all the colors that even science measures with spectroscopy to see light years away what stars and planet and asteroids are made of, what all comes together to make this white light, not something that can be extinguished, only you have to go there, with your mind, you can’t just flip a switch, it’s more the eternal sun reflected in the Universe, in the stars,transcending time and space…… I could be working on a piece of music, then step away from the computer, midikeyboard, synth etc. be making a meal, and then I would hear the same music having taken a new turn, but that would be the same as there’s no difference between inner and outer voices as in “schizophrenia” only the inner voices are more real THERE. I wouldn’t have to “compose” just listen, and not dismiss this, and THERE the “composition” comes from…… YEARS of hard work, having music to share, the best musicians in my area from the local orchestra playing my music, but then I was still……. No, the button to turn me on and be “entertaining” just wasn’t…….. or what they waned to exploit, or turn into their way of how it should be whether my behavior or the music………the ego to make certain judgments of how to whatever……
I avoided therapy, my parents were both psychologists, both have passed on beautifully, my mother gave therapy, helped women with sexual abuse extensively…. But so many friends of mine I had seen torn apart by the mental health system and “therapy.” People I could talk to, who had also the same opening, portal, doorway, avenue to something beyond, and could respond without the judgement most of the rest of society had, weren’t even able to NAVIGATE through such to be “functional” at times, or ever……… And then I watched them torn apart by the system, forced on treatments that abused them terribly, and when they couldn’t rebel without the fear of more of it, or knowing that was the result, might switch into compromising themselves. VERY DISTURBING AND TRIGGERING STUFF TO WATCH! Also this friend I shared above in another post……. So I never had therapy, avoided it while on SSI, would go in and out of what might be called psychotic episodes in order to integrate what now has been. Even just coffee drinking, not only does it interfere with Gaba that makes you tired, but increases serotonin and dopamine, and then recently I find out there’s often mold in coffee. Even going off of it, although I only drank decaf, would I be doing this the whole day, even thought like five cups of decaf is about as much as 15% or 25% at most of a normal coffee cup, I think the mold was affecting me. And this was going on for years, probably, plus smoking. The body’s respond, when given some freedom, does slow you down, or take you out of the rational thinking winding you up to not allow the immune system to take care of the mold, so after an episode, I would come out of it, I think the mold causes some mild infection in the brain, and we have this stuff all over in our body balancing us out, actually, so I’ve learned to get away from this rational stuff winding me up, to be rational where it’s rational but not indoctrinated or fear based. Irrational to allow for non fear based rationality…..
I have to add something totally insane here, by the way. Regarding Coffee, I didn’t know that Tina Turner had died, would in these “episodes” play around with a certain Mozart aria, had my turntable record player fixed with a possible device playing around with the wave patterns the electric motor for the turntable that would otherwise konk out after an interim (there’s supposed to be green stuff that prevents it from working but…. Despite that it works every time since I introduced this little device that has a…. um…… little mythological implications with its electromagnetism although extremely small…. something else regarding electromagnetism that has a different relationship with time, like miracles do then collapse a time, as stated in A Course in Miracles, or rather dissolve time that would otherwise be repeating itself when a person has fear that’s causing them not to see what it’s expressing from here https://acim.org/acim/chapter-1/principles-of-miracles/en/s/53?wid=toc a few of those principles…. Principle 13. Miracles are both beginnings and endings, and so they alter the temporal order. ²They are always affirmations of rebirth, which seem to go back but really go forward. ³They undo the past in the present, and thus release the future. (ACIM, T-1.I.13:1-3) principle 47. The miracle is a learning device that lessens the need for time. ²It establishes an out-of-pattern time interval not under the usual laws of time. ³In this sense it is timeless. (ACIM, T-1.I.47:1-3) Please understand, that Jesus can be a bit taking on too much having been brainwashed that HE was this prophet that HAD TO BY by his family, and when it says principle “32. I inspire all miracles, which are really intercessions. ²They intercede for your holiness and make your perceptions holy. ³By placing you beyond the physical laws they raise you into the sphere of celestial order. ⁴In this order you are perfect. (ACIM, T-1.I.32:1-4)” In reality that’s about everyone is Christ, has a soul from the other dimension where it can’t be destroyed, everyone is the resurrection, as well as the second coming…… I’ve had to go beyond him to integrate what he was trying to represent, which is OK with him but then…….. And thus………… Regarding Coffee, I was playing around with this one aria, that had been sung in Mozart’s time, would do it improvising on the violin with the record player (I think I can’t share it because of copyright stuff), but was fun. I’d act like the violin squeaking away was the pig replacing the Soprano (funding for Opera is down in the USA), and other stuff…… Here unadulterated by my spaceship turntable, which I can’t share because of copyright issues from youtube, from where there were people that could afford the soprano https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruM8d4vcGec ….. But then, after doing this for years, different layers added on to this….. I’m at a Goodwill, and there’s a really nice black lady standing there, talking to a worker. The worker I’d experienced before moping around the store thinking she was a good girl and a blessing like a tea kettle presuming everyone wants what it’s warming up for, all sorts of these “religious” songs, like some annoying thing the wind has to do creaking around the corner of a house, when the wind would rather be free of it….. and there’s an incredible amount of gossip about me, whatever I’ve done, getting radical with people trying to exploit me, with the end result they just weren’t up to it, and then I’m of course called nasty or inappropriate. I don’t know this lady, and she’s moping around thinking she’s being good sounding like some muzak that an irresponsible person forgot to TURN OFF. Before, she was going on, and then she say, seeing me: “He’s nasty…..” I had enough of it, and remarked: “Wow….. she howls…..” Then she says I’m nasty again. WELL! THAT being beforehand, actually. Time “passes” and I’m there at the store again, turns out there then a nice Black lady talking to her, I could see. I could see the soft energy around this lady, they had an interaction, and as the lady was leaving, the worker says: “She says she’ll buy me a cup of coffee…..” out loud so everyone can hear, and then looking at me: “How do you know I need coffee……” Either during this, before or after, I motioned to the woman, sort of a wave, when you at least lift your hands but not too much, to not make it look indoctrinated or officiated but simply human, and smile, again not too much. Just friendly, and we’re both dealing with not turning into robots…… What I saw who is listed as the savior do walking into a bus, and then I went and talked to him myself, not knowing no one else could see him. first entering the bus I heard a voice says: “now he’s really crying” because I knew I would fall asleep for a moment, but then woke up after the short spurt and sat next to him to talk, regarding someone I think I knew was his brother back when it’s not over……. I motioned to her the same, likehttps://acim.org/acim/chapter-1/principles-of-miracles/en/s/53 any child would to lighten things up. So the Black lady left, and I remembered it. And then I read that Tina Turner had been listed as dying a week before that. Went and looked, can you imagine you can do this on Wikpedia listing everyone that premiered said Mozart work, and she’s listed here, which I had already starting thinking was Tina…… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Cavalieri
“Coffee”
It was Tina……..
Emotions also, especially in art, they transcend the conscious mind, they resonate with forever, they have an intelligence that brings life together beyond the ego, they form whole worlds “UniVerse” a song that blesses us with the experience of what potential is there to be creative……. They transcend boundaries…… I don’t think they are limited to being non reality based the way people cut them off, not even trying to see what the mind makes out of them, even when expressed completely non violently, even when others try to intimidate one to think you can’t see any reality there… fiction wouldn’t exist to have any meaning, neither would imagination………art is real……
Now, I do have to add that before I went to get ANY therapy, before I found people again I could trust, knowing past lifetime stuff, which isn’t then past, it’s just from forever. I did start, on my own WITHOUT therapy, start to have what might be called “false memory syndrome” or “satanic scare” stuff going on. But then, not going into past lifetime stuff that then WOULD be gone, a dream you wake up out of, I can’t say I didn’t encounter ample evidence that such stuff IS going on, whether or not I was or had been going through it, again regardless of pastlifetime stuff, stuff like a dream one wakes up out of to see the human condition the spirit transcends all of it…… When simple empathy is made out to be “schizophrenia” and one can’t be picking stuff up that whoever is trying to hide, as if it controls the human condition rather than we all have the ability to transcend and heal it, even in the perpetrators….……. Well…………
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDopA7go7nk
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More what a good therapist might understand is related via empathy….. rather than looking for victim, perpetrator, but simply empathy, which shows there’s another way, and also would heal the perpetrator…. And if they weren’t SO FIXATED on “knowing” what’s real and what isn’t, or needing to be an authority regarding who is a victim in order to get points for being anyone’s savior, than not only would empathy be empathy, and the whole way it manifests find the possibility of being understood, even when it’s going on with someone else, or in general when hidden and it approached the function of fiction where it CAN be exposed, then time might not have to repeat itself in order to do what it’s there for to begin with…….
I haven’t even looked at this site since Saturday, or late Sunday when the stars were out…..
There’s another thing going on with coffee, because after running into the actress that played Mrs. Dalloway, the character that originally was Septimus Smith and her together, but Virginia Woolf split up, I ran into Virginia Woolf herself, or rather himself.
Bare with me, it does have to do with image games, and what you get for being a victim and the whole incredibly deception and mind game going on….
I had already written a composition inspired by her, called mediant. And sorry I should record that soon, haven’t done it. But in “composing” or in reality stepping into this space inspired by Virginia Woolf, knowing that she had committed suicide by loading the pockets of a coat with stones then stepping into a river, because she had started hearing voices again and DID NOT want to end up being institutionalized again, one can only surmise what kind of torture went on there. There are enough other people, like Josef Hassid, you can deduce what goes on there…… But in writing this composition, and thinking about a coat, I decided I should buy a coat, a suite coat, a nice comfortable one: one for her that she could wear, and find comfort. Like what one wears in an easy chair, so she HAD someplace to go. This I had done, enough years ago that shortly after running into Vanessa, I had already started going regularly to a store where there was a worker who first inspired me by the essence of purity I noticed in him. I have to add, although I first skipped adding this, as if reason had to bend over to appease indoctrination, but between writing the composition and when I ran into Vanessa Redgrave who played Mrs. Dalloway, there was enough time for Virginia to emerge in the form she did at a particular store. I heard him talking once, with others, and the sound of his voice made me smile so well, being that there was a matrix of poetry around it, a labyrinth, what I might call a matrix, although that word seems a bit harsh, it’s more like what vines do, like words climbing up a trellis to have enough color and dance of movement to create wonder and delight, which they did, or butterflies creating the color…. Seriously, sounds like I’m a bit exaggerating, but I’m not. It made me smile to hear it. I did notice that, perhaps for want of such truth finding resonance, he would have been drinking something with red food coloring, and this made him a bit hyper and anxious, maybe not aware that going along with such social de terminates as whatever pop was that red, and apparently readily part of “society” might be affecting him.. It was funny to see him being one of the greeters who was supposed to check whether someone was shoplifting, but the expression he would pull to show that he was “SUPPOSED” to be suspicious was quite an example of acting…… I think I had already seen that he was Virginia, and then I ended up at a redbox machine (a company since gone belly up because of streaming services), that had videos you could get for not too much, and he [Virginia] was mopping the floor there. I didn’t say anything, but he was sensitive enough to know I was going through something, I think the mental health system AT THAT POINT would have said I was psychotic, but that certainly is a bit more than they know, have bargained for, or even can diagnose when I go further here. He says: “You’re nasty……f@#$(k me…..” You know what the @#$( fill in. Which to see the words there sounds like something completely else given the kindness in his words, and the empathy. I didn’t go for that, but said: “I need a cup of coffee,” and went and got one, to find him still there, mopping. And then, having created the scene, I said”
“I have your suite, not one that you can [I don’t remember whether I said ‘would’ or ‘for piling’ but you get the drift] pile stones in to commit suicide,” follows a pause to come in at a higher phrase note, “but a comfortable one…..” I probably took a breath, or so….”It’s a musical composition ,actually….” and I might have mentioned it was at home in my closet….
Time passed, I came out of what would be called “psychotic” and with the same tone pure as any child that Stradivari once got out of my mouth, when I thought I was being completely incoherent, or part of myself did that since I’ve learned to correct from thinking “that’s crazy….” albeit that’s another story, from a different time, but when he [Virginia] was at the self checkout, taking care if something wasn’t working or someone needed help, I said: “I think you’re Virginia Woolf.” In JUST such a tone. And then he said, firmly and decisively, but again much softer than the kind of assault such words make people think is going on: “THAT WON!”
The kind of nonsense ensued that goes on ANYWHERE where there’s this indoctrinated idea of someone is crazy or not, even when another greeter said: “Virginia was in love….” the same greeter would belt out “GET OUT!” as if who knows what else was going on that never was. Because he’s supposed to think so, and gets points for it. I noticed Virginia at one point had died his hair blond, and was playing with some friends close to I think a bus shelter or terminal, maybe with a car, noticed deers the same, when they were trying to get out of a situation, with fences around, I mentioned to him that I had seen him with blond hair and he looked like the younger Mrs. Dalloway (that’s another actress in the movie directed by Marleen Gorris the younger of the same character), and he replied: “that was fun….” Only a few chance encounters since, perfect with time’s resonance, him looking like a character in a book I wrote, or when he came into a bus I was in I noticed both of us had the same expression of thought that entail the structural (again I don’t want to use this word, because it’s not something contrived, it’s what happens more by itself), [structural] change of one character becoming two. And when I ran into the actress that played Mrs. Dalloway the elder, I recognized her from a precognitive dream, where she was a sylph like image, being seemingly see through and up in the air above me as I exited a movie theater, where the exit ramp doubles parallel to itself so the incline this involves doesn’t double the length of the ramp. Two parts next to each other, two characters, and I didn’t want to use the bathroom and the concert hall that had such a ramp because there were too many people, and then going to the elevator I ran into the other character [Mrs. Dalloway, Vanessa], she asked me whether I was taking the elevator, I replied I wasn’t supposed to recognize her in the dream (that’s part of the plot, Had Septimus known there was such compassion as with Mrs. Dalloway things might have been different for him, but the whole interaction expresses….. what it expresses). And she told me that she also wished all the people weren’t there…… Her sister had just passed away……….
I won’t even right now go into the extremely abusive stuff going on, as if there was ANYTHING else going on when I frequented this store, or their alarmist nonsense, which ended up being so extreme it’s like the wheat from the chaff in the whole city, would anyone believe such an insult to malarky. Or nonsense, or……..
There was another boy whose soul I touched in with, involving thought, that was Alan Turing….. at the same store. Regardless, neither are working there anymore…… I think they ended up somewhere where they could breathe a bit better…….
To make it short, at the self checkout, I had started wondering whether there was monitoring going on, just playing, or whoever I won’t mention because it gets too complicated looking for a playmate for her son who already is put too much into a monarchal role (when he isn’t even the crown prince, who is now King had a child before this but is still hidden because of image games look up Simon Charles Dorante Day) that in having to have an image he would have difficulty just being himself or human…… no, there wasn’t such going on, although I had included Chekhov to be along with this “crown prince” who isn’t really (we haven’t had such ridiculous royal struggles in history yet, as to who is supposed to get the “throne”), and did run into him, I think. But THAT portal was in a different area….. his mother came from an East Block country and started a really nice store. I wondered whether there was some basement where this goes on from, had asked and no, there’s only a tunnel, which I decided might be sort of a bomb shelter, just because that’s where they’d be, not some need, really. Just of there was one, it would be there, for whatever reason beyond bombs. But as dadaism goes, I decided to act this out and simply ASK them whether they had a bomb shelter, knowing they didn’t, but heh, this takes what’s otherwise just a non reality based scenario, and might give it further resonance. So, I asked: “Do you have a bomb shelter?” the lady who looked like she SERIOUSLY needed to brush her teeth some more, they seemed rather yellow from the coating, she laughed, and said she didn’t know, and then I said: “And Prince William and Chekhov aren’t down there…..” then sat down on a bench and carefully gently pried apart layers of the paper knapkins or towels one gets all over the place, which I don’t throw away but keep, putting them in my pockets, usually have such is there a spill going on anywhere, and it’s handy; but then I found out there are separate layers to them, a whole motet of layers, and then I liked to draw on them, then dip them in wax, and thought they looked not too much but enough like parchment….. These people (one male one female) in uniforms show up, asking me: “DID YOU ASK IF THEY HAD A BOMB SHELTER….?” and they wanted to know why I had such a question, plus it had been remarked that I had been acting weird (I didn’t make any remark about me being weird, or that most people actually probably knew me from having seen me on TV as part of ongoing protests against wars, I only know this because a number of my sister’s friends said that had seen me on the news often, I otherwise wouldn’t have known. I didn’t feel like telling them it was a dadaist exercise, and I knew they didn’t have a bomb shelter, so I said something about there might be some need (wasn’t even at that point using that for any sarcastic insinuations), I just thought they might have thought that was too out there, weird, although I might be wrong one can only hope. Then along with that they said they were concerned about mass shootings, and I AGAIN withheld saying anything, such as: “well, you MIGHT want to stop escorting people to asylums, where they get doped up with what statistically correlates with such, if you are worried, or rather ‘concerned’” which AGAIN I might be wrong about whether I could share it, might still try to bring out such somewhere, but one can so easily be found non-compliant; and I HAVE been asked as soon as someone says they think I’m whatever, whether I’m taking “medications,” and then they ask whether I’m having “therapy,” and MIND YOU this was involving someone, MORE THAN ONCE, thinking something was going on that wasn’t, and even if it’s clear that THAT person reporting you as such is having non reality based thoughts, I’m still asked such questions. NUMEROUS TIMES! Along with these sherif people numerous times asking me the same question: “are you leaving now?” or when simply asking for some ID, and I went quite briskly for my satchel [ was a bit toked up on coffee] having made some movement that caused him to say that was for his own protection. AGAIN as if something was going on that wasn’t…… Well, after that, it’s all over the city, added other stuff that’s taken out of context when the other person or people or institution was more inappropriate, or non reality based, all because there’s this label of “mental illness” on my side. The Wheat from the Chaff…….. And what’s going on where it’s hidden…..[?] That ALSO was at the same brand of store as the other, but in a different location, sort of the other side of the city.
When I ran into Mrs. Dalloway in a dream Vanessa was playing that part, but I was Vaslav Nijinsky, and now AGAIN would I go into what happens when I as a simple human being going through what Nijinsky was diagnosed with, and bringing it into reality, where life brings times for me to see there’s such resources as Mrs. Dalloway, as Vanessa Redgrave, who supposedly could have made it “bigger” did she not make a few points when she won an oscar she wasn’t supposed to, that I…… on the “other” side I encounter such “bigger” winnings from celebrity actors playing image games, after simply talking about the idea I was “Nijinsky,” with people while living in an area where there’s this place called Eastown in Grand Rapids, Grand Rapids having this duality that it might be the biggest small town on the planet, and thus there aren’t any paparazzi, thus these commodities for their image can come here and haul out what they wouldn’t in other places, or it’s a place where even I can be free of – because of THEIR behavior – ending up turned into something thrown into the media commodities arena, and not have enough life to actually exist to experience what I needed to to heal, would I end up in the tabloids, like any number of people, say Amanda Bynes for example, and then encountering TWO top billed actors, having heard I talked about being Nijinsky, and BOTH of them, who wouldn’t really break the mold they allow themselves to be stuffed into as media commodities enough to be free of image and thus might actually THEMSELVES experience what they were acting out…… I mean Johnny Depp having been De Marcos, and feeling free too act like I’m part of all of that, as if one just takes a pill in the asylum, and bingo he remembers who he is, or Benny and Joon as if ANYONE is given a space for themselves like Joon was, or Brad Pitt in 12 monkeys glorifying supposedly rebellious behavior, thinking he’s cute acting out Akithesia or Tardive Dyskinesia, as if it’s cute, and there’s are MORE of such movies where someone acts out what the drugs do, as if this is “mental illness” sat for example Katie Holmes acting out what neuroleptics do to make someone docile, with the voice of a drugged up child in “Touched with Fire” “Johnny Depp and “Brad Pitt,” BOTH of them making intimate sexual advances towards me, but not actually taking care to reach out to me as a human being, and Johnny Depp acting like some sexual favor is akin to what he gets at his birthday party, because he’s a good boy…….BOTH of them all over the media because of the problems they caused with their x-wives where their x-wives are terribly demonized. In both cases I report here, I have to say it’s my opinion, from what I’ve read regarding such, otherwise you get you know what. Angelina Jolie wanted to get the report that was made after the plane incident, and filed for this using a name that shouldn’t have caused it to come out (I think Jane Doe), and then of course it comes out, and she’s made out to be some home wrecking demon trying to ruin Pitt’s life. The children completely free on their own to make choices, and they don’t want to have anything or much to do with Pitt, and it’s HER fault AGAIN. She clearly has to say what went on in the plane because the report gets out, which she didn’t want to, to begin with, and AGAIN she’s something evil, because she says how it was perceived by her and the children, although Pitt thought it was just some drunken binge, like when he and George Clooney used to see how mad they could get each other, and Pitt joked that when Clooney had gotten someone who checks luggage at an airport by looking through it in Israel to start taking apart his suite case, and say in an interview there would have been “blows” involved, as if this is funny, or “fight club” or mentioning that he had a “normal” childhood and beat up on his younger brother………. Angelina DOES NOT want to have to sign a NDA, because she feels what happened shouldn’t be suppressed, and even when Pitt could have bought her share of his “ambitions” from her without such an NDA he won’t and so because it also involves Alcohol again, she has enough of it, and sells it just to not have to deal with all of that. As if she’s supposed to suppress what the children also clearly remember and made them decide to themselves to detach from Pitt. AGAIN she’s made out to be something evil. And Amber Heard. One only has to have listened to the trial to see how the multitudes understand NOTHING about real trauma, because the jury [American] JUDGED her on it, as if she wasn’t supposed to respond like someone does that really HAS BEEN traumatized. Or how Johnny thought she was having some affair with everyone she worked with, would stalk her at the movie sets, called the studio, went on and on about her having something with Frank so and so, can’t remember all of this stuff, WHY should we have to [oh yes, James Frank, had to ask google what went with Amber Heard and “Frank”]; and none of that was going on at all, in the meantime, as was his habit, now not only with illicit substances (his amazing “caretakers” would say that cocaine made him calm, or get him whatever he said he wanted), but with prescribed, over the counter, not over the counter like caffeine and alcohol, who knows what else (probably LOUD JARRING music as if that challenges authority rather than calming down to be yourself), where he even stated he turned into a “mad injun,” (A guy that filmed a movie as Tonto, because Tonto was so bullied, then characterizes Indians as such) not sleeping a whole night or multiple nights. Well, when under such influences, when the short term memory is knocked out with all of that, multiple ways, and there still is the need the brain has for dreams, to work things out such, and the substances knocking out REM dreaming where otherwise you have sleep paralyses and a person can dream without acting such out, Johnny instead acts out his nightmares, or whatever he conjures up as going on to go with the feelings he can’t process from his youth, from Hollywood and what he’s supposed to be that can only make someone feel discarded as human. Any unprocessed notion of what’s going on, the feeling of abandonment from his youth when Amber or anyone else isn’t what his desperation thinks it needs to escape from it, he assaults Amber NUMEROUS times, doesn’t even remember what he was doing because of the controlled substances knocking out his memory, added to this the image he’s supposed to maintain to be “responsible” jarring against what he did but would have to take some steps OUTSIDE of such image games to remember, or even conceive of (no, I couldn’t have done that, I’m “Johnny Depp” bullying someone….no”, when poor Amber saw it all and was hiding it from the media because he promised to change: something they both called the monster. He was found to have assaulted her how many times which was decided by a legal system in England from people who KNOW what trauma is (rather than a jury from the one area Johnny’s lawyers saw would be most favorable, who couldn’t have already have had other notions, couldn’t have been free of the media circus, and certainly weren’t routined in knowing how someone with trauma responds to such retraumatizing, and no magic pill with your “angel” Marlon Brandon administering it in a movie changes all of that from Johnny Depp in a state he can’t even remember without for him too much trouble, while he had been assaulting what he thinks is some evil against him, but only what he projects on poor Amber. In reality what could happen to anyone given perspective on Johnny’s life, and Amber understood originally, then even in the second trial said she still loved Johnny. So, where is the courage? Is this what Hollywood can do to someone, or being a Disney hype (I don’t know AGAIN at this point WHY I am supposed to even know WHO these people are, I had to look up Don Juan De you-know-what to get Brandon to come out of my memory: by the way Amber Heard actually, according to me, as art goes, is Jane Austen, and Angelina Jolie is Emily Dickinson’s sister, which is stuff I can remember, and want to). No some jury of people wouldn’t know how someone who has really been traumatized would respond, the same as any schoolyard, the same probably at how many churches?, at political meetings etc. and how such a person responds (not that the English system is perfect, or any other is), but that was because JOHNNY sued a tabloid, and Amber HAD TO start telling the facts, stuff that before that she had been hiding from the media. Amber is supposedly ruining his life, when without THAT court case he would have retained the Magic Beasts role, his career wouldn’t have faltered in other areas, and then he turns it into what he HIMSELF recently called a soap opera, which maybe is an insult to such…… What does this say about media image games? What does this say about Hollywood or Disney when someone ruins their “career” trying to maintain an image they use as a commodity rather than being honest regarding what someone else was forgiving him about, stuff that would happen to ANYONE that had the kind of youth Johnny Depp did, and then looked for escape in such image, or the controlled substances he did, neither of them working other than…… I mean its like he would need a partner that goes along with his “Herculean” drug habits and image, then resorts to the same without seeing what it does to either, and would they kill each other or end up like I wouldn’t know what to call such “powers…..” I don’t think Bonny and Clyde fit, actually…..
And now as false memories go, and Hollywood and the image game, there’s also the case of Woody Allen that never happened, not even from the legal system is there such a “verdict”, and what the multitudes believe, same as Johnny Depp’s insult to a circus or a soup opera, or even a sitcom…………
https://mosesfarrow.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-son-speaks-out-by-moses-farrow.html
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To give Elizabeth Loftus a voice on the “Mad in America” is, for me, unthinkable. She has no credibility regarding victims of sexual abuse and recovered memories.
Ross Cheit said in an interview with Ashley Conway: “I think that is the litmus test for if someone is in any way open-minded. There are FMS [False Memory Syndrome, which is a “syndrome” that does not exist] proponents who allow that there might be a case that is true, but Loftus and Pendergrast are in the position where nothing will persuade them. I can’t locate where Loftus said it but she asked somewhere, “where are the corroborated cases if this is true?” and eventually I told her there were 100 on my website, but it could not persuade her.”
More from this interview:
Ross:
“Before Larry Nassar, it was Jerry Sandusky, and Mark Pendergrast’s (2017) book argues he is innocent, as some of those boys went to therapists.”
Ashley
“I find myself reacting to that emotionally. I find it very hard to know what to say to that.”
Ross
“It is awful and stunning. Elizabeth Loftus, who offered that claim in the Sandusky case, has been less successful in court than in the media. The judge in the Sandusky case said that her theory was based “on an uncritical review of an absurdly incomplete record carefully dissected to include only pieces of information”. He rejected it entirely. I know many cases where she has lost and she never talks about those.”
Link to the interview:
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003193159-2/conversation-ross-cheit-ashley-conway
More about Ross Cheit:
https://vivo.brown.edu/display/rcheit
https://www.institutionalcourage.org/ross-e-cheit
Ross Cheit “Recovered Memory Project”:
https://www.recoveredmemory.org
“The Memory War”
Quote: “Memory researchers like Loftus — who has no clinical experience working with patients — insist there’s little to no evidence to support the notion that trauma can be repressed and later recovered…. Therapists and social workers, however, say their experiences with patients tell them it isn’t that simple. Jim Hopper, a clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School, has studied trauma for 25 years. The fact that traumatic memories are stored by your brain, he points out, doesn’t mean you have automatic or consistent access to those memories. “You can encode something into your brain short-term, and you can store it away very strongly,” Hopper says. “That is an entirely different question from whether you retrieve it.” In other words, just because the memory exists doesn’t mean you’ll always be able to find it.”
https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controversy.html
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The problem with “recovered memories” is when the THERAPIST tells the person they have such memories but doesn’t remember them. People come across incomplete fragments of real memory all the time that can be fleshed out by good listening in the right venue. I had this happen to me – I was hit in the head by a teacher in second grade. I always remembered the incident vaguely until right before the hitting part (including her tossing a book across the room), then blanked out until I was in the hallway. I shared this with another student in the class at my 30th reunion, and she remembered the whole incident, including my being hit by the teacher! After hearing this, I recalled the kid who was tossed in the hallway with me, I recalled being sent to the nurse by the secretary, I recalled being outside the principal’s office hearing him and the secretary chatting, with Freddy sitting next to me. I have no doubt these are real memories I recovered because someone validated MY story. But no one told me they happened, I had to recall them myself.
No one should evaluate someone else’s experience or tell them memories exist that they don’t recall. But it is very much possible to recover memories of things that a person has forgotten. It happens all the time.
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Yes! The memory and details have to bubble up so to speak and a variety of factors lead up to that release. Some folk never have the gift of filling in moments of trauma from childhood or other times.
Thank you for sharing that.
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One of the most articulate and insightful descriptions of “therapeutic” gaslighting ever written. Thank you.
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Well I must have really startled you into thinking. A lot if stuff and yes I remember your story from the past posts.
I try hard to be diplomatic because I think we all our survivors and we are at a very very hard time on earth. I am sorry for your hard times. I cannot change only hear and acknowledge your words.
I think we have similar views though it surfaces in different ways.
I still have some hope that systems can be changed if we all continue to to tiny abd or big things depending on where we are in our lives. Take Care. Mary
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What this article speaks to me is of the deplorable state of psychological understanding of the human mind and of human experience. Both of the psychologists described here were, in my mind, pretty kooky.
Suppressed memories are real, and most psychologists are aware of this. It is obvious to most of us if we try to remember something that happened to all of us; birth.
“Fake memories” are real, too. They would be installed by a sort of hypnotic process, in which case they would seem to be real to the victim, until the hypnosis experience (also suppressed) is contacted. A patient can also simply make up past memories to gain sympathy or attention.
There IS a way to test a memory for its validity. Almost no psychologists know about it. I think this is deplorable. All good therapy depends on contacting suppressed memories. They are the only source of severe and irrational behaviors. Psychology still has to learn this. Currently what psychology is mostly good for is helping people cope with difficult living or working environments. It is capable of much more than that.
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Thank you for letting the opposite side of this issue be told. Survivors of sexual abuse don’t want to believe that false memories can be implanted in clients by therapists. Sexual and childhood abuse was a hot issue in the late 80s/early 90s. It’s still popular with therapists. It’s appalling that survivors want to be believed but refuse to give the same respect to those who say they were coerced into false memories. Lotus helped people who were victims of a witch hunt. One that is still in full force today. Thank you MIA and Elizabeth Loftus and the False Memory Foundation for giving victims of abuse by overzealous therapists a voice. Please don’t let the threats and confirmation bias of sexual abuse survivors to further traumatize victims of false memory syndrome. Their voices need to be heard, too.
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Actually Elizabeth Loftus has been highly paid for testifying against survivors. She also has her own personal story so that should have been discussed or perhaps a follow up. This has happened within the various systems where abuse has been alleged.
Having worked with both survivors and offenders it is complicated and reguires a lot of knowledge and acumen and after years away from that work I can see how much I didn’t know about my own trauma status and the ways and whiles of a slow machine like legal and juvenile justice operation.
Most times the system is stacked against the survivor. And if taken to court the survivor is portrayed by the defense sometimes using Elizabeth Loftus’s work or thinking against the accuser.
Samenow was an expert on the criminal mind set and yes usually trauma and choices to do harm versus become empathetic. They can be helped to stop and some professionals believe more addition like than not. But multiple victims.
I always thought if you have at least four survivors saying there was abuse then there you go. The trouble is complex because many survivors are too scared to even report or think if they tell others might be further harmed. Repressed memory of abuse or trauma down the line in all of this especially with the Me Too moment. Not repression
ignorance in what actually constitutes boundary breaking in terms of any type of sexuality.
When looking at the oppression of African Americans, Hispanics under the elite , indigenous peoples in the USA and other places , times, and cultures it is at least to me gobsmacking in the intertwined issues of all the ism along with layers of sex abuse and power grabs of all kinds. As an example a plantation owner might become unhappy with his physical relationship with his wife and then a go to sometimes daughters involved and sometimes slaves. Sex abuse is a power abd control grab clear and simple. I am in charge of you. You are not the boss of me. So basically five year old thinking.
At the time when the old idea of sex abuse and incest came out again think Freud the Greeks and Romans and other old groups and cultures no one knew what we were doing. When it was first reintroduced to cultural consciousness it was a vast suppressed repressed area of humanity in many systems it was almost shut down and coincided with the bio psychiatry push.
Please don’t equate the confused ignorance of therapists or counselors with solid child and trauma knowledge based with an approval of everything Elizabeth Loftus. There are many kinds of truths and yes people especially children can be swayed. And there were ways developed to preclude that type of issue back in the eighties.ERIC Clearinghouse has several research the one by White and Santelli well written.
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In my wanderings through various materials on sexual abuse and “ritual abuse” I never saw praise for Loftus’ work. My impression was that she was trying to provide perpetrators with a way to keep their secrets hidden. And that includes perpetrators in the field of mental health, as there have been quite a few.
But I never went deeper than that regarding Loftus. The basic truth is that this abuse is not that uncommon, but its perpetrators would love for you to believe that all their victims are merely deluded, or made up their stories based on what some therapist told them.
I also know that accusing someone of this sort of thing is a top choice for ruining a person’s reputation, as the idea of it is so repugnant to most people. And I have seen too many good people targeted with such accusations. For me, the bottom line is that our technology regarding all this is simply inadequate. Until that is remedied, I would tend to believe the stories of the victims, except in cases where the accused has become publicly controversial for some other reason, and has developed a number of mortal enemies.
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This isn’t for everyone to read. I know there are those on this site who have had RSA abuse, and are still healing from it. I had it in a past incarnation, so I’m just sharing what hope is for others…..
I have to add another post, Barbara Rogers mentioned how there were hundreds of cases, and the same thing happened with the therapist that helped Brice Taylor, mentioned in Brice Taylor’s book, that she wouldn’t believe at first such was going on that the satanic scare said wasn’t for real, but there were AGAIN what she says 60 other such cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu-SZY5bVr8&t=143s
It’s not like this isn’t part of history, as well. I won’t go into not being able to read Virginia Woolf’s the waves, because, well I used to konk out before the end, like my record player before it resonated with, up above is mentioned…… I saw her there in a crowd having to watch something awful, like they had back then. Then I put the book down, although I since have finished the wonderful novel, the rhythm of life….. A whole “festival” with food celebration ,dancing, all sorts of colors, decorations, and there I, an autistic boy, not knowing how to respond to life, was put to death. Someone I know now, but got away from for now, first ties me up, stakes me to the ground, and these maniac people acting like warriors start using knives to pull apart, rip off my flesh like birds of prey. And I had already bowed down from making ANY sense out of it, so I didn’t really feel a thing, much, other than feeling sorry for such sad behavior, actually. How could I have “memories” of this “festival” like coming from on high, like I was flying in? So maybe we can both survive THAT now. Or another incarnations I shy from going on about it’s so ridiculous. It’s like if you have any natural talent in certain areas that happen by themselves, beyond social whatevers…… And then returning in another incarnation with the same guy that I was put to death for, that we both were talented what we could do with our bodies, naturally, and having his child (although I was a woman then, we had both been boys or young men before), I remember something ELSE in that incarnation from some Hollywood star now I don’t want to mention…..
Anyhow, regarding the satanic scare, this was going on in the dark ages, in Europe. I was a gypsy boy, a roma gypsy, people who are STILL horribly persecuted, like the natives from the US, and who police kill more than the Black victims, often during “wellness” checks. I wouldn’t have remembered this but for AGAIN paranoid people, when I was trying to take a yoga class, which I mentioned in another post, years ago, ALSO involving “Hollywood” but that’s not in my post listings, because of hacking attempts on this site, and all such was lost. Just simply trying to share something regarding my love for yoga, to someone who was a teacher, turns out was a social worker, so brainwashed, that there seemed to be no end to what she’d make up regarding irrational paranoia towards me, what MANY people have encountered and not survived thanks to the mental health system. VERY akin to what went on with colonialism. THOSE people are uncivilized….. She had a friend, that when I simply was myself, sharing what truly was a love for yoga, which I STILL retain regarding any such teachings (feldenkrais, meditation, tai chi which I haven’t gotten into enough yet, etc.) but then I supposedly according to the friend was in the teacher’s personal space (turns out SHE was in mine, making sometimes quite illegal presumptions, as if she could read my thoughts, as when I didn’t go to class because I couldn’t get there, instead of that I couldn’t get there, she supposedly knew I was resentful of a supposed disagreement we had (and no one sees what kind of nonsense such is, as if she knew why I didn’t show up, and when I WAS there then again she felt free to misinterpret EVERYTHING, I’m supposedly dangerously in love with her which I wasn’t, it’s quite insulting that I would be in love with such a warped barby doll figure, plus I’m gay; or that I’m a dangerous psychotic, when in reality SHE is the one with hostile non-reality-based paranoia) You can look her up Kimberly Slendak-Baker, in Pawpaw Michigan she had an office as a social worker I don’t know her friend’s name. That social worker, there also was past lifetime abuse, I found out, I was again an orphan by the mediteranean, first I saw myself knocked out by her, physically assaulted, then I was being sexually abused by her, who was then “him,” which was so bizarre, as if that was some “kindness” of how one treats an orphan, or exploits them, that you only wonder where the flip such ideas came from. So when their paranoia (both of them) as the other remains is said to hit the proverbial fan, I had to start wondering what the FLIP that was all about. What does this have to do with past incarnations? So I saw myself as this young orphan, this Roma Gypsy, and my mother had been murdered. I didn’t know even what the congealed blood was on her body, which must have become cold. Somehow, that night a spirit could wrap me up in a bear skin coat, and I slept, or was it a human? My mother was just gone, although I know who that is now, and also was Giorgione the painter, the father already murdered also has true spiritual connection in the arts, since. It seems. For awhile, a cook in the castle liked to have me around. I haven’t seen him for awhile, actually. A bus driver now. But then this “friend” of the social worker came along, some violent “soldier” like person and shoed me out of the castle. This one https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g1156166-d3172515-Reviews-Baba_Vida_Fortress-Vidin_Vidin_Province.html I as a gypsy was of course “evil” vermin, and unwanted. According to him, this time around her, as this person was female, now, when I actually expressed my love for yoga to a yoga teacher I was in her personal space? I’m shoed out of the castle. It was cold in the forest, and then I found my way to another city, but there I got picked up by someone who was want to pick up such orphans, then handing the over to what he didn’t know was a cult. I remember ending up in a carriage with someone who was supposed to help me, but something was terribly wrong. Like when you gasp quietly inside yourself, feeling something that’s simply shocking….. And my memory went from being in that carriage to being in a closet of a room with a priest who I was meant to give fellatio to. I was a boy of say 6 or 7? 8? I don’t know exactly how they “trained” me, whow ould want to know? But this still goes on in the mind control cults the satanic scare says doesn’t exist. Of all places, I ran into this “priest” again at a party of some politician who now is mayor. The “priest” from back then was sitting like he was hiding on a bench of an alcove down steps leading to Lake Michigan. Then ended up being still such an “authority” being the pastor of a church I had a good friend going to. Of all things he mentioned something that he thought might be politically incorrect with the situation there, given the other people at the party. Then went on about going to give a sermon someplace else, as if it was who knows what glory he was nervous about. When my friend who went to his church died, he caused trouble, I heard, that he was so controlling over what would happen at her funeral, as if he knew what should be said, or represented, saying this to a family member of hers, which I don’t know why I remark about THAT, because that family member had my friend who passed away commited, AGAIN being a social worker with such knee jerk responses. The father of both of them, also member of the church died, and the minister gave a sermon regarding of all things I think tornado storms, likening that this deceased man was a member of his church, that he would know what to turn to when there was warning, the whole glory of what the church was made out to beakin to knowing what to do when there’s a tornado warning, where to turn. I have to add that this poor man who passed away, when I shared people that actually had the same stuff going on that Jesus had, miracles that were made out to be against who knows what (reality, a gift from the devil, who knows what…. Against the FDA!?), then this man who was said to know, posthumously, what to do when there were tornado warnings, told me: “I guess I’m just not interested in that….” WHAT is the church supposed to be about? The minister definitely wasn’t a child molester anymore, nor was the politician who had a party at his nice cottage at the lake, but the minister was still quite impressionable, and of course at such a party, I would hear: “that’s the guy that’s crazy.” I don’t know how the cult, back then, got someone to think being given oral stimulant by a child was akin to wearing after shave, which is how I associated such, that the man then thought he was given some special privileges or cosmetic enhancement. You can only imagine what kind of weird ideas were going on at all levels, what children were supposed to be, what being tended to is, what special treatment or privileges are…. How does someone get that messed up? Is it the penal system that glorifies trauma as a means of mind control, and having traumatized a child through mind control to be used such is some wonder!? Like a trained animal that does tricks for special people? I remember some stuff still going on in such cults reported widely among survivors. They would bury me alive, but being just a boy, I could transport my spirit out of there, walk in the essence air or wind has upon the grasses outside, more real than this “body” with its limitations. Or they would threaten to throw me out a window, forcefully sticking my head out of it, while holding it would I not be controlled by who knows what, or force me to eat mice droppings. They did have ways of putting you in restraints so you couldn’t move, for VERY long times, I think, I find myself just now remembering, because I still find myself letting go of even THAT feeling when I’m free like I was to walk upon the air that blesses the grasses on top of where I was “buried alive.” Just stuff I’m forgiving. And then there was a woman I somehow charmed in that city. She liked me, and they got concerned, so they had me murdered in a inquisition like setting. They SURE had ways or torturing people. I still have to laugh a bit being in some device where spring sent prods flying at your face. I seriously had to laugh that people would waste their time thinking this did who knows what. I supposed I ended up dead, and my body end up who knows where, but I don’t know……I don’t think I was gone, I might have returned just like Tina Turner and quite another few……
How did I run into this lady that I had charmed, and who was quite a few times very kind to me. Again there was a bit of memory that hadn’t hooked up yet. Years ago, when a group of Russian people came to theCollege I was studying Russian at as a minor, the morning before, not having slept at all, I think, maybe talking to my friend all night, a good friend, she asked me to bring something to an office at the school, and I ran into a precognitive dream. I had had a dream where Mikhail Barishnikov was playing walking up some stairs, tired with a line of tension in the back of his neck, a red line, perhaps what I’m still letting go of myself, he was going upstairs, where one would assumingly sleep, then he had turned into a woman, and was playing the guitar. A secretary at the college office had EXACTLY the same shirt on as in the dream. I actually asked her: “are you Misha?” and then shared the dream. Of ALL things I later did run into Barishnikov himself. I had gone to A Course in Miracles group where we are supposed to read from this book all the time, in such a situation (something I’ve shared with Jesus himself to give him an escape, sorry…… time changes) I started perverting a sentence beyond what it was meant to mean. And then mentioned to another guy that the next miracle would be that the book sprouts arms and legs and comes to life. If that’s what I said. Anyhow I said it would come to life. During my youth, we often saw Barishnikov play the nutcracker in Tchaikovsky’s ballet on television. Which is akin to something coming to life, which the nutcracker does in Clara’s dream. I actually then, ran into this woman, who had become “Barishnikov” in the dream. The one with the colored blouse Barishnikov was a bit annoying, he right away propositioned me, actually, and I didn’t respond. But I had run into this woman a few times, even when I was quite disturbed she still was very empathic. She volunteered at a soup kitchen, and once noticed I just missed a bus, and told me how she felt bad for me, but I had caught a bus right after that. We did have a conversation regarding that soup kitchen, how she had to work the whole day. I STILL actually wasn’t recognizing the woman from a dream, actually. Then, still not knowing it’s the same woman, I recognized her as the woman I had charmed, back there in Bulgaria, and walked up to her, in the store I’ve mentioned in the other post. I mentioned the history, of how I had charmed her, and then was….you-know-what, but ofcourse I’m still alive, and its OK, and she smiled quite unrestrainedly, what others might not like it not being restrained in any way, and said: “I remember you quite well…….” It doesn’t stop there, because talked to Tchaivkosky through a medium, who was in spirit the whole time, about what was reported as his suicide, and he was good about it saying I’d make it, asking me whether the medium wasn’t like everyone else, since I had become too attached to such, and would have to get away from it, then he told me I would make it, and the medium woke up with tears on his face, not knowing why. Turns out shortly thereafter a letter from the Tsar was found saying that if he didn’t do himself in, he’d be exposed. Tchaivkosky had told me that the last two years of his life were very difficult, that someone made a sarcastic remarks, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. But since, as with Virginia Woolf, I did find he’d returned. I would say reincarnated, but being born into a body seems a bit bleak, as if its not the other way around, we add to Heaven, allowing what remains a home there……He’s an upcoming violinist, also into chemistry, and when I mentioned Monatomic Gold, within a short time Nicolas Flamel became an angela mong us who helped me let go of stuff, even Jesus wasn’t able to, to be completely honest. And with Flamel there was no problem……. Monoatomic Gold being the philosopher’s stone.
Did I resurrect as the pied piper of Hamelin, and help a bunch of children out of the same situation I ended up in? I had to look also, that when Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn, whether I was in spirit, Vaslav Nijinsky not having been born yet, because: A man who I identified as an angel among us, because he had that kind of happiness, offered me overalls, stating it was a gift from a friend. Or just they were a gift. I didn’t take the overalls, but having noticed his happiness, found he perfectly fits this guy https://marktwainstudies.com/john-t-lewis-mark-twain-a-friendship/ and then ran into him three times (along with Mark Twain on the bus, the same expression he had when he had to describe how Huck had learned the multiplication table up to 6 times 7 is 35), the second time I ran into John actually mentioning I had run into a friend of Mark Twain’s where he had offered me the overalls. The third time there was another “clue” from Heaven, but involving a book I wrote, a novel, not the only such……. I only recently noticed I had taken on an accent that would be Huck’s, just after I was offered the overalls. Now I didn’t manifest out of the ethers or the wave particle duality to be Huck, in ways, that’s a gift from Heaven, but I don’t know what happened after this incident, this supposed tragedy in Bulgaria…… I think it’s possible that what remained more real than the physical, that it might have come back, but I don’t know……. It happens……I’m still shaking off the fetters…… I simply decided to talk a walk today, a quiet calm gentle one, feel my head resting on my shoulders, as those muscles are healing…… But I had to laugh that as I was walking, and there were dogs in a house along the way, dogs that couldn’t “see” me with their physical eyes, but noticed they were barking exactly to the rhythm of my gait……. Once while talking to a piano teacher who remained a good friend of mine, a mouse came out and was just staring at me, I mentioned this to the teacher, who replied that she was really scared of mice. Other such with different animals….. and children I can relate to at a level where they don’t have to forget that Heaven exists…….which is where they come from and pure creativity. And love, to use a severely abused word. In fact EVERYTHING we think otherwise…….how could that be what gave us a soul?
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What a courageous, thoughtful, and illuminating piece.
I worked in social work when recovered memory became a thing, and then when Elizabeth Loftus, among others, publicly eviscerated the concept.
At first, I doubted the recovered memory concept. Then, I came to think some cases were legitimate, just not most of the enormous and rapid increase in people suddenly reporting recovered memories of childhood abuse, which were likely due mostly to social contagion and moral hysteria.
Then Loftus came along. Although I had my doubts about recovered memories, I also questioned her from the start. For one thing, her lab study–inserting false memories of getting lost in a mall as a child–did not in any way replicate the sort of emotional charge that would accompany sexual abuse in a child’s home, and that might credibly lead to an unconscious suppression of that memory until it got triggered by something as an adult. And second, her absolute lack of any nuance at all.
She seemed more like a Jack Russell terrier with a chew toy than a psychologist. Was she a psychologist? She was certainly a savvy navigator of media and public relations. I kind of wondered if she had been abused as a child and was very much in denial about it.
And more important, she handed deniers of abuse the authoritative-sounding results of her research, for which defense attorneys across the land thanked their lucky stars.
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