Untitled Normal Page

[The following material is from O Timothy magazine, Volume 13, Issue 3, 1996. This material cannot be placed on BBS or Internet sites without express permission from the author. Any articles which are redistributed by e-mail or print must be left intact and nothing must be removed or changed, including these informational headers. Copyright 1995 by David W. Cloud. All rights are reserved by the author. O Timothy is a monthly magazine. Annual subscription is US$20 FOR THE UNITED STATES. Send to Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org. FOR CANADA the subscription is $20 Canadian. Send to Bethel Baptist Church, P.O. Box 9075, London, Ontario N6E 1V0. The Way of Life Internet web site is http://www.wayoflife.org .]

1-1.5 MILLION FAMILIES RUINED BY FALSE MEMORY THERAPY

The following is excerpted from the Fall 1995 issue of Women's Freedom Network Newsletter:

As a society we seem hooked on periodic witch-hunting, where common sense gets ditched, the `truth' recklessly improvised and hysteria takes root. We are now ten years deep into an epidemic of sex-abuse hysteria, flanked by a false memory syndrome craze of limitless proportions.

Militant feminism stands prominent--albeit not alone--in this sad drama. Its fixed romance of victimhood, anti-male mythologies and the general din of unchallenged misandry have both fed, and fed upon, this awful virus. . . .

Numbers are hard to verify as of yet, but speculation ranges in the neighborhood of 1-1.5 million families that have been ruined by false memories induced during therapy. Preliminary projections show that perhaps as many as 400,000 licensed therapists use at least some form of 'leading' technique (hypnotism, guided imagery, etc.) designed to uncover repressed sex abuse in one's history. And no one can count how many lesser-trained cottage industry-type 'therapists' are also out there, spreading the virus, with frightening righteousness--all of them creating the very implanted experience of tragic trauma that they so pompously profess to oppose. Ralph Underwager, at the Institute for Psychologic Therapies, suggests a guesstimate of 35-70,000 persons (mostly men, but certainly not all) who are currently in prison under false charges. The courts are increasingly full of cases being litigated (more and more of them against counselors), and the contamination has spread virtually everywhere: into State Human Services Departments; social workers functioning peremptorily and without due restraint in the field; law enforcement systems which Richard Gardner, of Columbia, believes may need to be wholly retrained, so deeply has the skew taken root; the American Psychological Association, which has been woefully slow to self-govern the rules of procedure which have been in place for decades, the violation of which is wide-spread and constitutes de facto malpractice. . . .

Of course, it also provided a convenient escape into blame for those unwilling to own the responsibility for their lives. Virtually any symptom one experienced, of any kind, fit somewhere in the bogus escape hatch: Sex-abuse Victim, and/or Woman Under Siege.

Meanwhile, increasing numbers of `retractors' (women who've made allegations of sex abuse based on retrieved memory, encouraged by their therapists, and who later come to understand their errors) are now trying to face life with the added burden of accepting the damage they have done. Suicide is high in their ranks. And often they face--as any of us face who dare to speak into the teeth of this wretched business--the added cruelty of being accused. . . . Assuming the role of `victim' for reasons of self-serving leverage is exactly the trump card of choice for passive manipulation. . . .

I've had angry letters and even midnight death-threat calls insisting that I at least forgive those who falsely accuse--for they certainly must have been abused by someone somewhere along the line, and therefore (apparently) are to be granted compassionate license to damage others. No thank you. I know of no creditable treatment of mental health which encourages running from the choices of our own human choices: both the burden of that ownership, and the ultimate freedom available within it. Let me answer still another way. Suppose a male, who's been chronically devalued and demonized, exploded one day with pent-up rage upon a female stranger he'd never met? Would you hold to the rule of `compassionate forgiveness'? I think not. Nor would I.

Sentimental indulgence of humans is in no way the same thing as bringing real value into human lives--an error the recovery movement has often made, and which memory retrieval therapy absolutely misunderstands, in its holy deference to induced narrative without corroboration (Gladden Schrock, "The Romance of Victimhood," Women's Freedom Network Newsletter, Fall 1995, reprinted from Christian News, Feb. 19, 1996, p. 7; Schrock is a professor at Bennington College in Vermont).