"False-memory" story in media

[marykmusic]

From today's News of the Weird:<br><br>News of the Weird has reported several times on psychotherapists who help patients "recover" "repressed" memories. According to the therapists, suddenly "remembering" a really astonishing event means that the event must have actually happened, but increasingly, patients realize that they were merely persuaded by aggressive psychotherapy (such as the Chicago-area woman who in February 2004 was awarded $7.5 million from two doctors who had, over a 12-year period, facilitated her false "memory" that she had bred children for a satanic cult). In August 2005, a leading skeptic of such therapists, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, reported (in a National Academy of Sciences publication) how her research team had planted "memories" in her subjects' minds, actually convincing strawberry ice cream lovers, falsely, that they had forgotten that they used to hate the stuff. [Los Angeles Times, 8-2-05]<br><br>This is bad... ridicule is a powerful control mechanism. --MaryK <p></p><i></i>

[banned]

...to indicate the programmers are worried and so launch another round of discrediting stories.<br><br>I strongly recommend the books of Dr. Lenore Terr, who has done work on trauma and memory that is not confined to the contentious subject of incest/abuse memories. I heard her speak when I was in law school and read her books when I was dealing with my own incest history. She worked with the kids who were buried in the bus at Chowchilla.<br><br>I think fighting the FMS disinformation specialists (it's OK to call them that, right, since they don't post here? <!--EZCODE EMOTICON START :D --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/happy.gif ALT=":D"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> ) is two pronged: first, to discredit the "recovered memory" debunkers, and second, to advance the work of experts who do believe in its validity.<br><br>Years before this became a hot topic, before there was any such animal as "False Memory Syndrome", a friend of mine then about 35 years old spontaneously remembered being abused by her father in junior high. At her therapist's urging she did some detective work and found she had been absent from school several months in the 9th grade, then that she had had an abortion. When she confronted her father he ADMITTED he had gotten her pregnant and taken her for the abortion and said, "So? I made a mistake. That's why pencils have erasers."<br><br>This woman went through hell because her mother and brother turned on her DESPITE her father's admission, for upsetting HIM (he was elderly by then), and her husband, while claiming to believe her, kept telling her to 'get over it' because it was so far in the past. Her marriage broke up, she had a breakdown and lost a job she really loved in nursing.<br><br>I lost track of her when she moved away, but I have always been willing to bet that her father probably joined the FMS brigade when they emerged in the '90s, and tells his sad story about how his family got broken up because some therapist poisoned his dear little daughter against him (she wasn't even IN therapy when the memory arose.)<br><br>There may be a few genuinely confused and well meaning people in it, and I'm not saying that there is no such thing as a false accusation of abuse, or that there aren't bad therapists who aren't properly trained to deal with emerging memories of traumatic situations not limited to sexual abuse (like combat vets who then go on to kill themselves and/or their families.) But the organized FMS movement participants are virtually ALL abuse perps, or involved in abuse/programming for the government. <br><br> <p></p><i></i>

[AnnaLivia]

People wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that women aren’t raped, just because in one case a woman falsely accused. Sad that the standard is so different for recovered memory. I’m sure the FMS people make it a lot easier for the general public to dismiss mind control and a host of other ills. Dark work they do. <p></p><i></i>

[banned]

...depending on the circumstances. If they're attacked by a total stranger in an alley and beaten within an inch of their lives, no, but if it's a situation that could be considered 'date rape' or even moreso 'marital rape'--I still hear from men and even occasionally from women that 'she probably asked for it going to a bar alone dressed like that', 'he probably didn't want to see her again and that's her revenge' (or 'she found out he was married' or something similar), blahblahblah.<br><br>I even said something similar myself once...it was a case where a 15 year old girl dressed up like a hoochie mama picked up a guy in a hotel bar after they'd both had quite a bit to drink, they had sex, her mother found out she hadn't been at her friend's doing homework that night, and when she finally told Mom what she'd really done, they nailed the guy for statutory rape (which admittedly is a little different since it doesn't require allegations of force). He was flabbergasted and said that she told him she was over 21, had a fake ID, and LOOKED over 21. There was nothing to be done because as the old saying goes 16 gets you 20, but what flabbergasted ME was the self righteous rage of Mom and Hoochie Daughter against this guy. I found myself saying "If you sit in a bar boozing on a fake ID, go to a hotel room and let a guy boff you, statutory rape law should not apply" and most of my female and liberal friends ripped me a new one. Legally of course a 15 year old (depending on the state/country that is) cannot be held to consent to sex even if she solicits it and intentionally and persuasively conceals her age (the girl DID look way older than 15), a result I find contrary to basic fairness.<br><br>The law needs to be written and enforced in such a way as to make sure that the real victim in a situation is the one who takes the fall. That means if someone is forced to have sex, even if they were with that person voluntarily, it's considered rape, and it means that safeguards have to be in effect to prevent the 1 in 1 million rape allegations that are specious/revenge motivated from ruining the life of the accused.<br><br>Here is a question you might want to consider, it happened to me back in the day: I consented to sex with a guy I had been going steady with for about a year. However, our agreement was that he ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS use a condom. One night suddenly he entered me and ejaculated sans condom before I could even react (he had half a foot and 60 pounds on me and had me pinned under him).<br><br>Rape?<br><br>Some of my friends said so.<br><br>I FELT so.<br><br>But I didn't report it.<br><br>Should I have?<br><br>(Goes without saying I should have dumped him on the spot, but it took more abuse of me, as it often does for us incest survivors, before I finally gave him the heave ho.) <p></p><i></i>