Delfs False memories of sexual abuse: the underestimated danger

Trauma therapy and family destruction
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-64268-850-4
Verlag: novum publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 226 Seiten

Memories change over time because they are constantly being reconstructed. This can also result in memories of experiences that never existed. The way the brain works does not differentiate between real and imagined content. Pseudo-memories arise particularly easily in psychotherapy through suggestive speculation about traumas suffered, such as sexual abuse. Those undergoing therapy are firmly convinced of the reality of these false memories. They suffer just as much as those who were really abused. They blame innocent people. Families are destroyed, livelihoods are threatened and there are only losers. It gets particularly bad when conspiracy theories of ritual abuse and victim programming are involved.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Delfs, Hans

Leseproben

Introduction This book is about abuse and false memories, not pleasant topics. But they are important topics that affect the lives of millions of people in Germany alone. Sexual abuse of children is a terrible thing and unfortunately widespread. For years, it was not recognized how common sexual abuse is. It was mainly thought of as the pedophile uncle with the candy bag on the street corner. However, the fact that sexual abuse most often occurs within the family and among friends was concealed and usually remained well disguised. It is good that the public has become more sensitive in this respect and that victims of abuse are increasingly daring to defend themselves and name the perpetrators. As the vast majority of abuse victims are female, this development is mainly thanks to the feminist movement. According to the best study currently available in Germany on the frequency of sexual abuse1 there are a staggering 5 million victims of abuse in Germany, a figure that justifies the greatest efforts in the fight against it. This fight is becoming increasingly heated, and this narrows the perspective. Some victim support organizations and self-proclaimed abuse hunters have put on ideological blinders. If someone comes forward as a victim of abuse, they are usually not asked whether the accusation is justified. Instead, it is widely accepted that the victim of abuse must be believed at their word. Not believing the victim is seen as a serious mistake and a further traumatization of the victim. 1 Stadler L, Bieneck S, Pfeiffer C: Representative survey on sexual abuse 2011. Hanover: Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony 2012. www.kfn.de/versions/kfn/assets/fob118.pdf In the public consciousness, the accused is already convicted before any charges are brought. The basic legal principle of the presumption of innocence is practically undermined, and often even courts cannot escape this dynamic. In many cases, it is assumed without examination that the accusation is based on real facts. This is by no means always the case, as a number of spectacular cases in recent years have shown. Innocent people have been convicted and courts have inflicted irreparable injustice on the accused.2 2 Rückert, Sabine, Injustice in the name of the people, ISBN: 9783455500158. There are four main causes that lead to false accusations. A deliberate false accusation is made for personal reasons, for example for revenge, or to influence a custody dispute in the desired direction in a failed relationship. Children's behavior and statements are misinterpreted. It is assumed that they are victims of sexual abuse. During repeated interrogations, children often simply say what is expected of them. People with mental disorders, especially borderline personality disorder, accuse attachment figures, although it is not always clear whether this is due to false memories or deliberate accusations. Adults develop false memories, usually in the context of psychotherapy. The first cause is not dealt with in this booklet; the focus of our considerations is on the last case. The term false memories is a technical term used in memory psychology. Those who do not know the exact meaning of the word may mistakenly associate the term with lies and deliberate deceptions. But it has nothing to do with that. False memories are personal memories of events that the person remembering believes to have experienced. What is false is that these experiences did not happen. We have been aware of cases of false memories of sexual abuse since the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, the frequency increased dramatically, initially only in the USA. There was a dramatic increase in cases in which adults who had seen a psychotherapist for some kind of life problem remembered something during therapy that they did not know before therapy began: that they had allegedly been sexually abused as children. They were false memories. This type of false memory is the subject of this book. When the term false memories is used in the rest of the book, it is usually in the sense of induced memories of sexual abuse that arose after puberty in the context of psychotherapy or other life counseling and that were not present before. The mass emergence of such cases in the USA reached a temporary peak in the early 1990s and resulted in those wrongly accused of abuse fighting back. They had psychological research on their side. A bitter public controversy arose between the accused and those therapists who had created false memories of sexual abuse, the memory wars. One consequence was that psychological research sought to clarify all related issues with particular intensity. Two findings in particular have emerged: Sexual abuse is rarely forgotten, especially if it was a traumatic event. If a non-existent memory is "recovered" in adults through a targeted search, it is most likely a false memory. Psychiatrist Paul McHugh wrote in 2006 that the memory wars had been decided: Science had won.3 Nevertheless, we see today that false memories of sexual abuse continue to arise in psychotherapy, perhaps even more than in the past. What has gone wrong? 3 McHugh, Paul R., The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. In terms of scientific psychology, McHugh was right. Clear results on memory, repression or dissociative amnesia were already available before the year 2000. Since then, the number of scientific publications concerning false memories has been steadily decreasing.4 The topic has been largely clarified and exhausted. 4 Pope, Harrison G. et al, Current Scientific Interest in Dissociative Amnesia: A Bibliometric Analysis, Applied Cognitive Psychology 37/1 2023, pp. 42-51. However, many clinicians and therapists take little interest in these results. For this reason, the most important psychological research results from recent years have a more sociological character. A milestone in this regard is a study by Patihis & Pendergrast 5which is discussed in more detail in the section on representative studies on sexual abuse and which has shown that false memories of sexual abuse are far more common than was previously generally assumed. 5 Patihis, Lawrence and Pendergrast, Mark H., Reports of Recovered Memories of Abuse in Therapy in a Large Age-Representative U.S. National Sample. Clinical Psychological Science 2019, pp. 3-21. The scientific controversy of the memory wars in the USA has given way to a no less fierce debate about the media's sovereignty of opinion on the trauma therapy of sexual abuse or the existence of ritual abuse. This debate is being fought in all media, with social networks playing a role that could not have been imagined in the last millennium. However, since the beginning of this millennium, something else has been added or has become much stronger: There can be no doubt that for clinics and for the entirety of psychotherapists represented in certain professional organizations, trauma therapy is a multimillion-dollar business. Lobbying is correspondingly strong in favor of forms of therapy that guarantee lucrative and long-lasting treatments. The False Memory Germany association opposes this development, but the main task of this association is to advise those affected, not lobbying or research. That is why publications by serious and carefully researched journalists play a very important role. They reach a far wider audience than academia and come to the attention of the most important institutions such as victims' associations, churches, law enforcement agencies, professional associations, training centers, etc., and not least the organs of the federal government. Approaches have been made and have led to initial consequences. In the public debate on false memories of sexual abuse, one repeatedly encounters the claim that it is a trick used by child abusers to escape prosecution.6 Nothing could be further from the truth. It is only because there is so much real child abuse that a psychotherapeutic discipline has been able to develop which sees abuse as the universal cause of psychological difficulties of all kinds. The testimonial psychologist Max Steller7 describes induced memories of abuse as the "collateral damage" of the fight against child abuse. Those affected are therefore indirect victims of actual child abuse. 6 for example in forums and publications of Wildwasser e. V. 7 Steller, Max, Nothing but the truth, Munich 2015. It should be emphasized at this point: This book is not about trivializing child abuse or providing a bridge to escape for the real perpetrators. But it is about distinguishing between justified accusations and false accusations. A few words about the structure of the book: It...