Why did I make a podcast about the Recovered Memory Movement?
Why on earth did I become interested in this topic?
In 2023 I created a 6-episode podcast series about the historical era of the late 80’s and early 90’s known as the Recovered Memory Movement. I created this podcast to share the research I did to support my novel about women and their families still grappling with the hurt stirred up by the allegations of abuse. You can listen to the series on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
I once, ever so briefly, wished I could remember a history of childhood sexual abuse.
It’s embarrassing to admit this brush with disaster, embarrassing to admit I’m suggestible enough to have nearly fallen into something like a cult. Because I wanted to be like my college roommates, I tried to believe I’d experienced and then forgotten truly horrible events. What outrageous claims would I have made, how far would I have gone just to fit in? Fortunately, I awoke from my enchantment before I did anything I would later regret.
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On a crisp and crunchy late afternoon in the fall of 1990, as I crossed the living room threshold of my first apartment, I suddenly forgot what I was about to say. I paused, momentarily mute as parallelogram reflections from passing cars crept across our hardwood floors and crawled up the walls.
“I can’t remember what I was going to say,” I chuckled. My words trailed off into the overheated apartment where they mixed with the Dead Can Dance cassette on repeat that season.
My roommates’ expressions were serious. As they frowned, studying me, I slouched inside my oversized tan cardigan, bowing under my frizzed bangs.
“Jena,” one of them said, “Phyllis* says that forgetting what you were about to say is a sign of abuse.” She sipped her tea, eyes fixed on me.
Phyllis says…
In our apartment, that phrase was the ultimate trump card.
I’d never met Phyllis, their therapist, nor attended one of their twice-weekly group sessions, but I knew exactly what my friend meant. When I first met my friends, they had just started seeing Phyllis but they’d already detonated their memories. Becoming friends with them drew me into the blast radius of their exploding awareness: in their minds, nearly everyone had been sexually abused as a child and forgotten it.
Until that day, standing there with my words lost on the tip of my tongue, I was willing to consider it.
*
More than a decade later, I saw a headline – When your therapist drives you crazy. That was when it first dawned on me that the spell my roommates cast wasn’t just an isolated enchantment. What had happened, I wondered, to all that talk about incest, inner children and memory anyway? Had there really been a massive repression of incest among women in the 1980s? Frankly, until I read that essay, I’d forgotten how hard I tried to remember.
Since then, I’ve learned that we were swept up into a national mental health crisis, known now as the Recovered Memory Epidemic. Some people call the era the Memory Wars, referring to the debates amongst psychologists. I’d never known about those discussions, nor realized my friends were unwitting foot soldiers in the battle. I didn’t realize that I almost became collateral damage.
As I read, listened to podcasts and watched documentaries about this controversy, I decided to use this era as the setting for my novel, a literary thriller about women and their families still grappling with the hurt stirred up by allegations of abuse. And I’ve realized that far from being over, the two sides of the battles just went underground. The Memory Wars sputtered out with no armistice or peace treaty. Many of the foundational debates still linger.
Take for example the very idea of repression**. It is part of how our culture understands the mind, a metaphor for how memory works – if you can’t remember something, you must have repressed it. The entire Recovered Memory Movement and indeed much of psychology was based on the Freudian idea that horrendous abuse is routinely forgotten, unconsciously repressed and then incompletely remembered later. Massive repression, in the words of influential trauma psychiatrist Judith Herman, is accepted as the most likely way for those who experienced early childhood sexual abuse to cope.
Except there is no scientific evidence that ‘repression’ as defined here exists. The very word – repression – is an antique metaphor based on a hydraulic model of the brain. We often resort to technologic metaphors when describing our mental lives, and hydraulics – a system that transmits force through fluids - was the latest technology over a hundred years ago. In the hydraulic model of the brain our emotions are forces under pressure. Feelings and wishes are hidden underwater before they are discharged or surfaced.
It's hard to prove the non-existence of a mental mechanism. We cannot see it and each person occupies their own experiment of one. Repression as a hydraulic metaphor might work as a way to understand and describe our emotions, but it does not incorporate what we know about our brain function. For example, childhood amnesia is not about repression but is part of natural and necessary neuronal pruning that occurs as we become adults. Although there is a lot about our brains that remains to be better understood, we know more than we did one-hundred years ago how cognition works and how memories are stored and processed. The modern metaphor of brain as a computer doesn’t lend itself to comparison to underwater forces.
Forensic Psychologist Henry Otgaar calls the Freudian idea of repression ‘unconscious repression’ and has not found evidence to support its existence. Conscious repression, also called suppression or motivated forgetting, has been studied and matches how traumatic experiences are stored and retrieved. Memory researchers have proposed and tested other more plausible explanations for lapses in memory, such as ordinary forgetting or reinterpreting our experiences to suit our current needs.
Reading about the Recovered Memory Movement as a middle-aged adult, I am struck by the reassuring certainty about memory that the adults projected. The Courage to Heal, Phyllis and the experts appearing on Oprah presumed so much – not only that abuse had occurred but that it was the final explanation for all that troubled you. Any questioning or push back against this certainty generated denouncements and immense defensiveness.
It's easy to see how this environment could have led to the creation of memories in susceptible people. From memory researchers such as Professor Otgaar, we know that about 30% of the population can be swayed into remembering a false autobiographical event and that even negative events can be implanted. And we each know from personal mentation that the very act of memory retrieval can alter the memories thus generated.
But questioning our memories is deeply upsetting. It is uncomfortable to face how suggestible we are. If we cannot be certain of what our minds tell us, we are on very unsteady and uncomfortable ground. Who are we, if not a collection of our memories? Living in a mind with incomplete or confusing memories is terrifying; we are haunted by the specter of dementia waiting for some of us in a Memory Care facility.
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“If Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony.” Eli Wiesel
As I entered adulthood the explanation I was offered for my personal feelings of distress – depression, anxiety, and disordered eating – was repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. In saying this I’m not looking to blame anyone nor shift responsibility away from my own gullibility. Until the absurd moment when confronted with forgetting what I was about to say, I didn’t question any of it– in fact, it just felt right. But why did that explanation make sense to me? Why not hysteria or conversion disorder or any other named mix of mental health and identity?
Historian Edward Shorter says there are culturally accepted behaviors in circulation at any given time, and he called these the “symptom pool.” My early adult life just happened to coincide with a time of prominent testimony about recovery; in other words, the experience of recovery was the available symptom pool. My ‘symptoms’ at that time matched the ambient explanation of both recovery from forgotten traumatic memories of incest, and recovery of those memories. The stories I heard shaped my own story; in writing, with friends, or just to myself, I was encouraged to imagine myself as damaged and in need of healing.
Sociologist Jo Woodiwiss studies childhood sexual abuse and she calls this modern autobiographical storyline the damage narrative. When the question – what is wrong with me? – becomes the dominant way to make meaning of our lives, our biographical choices are the checklists of self-help books and the fads of pop-psychology set the available plot lines. Even our fictional stories mirror this framework. In her essay, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” Parul Seghal wrote about this narrative structure as the dominant storyline of the last hundred years, during which trauma has come to be “accepted as a totalizing identity.”
*
The most embarrassing part of this time in my life is that I wanted to claim a tragic past in order to be at the center of the story. I hadn’t thought through the implications of what might have happened if I had ‘remembered’ something, or how that would have irrevocably damaged my family. I hadn’t considered what it would mean to entwine my mental health with my public identity, and how I might feel exposed in doing so. I was 19 and it seemed exciting to imagine that big problems with society, like sexism and injustice, led to a single crisis point that also, coincidentally, involved me too. I was caught up in a romantic idea of being a part of something larger than myself.
Yet it unraveled in a trivial moment. Forgetting what you were about to say happens to all of us from time to time. It might be an irritation or, as we get older, concerning. It’s not a particularly dramatic hinge upon which to hang a story: I crossed into my living room and forgot what I was going to say. My roommate told me this behavior was but one of many I demonstrated that indicated I’d been sexually abused as a child.
But that ordinariness is why I have always remembered it – standing there, speechless, accused of something I suddenly and intuitively knew wasn’t true. It was as though everything went silent as my desire to fit in collided with my common sense.
Now as an adult I try to cultivate my skepticism and accept the discomfort and freedom that this brings. A simple moment of absurdity can reveal a personal truth if we let it; sometimes it’s the only way we can unhook our fragile mental lives from the culture at large and retether ourselves to reality. In a world that lauds and sometimes aggrandizes dramatic trauma, honoring our most mundane, imperfect selves can be a way back to creating our personal story.
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*Not her real name.
** How we remember has deep personal and legal implications. How traumatic experiences are remembered is one of the most contentious areas in psychology and culture and I am no memory researcher. If these topics interest you, I would encourage you to follow Henry Otgaar of Maastrict University. Read The Memory Wars by Frederick Crews, to better understanding the context of this era. Meredith Maran’s memoir, My Lie; a True Story of False Memory is an excellent, gracious, and unsparing look at an expert journalist caught up in a web she spun and then untangled.