Truth and reconciliation

Incest accusations of the recovered-memory craze tore families apart. Now one of its leaders wants to let bygones be bygones.

By Julia Gracen

May 22, 2002 | "For ten years of my life, the fact that I had been sexually abused was the principle around which I organized my existence," writes Laura Davis, coauthor of the phenomenally popular and influential "bible" for abuse survivors, "The Courage to Heal," in her surprising new book, "I Thought We'd Never Speak Again: The Road From Estrangement to Reconciliation."

In her 20s, after a tumultuous adolescence, Davis began to remember her grandfather molesting her when she was a child. But when she told her mother about the abuse, her mother refused to believe it, and their previous "rocky" relationship became "a shambles." For a decade Davis was completely alienated from her mother's side of the family. "My rule was simple: if you believed me, you were in; if you didn't, you were out."

In an e-mail interview, Davis told me that she had to separate herself from her mother because people can't recover from their experiences of sexual abuse in childhood "when the reality of their experience is constantly being minimized or challenged ... I couldn't afford any kind of reconciliation with my mother until I knew my own truth and had done enough healing to keep my own equilibrium when I was with her. Once I accomplished that, and only then, could I consider the possibility of reconciliation."

Davis' experience in finding her way back to her family -- even though her mother still will not believe the accusations against Davis' grandfather -- formed the genesis of "I Thought We'd Never Speak Again." The book encompasses a wide range of injuries and estrangements, and it details many reconciliation strategies, including one that brought together Israeli and Palestinian teenagers. Yet Davis' prominent role in the notorious fin-de-siècle growth of "recovered memories" of childhood sexual abuse will inevitably draw attention to the parts of "I Thought We'd Never Speak Again" that deal with family reconciliations after accusations of abuse.

Recovered-memory therapy and books that uncritically supported it were all the rage in the late '80s and early '90s. In the space of a few years, thousands upon thousands of people -- the vast majority of them women -- somehow came to believe that their parents hadn't just failed them in the usual ways, but were in reality incestuous monsters who had covered up a lifetime of unspeakable sexual abuses.

"The Courage to Heal," first published in 1988, was a catalytic phenomenon in the midst of the madness. It was widely recommended on television, in magazines, by friends, by feminist groups, and by psychotherapists when their patients first entered therapy. It sold like hot cakes, and its influence was incalculable.

No one I talked to about Davis' books denies that incest and the sexual abuse of children are real and serious problems, and most think that they are far more common than many of us would like to believe. Everyone welcomes the support and understanding that books like "The Courage to Heal" (subtitled "A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse") can give to people who have genuinely been sexually abused in childhood.

But "The Courage to Heal" also uncritically accepted -- some say actively promoted -- the idea that "repressed memories" of childhood sexual abuse could be the cause of many ordinary psychological and emotional dysfunctions in adult life. In the process, say critics, Davis was a major contributor to thousands of family breakups, lawsuits and estrangements that never should have happened. Now many of them find Davis' new book on reconciliation to be a bitterly ironic follow-up to the damage they feel "The Courage to Heal" has done.

Davis concedes that a very small number of people might have a more or less legitimate beef, but she feels that she and Ellen Bass, her coauthor on "The Courage to Heal," did far more good than harm. "Whenever you make a strong stand in the world, particularly when you deal with issues that have been hidden, you invite a strong reaction," she told me. "Ellen Bass and I have been compared to God and to the anti-Christ. Hundreds of thousands of people have told us that we have saved their lives, and a few have said that we ruined their lives."

The theory that adult psychological dysfunction could be caused by the repressed memories of childhood trauma was first promulgated by Sigmund Freud more than a century ago. It assumes that people can somehow store or imprint complete memories of traumatic events somewhere in their brains but entirely separated from normal consciousness. Memories of early abuse can be buried so deep, the theory goes, that people can live their whole lives thinking they had relatively normal childhoods -- or even happy ones.

Yet all along they will manifest the "hidden trauma" in physical symptoms or dysfunctional behavior. Later -- even decades later -- with the help of psychoanalytic techniques like hypnosis, sodium Amytal ("truth serum") and "guided imagery" -- which also dramatically increase suggestibility and encourage fragmentary states of consciousness -- people can recall the repressed events with perfect clarity. The overarching idea is that once people have recovered these hidden traumas and exposed them to their conscious minds, their psychological difficulties will be cured.

In the first edition of "The Courage to Heal," Bass and Davis actively encouraged women to believe they had been abused, even if the women themselves initially had doubts about it. "So far, no one we've talked to thought she might have been abused and then later discovered that she hadn't been," they wrote. "The progression always goes the other way, from suspicion to confirmation. If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were."

Next Page: "The Courage to Heal" changes its tune

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