Truth and reconciliation

The role of victim is seductive, and not just because it explains otherwise inexplicable missteps and failures. In the heady, angry heyday of the recovered-memory movement, it offered the opportunity to "start over" in life with a whole new identity and system of relationships.

The "chosen" family of the abuse-survivor community, unlike your original family, would never question or doubt you, and would always be accepting and supportive. You wouldn't be told to "straighten up and fly right," and you wouldn't be expected to put up with any people or behavior you found too distressing or challenging. No one would know of your failures in life unless you chose to tell them -- in your own way and from your own point of view. Your pain would be celebrated, your social and emotional dysfunctions forgiven as symptomatology beyond your control. There would be a sense of living through a period of high and necessary drama, and of bravely facing and dealing with something truly important. Best of all, you would not need to feel guilty for breaking away from a family that remembered your whole dismal history and had never given you what you felt you needed. A routinely bad childhood may not be enough to justify a clean and complete break, but an incestuously abusive one is.

Abuse survivors, perhaps understandably, tend to idealize the importance of family and overestimate the amount of unconditional love and affirmation people have a right to expect from each other. Many survivors' "pre-discovery" stories betray a disquieting undercurrent of disappointment with their families' emotional support and responsiveness, and the abuse diagnosis seems to validate and justify that discontent.

In "The Courage to Heal" Laura Davis inadvertently illustrates this concept with a dramatic rendering of the separation from her mother. "I've built this wall between us with careful, conscious precision," she writes in an elegiac tone. "I know I'm not the daughter you wanted, Momma. I've always known that. But with my wall close around me, I can see that you're not the mother I wanted, either, all-knowing, all-giving, all-protective."

In a later section, Davis composes a letter she wishes she could receive from her mother after six months of their estrangement. It is not just a letter of total acceptance and apology, but of virtual self-abasement, and it ends by congratulating Davis for her courage.

"I must step past my own denial and support you," Davis has her mother say. "As your mother, I want to give you whatever love and nurturing I can to help you get through this thing ... Laurie, I think you are incredibly brave to do this work. I am proud of you. Your willingness to face the truth of your life is an inspiration to me. I only hope I can face my own life with as much grit and determination." Davis reports with regret that her mother's reaction to the proposed letter was not a happy one, and that was when Davis realized that reconciliation was impossible: "I was not going to get what I wanted from my mother."

In the same section another woman writes of her mother, "Her love is not the kind of love I can believe in. She doesn't have the instincts of a lioness for her cubs, and that's the kind of primal love I need." Bass and Davis note in reply, without a trace of irony: "This fierce, clear love isn't available to many survivors from their families."

Perfect, "fierce, clear" love is not available from most families, period. And no parent can be "all-knowing, all-giving, all-protective." But recovering a memory of horrible abuse means not having to acknowledge the ordinary limitations of family love. As a victim of abuse, the survivor no longer has to make any concessions to the needs or feelings of others in her family.

She has suffered, and she is therefore the center of the family's emotional and moral universe. She must have all the power and control in her relationships with her family, and her family must, according to another checklist in "The Courage to Heal," accept the truth of the accusations without reservation, apologize, conform to the survivor's wishes, say only the right things, and let the survivor direct the relationship.

In "I Thought We'd Never Speak Again" Davis acknowledges the seductive power of the victim's role. It can be paradoxically wonderful at first to feel injured or "owed" or morally superior. But, Davis says, "while it is often empowering to identify as 'a battered wife,' 'an abandoned husband' or 'the mother of a drug addict,' in order to claim our legacy and heal from it, aligning ourselves with our injuries only benefits us for so long. Ultimately, a label that initially brought strength, solidarity and understanding can become a prison from which we must free ourselves."

Davis claims that the estranged abuse survivors she's met have welcomed this new emphasis on reconciliation: "There have been many survivors coming to my events," she says (she maintains a list of workshops and personal appearances on her Web site), "many of whom say their progress and evolution on these issues is tracking my own and that they feel like it's 'time' for this perspective to come out."

But there have also been wary and angry reactions to Davis' new philosophical focus on reconciliation, among both her abuse-survivor constituency and from people who feel "The Courage to Heal" was instrumental in inducing some women to believe they had been abused when they hadn't been, destroying families and relationships as a result. "Well, isn't that nice?" one woman snapped sarcastically when I told her about Davis' new book. "She cashes in on the train wreck and now she'll make another wad cleaning it up."

According to the penultimate chapter of Davis' new book, forgiveness is the major way to free ourselves from the prison of victimhood, but, she cautions, that forgiveness has to be genuine. "We live in a 'feel good' culture that encourages us to search for easy answers, speedy solutions and the immediate cessation of pain," she writes. "As a result, what passes for forgiveness in our culture today is often a kind of pseudo-forgiveness in which people gloss over their grief, anger and pain in order to generate a false sense of magnanimity."

Genuine forgiveness often requires an accounting, she notes, approvingly quoting Richard Hoffman, author of "Half the House," a book outlining how he came to terms with his childhood: "There's this weird Hollywood idea that all relationships should have a happy ending -- that everyone should forgive everyone in the final scene. But if a man burns down my house, I don't owe him forgiveness, he owes me a house ... Real forgiveness restores the moral fabric of a community and a family. It says, 'We are all accountable to each other.'"

Justice requires truth and the acknowledgment of responsibility. The perpetrators of sexual abuse have to acknowledge that what they did was wrong, stop making excuses, and apologize for the damage they have done to their victims. Out-of-control recovered-memory therapists, accusers who broke up their families on the strength of "developed" memories that are more likely than not untrue, and, above all, those who supported and encouraged the recovered-memory movement also need to face up to the mistakes they made. Otherwise, our forgiveness can be rightly withheld.

Given all the agony caused by mistaken "recovered memories" and their consequent family estrangements, it's understandable that Davis would want to play down her own role in them. She'll admit that, back in the '90s, a therapist here and there made mistakes, of course, and perhaps a few people need to apologize. But Davis herself doesn't. As in the reconciliation she has achieved with her mother, any question of truth or guilt or accountability can be set aside. No one needs to apologize for anything; no one needs to admit being wrong. Never mind justice or truth. We can just go on from here.

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