Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [44]
The trigger is the frightening experience. “One night I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t move,” said one of her interviewees. “I was filled with terror and thought there was an intruder in the house. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t get any sound to come out. The whole thing lasted only an instant, but that was enough for me to be afraid to go back to sleep.” Understandably, the person wants to make sense of what happened, and looks for an explanation that might also account for other ongoing problems. “I’ve been depressed since as long as I can remember,” said one of the people in Clancy’s study. “Something is seriously wrong with me, and I want to know what it is.” Others reported sexual dysfunctions, battles with weight, and odd experiences or symptoms that baffled and worried them: “I wondered why my pajamas were on the floor when I woke up”; “I’ve been having so many nosebleeds—I never have nosebleeds”; “I wondered where I got these coin-shaped bruises on my back.”29
Why do these people choose alien abduction as an explanation for these symptoms and concerns? Why don’t they consider more reasonable explanations, such as “because I was hot in the middle of the night and took off my PJs” or “I’m getting paunchy—I need more exercise” or “Maybe it’s time for Prozac or couples counseling”? Given all the available explanations for sleep problems, depression, sexual dysfunction, and routine physical symptoms, Clancy wondered, why would anyone choose the most implausible one, alien abduction? How can people claim to remember events that most of us would consider impossible, unless they really happened? The answers lie partly in American culture and partly in the needs and personalities of the “experiencers,” the term that many who believe they have been abducted call themselves.
Experiencers come to believe that alien abduction is a reasonable explanation for their symptoms first by hearing and reading stories about it, along with testimonials by believers. When a story is repeated often enough, it becomes so familiar that it chips away at a person’s initial skepticism, even a story as unlikely as persuading people that they witnessed a demonic possession when they were children.30 Certainly, the alien-abduction story is everywhere in American popular culture, in books, in movies, on television, on talk shows. In turn, the story fits the needs of the experiencers. Clancy found that most had grown up with, but rejected, traditional religious beliefs, replacing them with a New Age emphasis on channeling and alternative healing practices. They are more prone to fantasy and suggestion than other people, and they have more trouble with source confusion, tending to confuse things that they have thought about or experienced directly with stories they read or have heard on television. (Shermer, in contrast, recognized his aliens as coming from a 1960s television series.) Perhaps most important, the abduction explanation captures the emotional intensity and dramatic importance of the experiencers’ frightening waking dreams. The explanation feels real to them, Clancy says, in a way that mundane old “sleep paralysis” doesn’t.
The “eureka!” that experiencers feel at the fit between the alien-abduction explanation and their symptoms is exhilarating, as was the fit Wilkomirski found between the Holocaust-survivor explanation and his own difficulties. The abduction story helps experiencers explain their psychological distress and also avoid responsibility for their mistakes, regrets, and problems. “I couldn’t be touched,” one woman told Clancy, “not even by my husband, who’s a kind and gentle man. Imagine being forty-five and not knowing what good sex was! Now I understand that it’s related to what the beings did to me. I was a sexual experiment to them from an early age.” Every one of Clancy’s interviewees told her they felt changed