Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [47]
But how could a memoirist even begin to unearth his life’s truths with fake events? At one point, I wrote a goodbye scene to show how my hard-drinking, cowboy daddy had bailed out on me when I hit puberty. When I actually searched for the teenage reminiscences to prove this, the facts told a different story: my daddy had continued to pick me up on time and make me breakfast, to invite me on hunting and fishing trips. I was the one who said no. I left him for Mexico and California with a posse of drug dealers, and then for college.
This was far sadder than the cartoonish self-portrait I’d started out with. If I’d hung on to my assumptions, believing my drama came from obstacles I’d never had to overcome—a portrait of myself as scrappy survivor of unearned cruelties—I wouldn’t have learned what really happened. Which is what I mean when I say God is in the truth.38
Chapter 4
Good Intentions, Bad Science: The Closed Loop of Clinical Judgment
It doesn’t matter how beautiful the guess is, or how smart the guesser is, or how famous the guesser is; if the experiment disagrees with the guess, then the guess is wrong. That’s all there is to it.
—physicist Richard Feynman
IF HOLLY RAMONA FELT dissonance at the verdict that convicted her therapists of implanting false memories in her, how do you imagine her therapists felt? Would they be inclined to say, “Oh dear, Holly, we apologize for being so dreadfully mistaken in our treatment of your depression and eating disorders. We had better go back to school and learn a little more about memory”? The response of another psychotherapist is, we fear, more typical. A woman we will call Grace went into therapy after having a panic attack. She was not getting along with her male employer, and for the first time in her life she felt she was in a situation she could not control. But instead of treating her for panic attacks or helping her solve the job difficulty, the psychotherapist decided that Grace’s symptoms meant that her father had sexually abused her when she was a child. At first, Grace embraced her therapist’s interpretation; after all, the therapist was an expert on these matters. Over time, she, like Holly, came to believe that her father had molested her. Grace accused her father directly, cut off relations with her parents and sisters, and temporarily left her husband and son. Yet her new memories never felt right to her, because they contradicted the overall history of her good and loving relationship with her father. One day she told the therapist that she no longer believed her father had ever abused her.
Grace’s therapist might have accepted what her client told her and begun working with her on finding a better explanation for her problems. She might have read up on the latest research showing which therapeutic approach is the method of choice for panic attacks. She might have talked over the case with her colleagues, to see if she was overlooking something. Grace’s therapist, however, did none of these things. When Grace expressed doubts that her recovered memories were true, the therapist replied: “You’re sicker than you ever were.”1
***
In the 1980s and 1990s, the newly emerging evidence of the sexual abuse of children and women set off two unintended hysterical epidemics. One was the phenomenon of recovered-memory therapy, in which adults went into therapy with no memory of childhood trauma and came out believing that they had been sexually molested by their parents or tortured in Satanic cults, sometimes for many years, without ever being aware of it at the time and without any corroboration by siblings, friends, or physicians. Under hypnosis, they said, their therapists enabled them to remember the horrifying experiences they had suffered as toddlers, as infants in the crib, and sometimes even in previous lives. One woman recalled that her mother put spiders in her vagina. Another said her father had molested her from the ages of five to twenty-three, and even raped her just days before