DEAR DR. FRANK: I NEED HELP IN LETTING GO OF MY ANGER AT MY
SISTER'STHERAPIST, WHO HAS NEVER COMMUNICATED WITH ME OR OTHER MEMBERS OF
MY FAMILY AND YET FALSELY ALLEGES THAT I AM IN DENIAL THAT I WAS SEXUALLY
ABUSED BY MY FATHER. WHEN MY SISTER ENTERED THERAPY SEVEN YEARS AGO, SHE
TOLD ME THAT THE THERAPIST HAD SAID: "YOUR FAMILY HAS ALL THE DYNAMICS OF
AN INCESTUOUS FAMILY." SOON AFTER THAT MY SISTER TOLD ME "SOMETHING MIGHT
HAVE HAPPENED," MEANING SHE MIGHT HAVE BEEN SEXUALLY ABUSED BY MY FATHER.
WHEN I DID NOT VALIDATE THIS BELIEF, SHE WROTE ME A VERY HATEFUL LETTER.
MY SISTER LATER WROTE HATEFUL LETTERS TO OUR PARENTS ABOUT REPEATED
SEXUAL ABUSE SHE REMEMBERED. WHAT CAN I DO? MY PARENTS AND OTHER SIBLINGS
ARE HEARTBROKEN OVER THE LOSS OF OUR SISTER, BUT THEY DO NOT WANT ME TO
"GO PUBLIC."
Dear Heartbroken Sister: You are not alone. This strange
therapeutic witch hunt, the search for the forgotten abuser, has split
apart many families in the last few years. I share your outrage at the
irresponsibility of therapists who take advantage of clients and render
them dependent by isolating them and convincing them that they cannot
trust their own family or even their own memories. The process is
somewhat akin to being brainwashed by a cult. As you see, any effort to
make contact with the victim of this brainwashing is likely to be
distrusted and rebuffed.
Obviously, if you do remember any incest--and you would most likely
remember it--tell your sister. Despite all the recent false accusations
of incest, it can be quite real and quite destructive-- the people who
experience it may be unable to forget it. In fact there are probably
still a lot more cases of real, never forgotten incest than there are of
these recovered memories" of forgotten incest.
Of course you realize that even if you don't remember it, it still
could have happened to your sister. However, if she didn't remember it
except under the influence of therapy, I too would distrust it.
It may help to try to understand this tragedy from the therapist's
perspective. She may think she is doing good and have no idea of the
havoc she is wreaking. She must be told.
Nobody becomes a therapist to create pain or wreck lives; that
happens when well-intentioned therapists become so overwhelmed by the
pain they see in their offices every day that they begin to think all the
world is villainous except themselves and their clients. Many therapists
who "find" forgotten incest are merely immature, inexperienced, and
working through their distrust and paranoid fantasies about men, parents,
or family life that should be the subject of their own therapy, not their
clients'.
While it will probably be misinterpreted, I would write the
therapist what you know about your family (send a copy to your sister so
this won 't look devious.)
Second, while making clear that you do not remember any abuse,
there is no point in arguing with your sister about it. Try to remain in
contact with her, even if the contact is unilateral. Even if most of her
life is taken up with distrusting her own and everyone else's remembered
experiences, surely there is something else you and she can talk
about.
Third, contact the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Some of the
recovered memory cultists insist that there are many pedophiles in the
FMSF, and I have no doubt that is true, and there are pedophiles in the
Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church too, but where else can you go? The
FMSF may get you in touch with support groups for the families of victims
of recovered memories. People who have gotten caught up in these beliefs
can recover once they escape the clutches of the witch-hunting
therapists.
You realize that families can and do survive real incest. But it is
very difficult to recover from imagined incest.
Note to all readers: Several issues ago, in an answer to a young
man who had been sexually abused by his father and was now alarmed by the
dire predictions that incest in childhood causes all manner of adult
mental illness, I referred to "all the uproar in the media about the
so-called recovered memories of forgotten childhood sexual abuse (a
highly questionable business). I have since received a bunch of
impassioned letters from therapists who are displeased with me for my
distrust of the phenomenon either as a method for uncovering literal
truth or as an effective treatment for the pain of life.
The letters are too long to print here, but the most frantic one
cries out, "Let's wrest psychology away from the pedophiles, for once and
for all." The author implies that I must be either a pedophile or a
"Freudian" or both if I am not as overwrought as he. The assumption is
that, since I don't believe in the literal truth of "recovered" memory,
then I must distrust any story of incest, as Freud did when be began
hearing some stories that could not have been literally true. Actually,
back in the late Sixties, I wrote the first paper on incest in the family
therapy literature, in which we insisted that Freud was wrong and incest
was real. I've written a fair amount about it since, most recently in my
1987 textbook, Turning Points: Treating Families in Transition and
Crisis.
