STATEMENTS BY PRACTITIONERS OF RECOVERED MEMORY THERAPY

Disclaimer

• Bonnie Burstow

  "Faced with any female client, we can assume some degree of childhood abuse."

  "Whenever we encounter a woman who has such large gaps in her memory of childhood, we can usually conclude that she experienced ongoing and severe trauma as a child."
  "Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence", Sage, (1992). P.114

  [Memories from before the age of 24 months cannot be recalled during adulthood. The average person cannot recall events before the age of 42 months. Most people have large gaps between early childhood memories.]

• Ellen Bass & Laura Davis

  "If you think you were abused, and your life shows the symptoms, then you were."
  "The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse", Harper Collins, (1992). P. 22

• Charles L. Whitfield

  "My own opinion...is that 'FMS'... incidence is minute when compared with the number of refutations by parents or other alleged perpetrators who actually are themselves in denial of their having mistreated or abused one or more of their accusing victims"
  "The Process of Remembering: A Psychology of Memory", Health Communications Inc, (1995) P. 13

• Daniel Ryder [Licensed Social Worker]

  "...if a therapists starts to suspect ritual abuse, based on some of the symptomatology being displayed, it is advisable, in as nonthreatening a way as possible, to start to move the client towards acceptance"
  "Breaking the Circle of Satanic Ritual Abuse: Recognizing and Recovering from the Hidden Trauma", CompCare, (1992) P. 58

  [A variety of professional organizations recommend that therapists take a neutral stance on the validity of these memories]
• Gail Carr Feldman Ph.D.

  "I 'knew' ... everything Barbara told me was the truth. How did I know? I'm not certain, but I knew."

  [Many therapists do incredible harm to their patients/clients by supporting their memories as recollections of real events, without independent confirmation. Untold numbers of innocent people have been accused; untold numbers of families of origin have been destroyed]

  "The problem is that if none of the events occurred, these patients know the alternative is that they are indeed crazy. Otherwise, where would such bizarre and terrible images come from?"
  "Lessons in Evil, Lessons from the Light", Crown, (1993) P. 48-9

  [There is a third option: that the memories are false and are an undesirable byproduct of the hypnotism or other suggestive therapeutic technique. Perhaps the "memories" are very much like a nightmare.]
  
• Ritual Abuse and Healing Home Page

  "While any one particular feature of a memory may not be historically accurate, you would not be having ritual abuse memories unless something really did happen to you. Non-abused people do not have flashbacks or memories of ritual abuse events. They may have a nightmare after a horror film, or an image they read about or saw may haunt them for a while, but they do not suffer from persistent images with ritual abuse content."
  The Ritual Abuse and Healing Home Page is at: http://www.xroads.com/rahome/

  [They are apparently referring to ritual abuse memories recovered by RMT, because all of essentially all such memories are formed during that form of therapy].

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