Resist the Gaslight

Undoing centuries of gaslighting engineered to keep abusers in power is no simple task. In order to free our minds and find our own truth, it’s helpful to educate ourselves about gaslighting tactics. Dr. Jennifer Freyd, whose parents founded FMSF, devised a helpful acronym to describe the common components of sexual predator defense tactics:

“DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. DARVO stands for ‘Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.’”

What follows is a detailed investigation of gaslighting techniques commonly used to discredit and undermine incest survivors.

The “Witch Hunt” Deception

The conspiracy theory that a far-flung network of feminist therapists were behind a supposed epidemic of false incest accusations.

As has been pointed out by rigorous scholars, no actual evidence has ever been produced to support this theory — nor does it stand up to logical reasoning.

“Witch-hunt” rhetoric is a classic ploy used to deflect blame from abusers by reversing the victim and perpetrator roles. It’s been used to discredit Trump’s critics, Weinstein’s accusers, Cosby’s accusers and countless survivors who’ve come forward in the #METOO era and throughout history.

The “False Accusations” Deception

The notion that legal exoneration of an alleged perpetrator is proof of a “false accusation” resulting from a “false memory.”

Unless you are a men’s rights activist or living under a rock, anyone in the age of #METOO should understand that legal exoneration is not proof that sexual abuse did not occur. The legal system is rigged against sexual abuse victims, as has been shown time and time again — even in cases where irrefutable physical evidence has been present.

The “Due Process” Deception

The notion that sexual abuse memories should be treated as courtroom accusations and thus regarded with suspicion — even in a therapeutic setting — in order to honor due process for the accused.

While blanket skepticism certainly makes sense in a courtroom setting, it is not consistent with the general goals or attitudes of psychotherapy. Just imagine how a therapy session might go if the therapist viewed a client’s every memory with skepticism — childhood birthdays, the loss of a beloved pet, a fight with a best friend. Generally, therapists are trained to respond to clients’ memories with acknowledgment, empathy and curiosity. Only on the topic of childhood sexual abuse are therapists warned to be wary of “false memories.”

What we know about childhood sexual abuse is that — like adult sexual abuse — it occurs at epidemic rates and is grossly underreported, under-prosecuted and routinely disbelieved. Warning therapists to be wary of “false” abuse memories reinforces the status quo of disbelieving sexual abuse survivors.

The “Recanted Testimony” Deception

Many FMSF supporters have pointed to alleged abuse survivors who later recanted their testimony as proof of “false memory syndrome.” Somatic Experiencing literature contains its own version of this device in the form of an oft-trotted-out story about a man who thought he’d been sexually abused as a child but, after receiving SE therapy, concluded that his distress was related to a childhood surgery instead.

It is entirely possible for a person to tell a falsehood about incest and later retract it. However, there are compelling reasons to view retractions with caution. It is important to understand that retracting testimony — along with denial, minimization and memory suppression — is a textbook coping mechanism of incest survivors. Some of the reasons that incest survivors recant are similar to the reasons that Freud recanted his discovery, that Republican politicians disavow truth to align with Trump’s lies, and that family members of incest survivors often side with the perpetrator: The fear of being exiled from the tribe and being targeted for retribution by the perpetrator.

With this in mind, it is also important to acknowledge that denial — whether from an alleged perpetrator or an alleged victim — does not prove the absence of abuse. In fact, there simply is no way to objectively prove that abuse did not occur.

The “Satanic Panic” Deception

The narrative that, in the 1980s, the United States was swept by a “moral panic” characterized by widespread delusions about “satanic ritual abuse” of children — a supernatural phenomenon beyond the realm of credibility.

The “satanic panic” deception is designed to make abuse survivors appear “crazy” or “hysterical” — a tactic that deflects attention from perpetrators by discrediting their victims.

While the term “satanic ritual abuse” may sound out-there, it refers to a very real and commonplace phenomenon. The more ordinary term for this phenomenon is “organized abuse.” Put simply, it is the practice of organized groups perpetrating abuse as a condoned, intentional and habitual activity. Organized child sexual abuse has been documented in religious groups, cults, schools and other organized communities.

As with the “false accusations” deception, FMSF advocates have highlighted court cases in which the charges were dismissed as a way to delegitimize survivors of organized abuse.

The most famous of these cases was the McMartin preschool trial, in which members of a family-run preschool were charged with sexually abusing 360 children. After 6 years of proceedings, all charges were ultimately dismissed, and to this day the case is touted by mainstream media as a hoax.

This is despite the presentation of physical evidence during the trial, the victims’ persistent assertion decades later that they were abused, and the discovery of corroborating evidence of underground tunnels that victims had described being used as hiding places for the abuse.

The “Destroyed Families” Deception

The myth that epidemic numbers of families have been torn apart by “false accusations” based on “false memories.”

This deception is similar to the one used by men’s rights activists who believe that #METOO has caused an epidemic of “destroyed careers” for prominent men. Survivor testimonies don’t destroy families or careers. Abuse does.

The “Science” Deception

Members of the FMSF Advisory Board claimed to be interested in memory research on purely scientific grounds.

“False Memory” research is politically motivated. It came about as a response to sexual abuse accusations and its aim is to exonerate the accused, not to improve psychotherapy outcomes.

Elizabeth Loftus, widely cited as the preeminent memory researcher in the “false memory” camp, has made a career of defending alleged child abusers in court for large sums of money. By her own admission, she has no experience working with trauma survivors in any clinical or research capacity.

“False Memory” advocates uniformly ignore the ample evidence and research studies that support the validity of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Repressed memory is a phenomenon that is also commonly observed in survivors of military combat and other traumatic experiences, yet the memory debate centers uniquely on the more politically charged topic of childhood sexual abuse (Goldsmith and Barlow).

The “Implanted Memories” Deception

The claim that therapy clients are highly suggestible and that “false memories” — specifically of sexual abuse — are often “implanted” by unethical therapists through the power of suggestion.

Elizabeth Loftus’s “Lost in the Mall” research study is routinely cited as proof of this claim. It showed that research subjects could be manipulated into believing they had experienced a relatively benign childhood event that never really happened (getting lost in a mall.)

There are several gaping holes in this foundation for the “implanted memories” theory:

As trauma expert Bessel Van Der Kolk pointed out in his book, The Body Keeps the Score, Loftus’s research cannot be extrapolated to apply to traumatic memories, which are quite different from memories of benign events. Traumatic memory consists of not only narrative elements but also sense memories — conditioned emotional and physiological fear responses that can be activated by triggers that remind the nervous system of a traumatic event. No published research has been done to test whether it’s possible to “implant” a “false” traumatic memory. Doing so would be unethical as it would require frightening participants badly enough to elicit chronic physiological flashbacks. In other words, you’d have to traumatize them.

Furthermore, Loftus found that subjects were far more likely to believe the mall story if it was told to them by an older relative than if it was told to them by a researcher. This suggests that parents, not therapists, have greater influence to manipulate an individual’s memories.

In addition, a study on trauma and memory (Elliott, 1997) showed that, among participants who had experienced delayed recall of a traumatic event, psychotherapy was the least common trigger for memory recall.

In summary, the “implanted memories” deception is a projection. In fact, the most common memory manipulation occurs at the hands of abusive parents who use the power of loyalty and fear to convince their children that it never really happened.

The “False Memories are Invented to Explain Psychological Symptoms” Deception

A theory, espoused by Peter Levine and others, that when an individual experiences unexplained emotional distress, the mind may create or latch onto a “false memory” of incest out of a “desperate” need to explain the distress.

The term “desperate” as used here is a dog whistle for sexism — similar to words like “hysterical” that cast women’s emotional reactions to oppression and gaslighting as “crazy.”

Evolutionarily, humans are most likely to accept the beliefs that pose the least threat to our survival instincts, which are wired to prioritize family bonds as a means of securing protection and support that keep us safe — particularly in childhood. That’s one reason so many incest survivors repress, deny, minimize and doubt their memories of abuse. It’s quite common for survivors to experience periods of remembering that are so hard to bear that they push the memories away again, in order to keep the family bonds intact.

The notion that a therapy client would easily accept a therapist’s suggestion that they’d been sexually abused by a parent simply does not check out with the scientific research on attachment bonds.

The “Hocus Pocus” Deception: False Representations of Repressed Memories

The idea put forth by Elizabeth Loftus and other FMSF supporters that repressed memories are a kooky made-up phenomenon too out-there to be real.

In Loftus’s book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, she writes:

“I don’t question the fact that memories can come back spontaneously, that details can be forgotten, or even that memories of abuse can be triggered by various cues many years later.”

Based on well-known literature by both trauma experts and survivors, the above is a fairly sound description of repressed memory. It’s hard to understand, then, Loftus’s insistence that repressed memory is a myth.

That is because Loftus’s definition of repressed memory is not derived from trauma experts or survivors, but rather from the population that she is steeped in: Alleged perpetrators.

The accounts given to Loftus, as detailed in her book, describe repressed abuse memories as shocking, bizarre, out of sync with reality, delusional and entirely baseless — according to the accused.

Allowing alleged incest perpetrators to define repressed memory is like allowing Harvey Weinstein to define sexual trauma. Abusers have been calling their victims crazy since the dawn of time. Loftus lent authority to that diagnosis.

The “Memory Accuracy” Deception

The claim that repressed and later recalled memories are less accurate than continuous memories.

According to Goldsmith and Barlow at the University of Oregon’s Freyd Dynamics Lab and the studies they cite:

“Memory accuracy is generally not related to memory persistence. That is, people’s continuous memories are not generally more accurate than memories that are forgotten and then later remembered.”

The “Eyewitness Testimony” Deception

The notion that research showing the unreliability of eyewitness testimony can be extrapolated to apply to incest survivor testimony.

Another tactic that Elizabeth Loftus used to confuse the public about incest survivor testimony was her research on eyewitness testimony in non-familial crime cases, showing that memory is fallible and susceptible to biases such as racial bias. This tactic preyed on the moral conscience of white progressives.

While Loftus’s findings have merit in relation to single incident crimes, this research cannot be extrapolated to childhood incest abuse, where the perpetrator is well known to the victim, the abuse is usually chronic rather than single incident, and conditioning and bias would more likely cause the victim to deflect blame away from the parent and onto someone with less power and authority over them.

The “Legitimate Abuse Memories” Deception

Supporters of the anti-survivor backlash claim that repressed memories are “false memories” that were “implanted” by therapists — and that the propagation of “false memories” undermines the survivors who come forward with “legitimate abuse memories.”

Records show that FMSF supporters have used the term “False Memory” to discredit sexual abuse claims of all kinds: Abuse that the survivor remembered continuously, abuse that was corroborated with evidence, and abuse that was remembered by individuals who were not seeing a psychotherapist.

Furthermore, FMSF members have gone on record to espouse the view that molestation is not significantly harmful to children. Elizabeth Loftus has been quoted as saying that child molestation is “not that big a deal,” and FMSF founding member Ralph Underwager was quoted in Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia as saying that sex with children is a “responsible choice for the individual.”

The aim of the “legitimate abuse memories” deception is to dissuade survivors from speaking out for fear that, if their testimony is disbelieved, it will set back the entire survivor movement.

The “Client Wellbeing” Deception

FMSF literature claims that its goal was to protect children of the accused from being harmed by unethical therapists who “implanted false memories” of abuse in their clients’ minds.

The vast majority of literature on “implanted” abuse memories is written and distributed by accused parents and their supporters, not therapy clients.

The “Don’t Go Digging” Deception

The claim that it’s dangerous to go “digging” for causes of trauma symptoms, because you might implant a “false memory” of sexual abuse.

This trope is effective because it attaches a partial truth to a deception: It’s true that it can be damaging to a client to aggressively dig for trauma memories, but the potential damage is not likely to be a “false memory.” What’s far likelier is the potential to re-traumatize a client by prematurely or too aggressively challenging their coping mechanism of denial.

Further, what constitutes “digging” is subjective and influenced by politics. Proponents of “false memory syndrome” tend to view all questions about sexual abuse history as “leading” or “digging,” while they regard other standard history questions — like illness history or history of suicidality — as, well, standard.

The “You Can’t Diagnose Sexual Abuse” Deception

This deception hinges on a distorted interpretation of the seminal incest recovery book, The Courage to Heal, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. FMSF supporters claimed that the book “diagnosed” childhood sexual abuse as the universal cause of all common psychological symptoms like anxiety and depression.

First published in 1988, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse was — and still is — a groundbreaking book the likes of which had not been seen before. It offered acknowledgement, connection and a path forward to millions of readers who learned for the first time that they were not alone, they were not to blame and healing was possible. It quickly became an invaluable resource to both incest survivors and therapists and as such, the book and its authors became primary targets of vicious attacks from the “false memory” camp.

Bass and Davis never proposed that sexual abuse could or should be “diagnosed” as the cause of psychological symptoms. Rather, The Courage to Heal lists symptoms commonly correlated with childhood sexual abuse in order to help survivors make sense of their emotional and psychological confusion and distress.

A phrase in the first edition of the book that is often maligned by the anti-survivor backlash (and was changed in later editions) is: “If you think you were abused, you probably were.”

Backlashers have interpreted this line through the lens of legal accusations and due process for the accused.

The intention of the line, however, was to offer validation and support to survivors who’ve lost faith in their own sense of reality due to fear, intimidation, gaslighting and self-protective denial.

The “Therapeutic Neutrality” Deception

The professional stance that a therapist should always maintain neutrality, and therefore it doesn’t matter whether a therapist believes a client’s memories or not.

This deception confuses skepticism with neutrality, as if doubting memories was something applied universally. As author and Holocaust-survivor Eli Wiesel wrote:

“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

The “Remembering is Not Important to Healing” Deception

A theory, espoused by Peter Levine and others in the trauma therapy realm, that recovery of repressed abuse memories is not important to healing.

Judith Herman, who worked extensively with incest survivors, conducted a 1987 research study with her colleague Emily Schatzow in which they were able to verify with evidence the recovered memories of childhood incest survivors. They found that memory recovery served several important therapeutic purposes for these women:

(1) Survivors were able to finally process the traumatic experience.

(2) They were able to make sense of emotional and psychological symptoms that previously seemed chaotic and incomprehensible.

(3) They were able to construct a clearer sense of identity and of meaning in their life history.

(4) Some experienced a dramatic reduction in certain posttraumatic symptoms after memory recovery.

It’s important to let survivors know that cognitive memory loss does not have to be a barrier to healing, and that somatic memories alone can provide the gateway to return to wholeness. But like the “therapeutic neutrality” deception, the theory that “remembering is not important” protects perpetrators and maintains our societal dissociation surrounding childhood sexual abuse. Keeping our collective awareness submerged allows the culture of abuse to continue. In order to change these generations-old patterns, we need to collectively wake up and acknowledge what happened.