Armed with the Truth
Book Review by Brenda Anderson

A Review of Memory and Abuse: Remembering and Healing the Effects of Trauma

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting weary of the False Memory Syndrome (FMS) Foundation. I’d rather spend my energy on my own recovery instead of getting sidetracked with their one-sided arguments.

That said, the FMSF is a powerful, well-organized group doing an incredible amount of damage. To sit idly by while they continue to manipulate the media with their distortions, innuendoes, and downright falsehoods is a disservice to myself and every other survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

With that attitude – I know I need to educate myself, but I’d just as soon go to the dentist – I picked up Dr. Charles Whitfield’s Memory and Abuse.

Whitfield’s comprehensive, rigorously researched book provides a wealth of information to arm survivors with the facts. He thoroughly discusses memory, both traumatic and ordinary, the history of denial in child abuse, an overview of the “false memory” debate, verification of oppressed memories, guidelines for therapists, details of famous memory based legal cases, and recovery.

I found myself getting angry as he exposed the lopsided manipulation of the media that the FMSF has orchestrated: “…a few thousand lay people, most of whom have been accused of child molestation, and a few hundred academics and psychologists are claiming that a majority, probably millions of sexual abuse survivors and a few hundred thousand helping professionals, are making up memories of having been sexually abused.”

By this time, most survivors know that there is no clinical diagnosis of FMS; the pseudoscientific term was coined by the group. Whitfield effectively dismantles what he calls the “three-legged stool” upon which the FMSF bases its claims. The “legs” include retraction by some survivors of their prior claims of sexual abuse, the denial of abuse by accused perpetrators, and a few research projects studying ordinary memory.

About these studies, Whitfield explains: "Researchers are able to manipulate normal memory and implant false details into the minds of ordinary people under the non-traumatic conditions of simple laboratory experiments… However, it is hard to imagine that many thousands of therapists are implanting powerfully traumatic, state dependant memories – with their accompanying painful symptoms – into hundreds of thousands of their patients or clients.”

Memory and Abuse contains many useful tables and charts, including the factors involved in remembering, claims and facts about false memories, studies of memory in childhood sexual abuse, and descriptions of the defenses of traumatic forgetting – dissociation, repression, and denial.

Whitfield dramatically demonstrates the staggering statistics about child abuse. “About 50,000 names are etched into the Vietnam War memorial. If we made a memorial to children who have been sexually abused, it would be more than 1300 times the size of the Vietnam memorial. If we included other forms of child abuse it would be more than 7500 times the size.”

Because Memory and Abuse helps those of us who are the faces behind the statistics honor the truth of our memories, it is a valuable book.  For the ammunition it provides to refute those who say we are lying, it is even more valuable. This book helps us take our recovery back into our own hands, regardless of the claims of the FMSF.

“In recovery…we learn that no one else any longer determines our destiny,” Whitfield writes. “Rather, by our own motivation and by setting healthy boundaries, we create it”