Doomed to Repeat: Gender Ideology and the Repressed Memory Movement

A scant 30 years ago, therapists with (mostly) the best of intentions managed to ruin many people’s lives. Using recovered memory therapy, clinicians unwittingly participated in creating false memories of horrific abuse that in some cases permanently sundered relationships between parents and adult children and sent innocent people to jail for decades. Most importantly, this treatment also harmed the patients it was meant to help.

In the late 1990s there were numerous lawsuits in which therapists or psychiatrists were successfully sued or settled on charges of having propagated false memories of childhood sexual abuse, incest, and satanic ritual abuse. Fran and Dan Keller served 21 years in prison after young children who attended their daycare began making wild allegations after having been coaxed by a therapist. According to one child witness, the Kellers “had everyone take off their clothes and had a parrot that pecked them in the pee-pee,” and “came to her house with a chainsaw and cut her dog Buffy in the vagina until it bled.” The therapist construed these childish imaginings as literally true, and concluded her small patient was a victim of ritual abuse. The Kellers were finally freed in November of 2014 after the only witness who provided any physical evidence of abuse—a doctor—recanted.

The false memory and ritual abuse scares of the ‘80s and ‘90s now seem bizarre almost beyond imagining. Therapists, psychiatrists, government agencies, congressional committees, and the media bought into the belief that worldwide satanic cults had infiltrated society and were ritually abusing children on a significant scale.

Tragically, history is in the process of repeating itself. Something strikingly similar is now happening. The current trend to diagnose children as transgender bears an eerie similarity to this previous social panic.

Well, my apologies, because I beg to differ. I experienced some repressed memories of abuse, so I know for a fact that it can and does happen. That doesn’t make every case legitimate, though.

And probably because there was some “mild” abuse in our family, I was picked out by a worker at a community event for more mild abuse. I was in middle school, and this worker put his hand down my shirt. When I went back and told my family, the whole incident was dropped within two seconds and never spoken of again. Imagine parents with no interest to discuss a strange man putting his hand down their daughter’s shirt. I did eventually tell an adult neighbor about that incident, and she was very concerned, but nothing came of it because it was the early ‘80s.

I didn’t entirely forget the incident with the stranger. But my family environment encouraged me to not think about it, so I didn’t for years. But I did, for all intents and purposes, totally forget about some incidents of mild sexual abuse until I started thinking about it all as an adult. One incident, when I was also in middle school, I later recalled that I was actively forgetting as it occurred, just as one doesn’t want to be mentally “present” while going through a highly stressful event like severe bullying in school. But school bullying tends to be for an audience and the bully doesn’t want the bullying victim to forget it, while abuse generally occurs in private. And these mild incidents were much later corroborated. I can’t generalize about what a person can and can’t forget for a time, but I do know that there are factors that can produce that result.

Repression is a word which has entered the general discourse but for which there is no operational definition. People forget; they compartmentalize; they avoid thinking about painful things. But the impact of trauma on memory is more in the form of unwanted intrusions— trauma patients I have seen over the years wish to hell they could forget, but they can’t.

I know what you mean. However, I believe there are different factors that can add up to a type of repression. In my case, certain incidents that were relatively “mild” that happened when I was very young, and only a few other “mild
more ambiguous incidents happening when I was an older child. And I was pressured out of not “processing” any of them mentally or emotionally at the time. If you’d ask me, then, at 18, if I’d been abused, I would have said no. But several years later, when things came back and I was able to process them then, it felt pretty devastating for awhile. That was the first time that I was able to put together the puzzle, so to speak, and reflect on it then. So after a manner of speaking, it was all partially repressed for me.

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