CKLN FM 88.1  RYERSON POLYTECHNICAL UNIVERSITY Toronto
MIND CONTROL RADIO SERIES
Producer/Interviewer:  Wayne Morris
part 2 of interview with Gail Fisher-Taylor, Therapist

Good morning. Welcome to the International Connection once
again. This is show #45 in the radio series on mind control
and the last show with interviews. We are finishing the
series with a few panel discussions - next week on ritual
abuse and the following week on government military mind
control. Today we are airing Part 2 of an interview with
Gail Fisher-Taylor, a Toronto-based psychotherapist who
works with trauma survivors. Also today we will have a
short interview with Dr. Connie Kristiansen, a social 
psychologist and professor at Carleton University in Ottawa.
You are listening to CKLN.

WAYNE MORRIS:

In terms of the healing process - what has to happen in order
to break that conditioning? Examples of using dissociation for that
conditioning or not. How does a person break that control?

GAIL FISHER-TAYLOR:

There are number of factors in the short term and in the long 
term. In the long term, the dissociative barriers have to
come down and in some way the person has to recognize how
this programming has happened, how this conditioning has
happened - what they are supposed to do, and why they believe
they are supposed to do those things. Primary emotion, even
though it may be very masked, will be terror if they don't
do what they are told to do, what they are conditioned to
do, what they are programmed to do. 

In breaking down the dissociative barriers, let's say that
this particular identity believes that they love the perpetrator
and they would never think of not doing what the perpetrator
said unless the perpetrator is telling them to do absolutely
horrific things.  Part of what needs to happen is that they
need to go back to how that relationship formed with that
perpetrator and they need to go back to what beliefs they
had. They need to get the whole experience to understand
both what they are believing and why they are acting in the
way that they are, and to integrate that with the emotions
that are probably dissociated away, and may in fact be in
another identity. Often what has to happen in programming
is that various identities have to be sharing information,
and have to somehow find a way to build those alliances so
that there isn't the control over separate identities - so
they form an alliance against the people who have done the
mind control.That's just one aspect. It can be very 
complicated and multi-layered.

WAYNE MORRIS:

What is your approach to undoing that conditioning, that
programming in terms of therapeutic approaches?

GAIL FISHER-TAYLOR:

There are many of them. There are many stages to the therapy.
It can be very difficult to predetermine exactly what that
road is going to be because different people's programming
happens in different ways. Part of what is really important
to do is to be understanding what the structure of the 
identities is, and what kind of co-consciousness is there in
the system. What kind of programming is there. How do the
layers of programming work, how the layers of identities work?
There are layers of memory, layers of identities, and it can
get very very complex. There are techniques that can start
to expedite some of this but what makes it very complicated
in working with survivors of purposeful mind control is that
often part of the programming is that if the person starts
to tell, starts to remember, starts to undo the programming -
there are other programs in there that can be triggered off.
There might be suicide attempts. If there is a cult they
were supposed to return to and they have been able to resist
returning, they can't resist any more. They end up going back
to the group that will be using them.

WM:

I have also heard of "reporting" alters, simply reporting
back what has happened.

GFT:

Reporting identities, and compliant identities. Even if a
person relocates to get away from a group that is doing this,
it can be very difficult because they have identities inside
who will call the group and tell them exactly where they are.
Part of the strategy has to be to work with those and get
them aligned with therapy and compliance. That's another
technique. You work with the programming that is there for
the perpetrator and you try to use it therapeutically, you
try to turn it around. For instance a reporting identity will
not only report to a cult, they will also report to the
therapist. 

Let's say there is some sort of scrambling programming - 
that means the person is sitting there and they can't hear
clearly what somebody is saying in therapy. That scrambling
programming can be very useful when there is something
overwhelming that takes over.  It can be useful to use
scrambling programming to scramble it so it is not overwhelming,
let's say an abreaction, or a flashback, or an emotional
state.

There are many ways to do it. It is very complex and it's 
very dependent on that particular survivor's history and
mind that has happened.

WM:

I would like to change the topic a little bit. I want to
talk about how the Canadian Legal system has handled cases
involving mind control or sadistic abuse?

GFT:

I am talking from a therapist's point of view, and just what
I have some sort of knowledge of. I think that there is lot
of disbelief that these things happen in our society. The
criminal justice system - if a prosecutor is going to go
ahead with a criminal charge against somebody, the Crown
Attorney is going to try to win the case. They don't prosecute
unless they think they can win a case. The media is so full
of information that discredits the existence of this kind
of abuse and who is reading these papers but people who
are on juries, judges, lawyers. Usually what happens is
that part of the evidence is left out or minimized or the
Crown Attorney talks about - well, not all of this, you
don't have to believe this in order to prosecute on sexual
abuse. We do have a problem because there is a kind of
conservative atmosphere in the criminal justice system.
It's probably going to be the last to change. Twenty-five
years ago it was much more difficult to prosecute on an
incest charge. I understand there are still psychiatric
textbooks in use that say incest occurs in one in a million
families. Our beliefs about abuse have been totally out 
of line. As more and more information is released from
bodies like the CIA in the States that document the kind
of mind control and mind control experimentation that has
been going - we start getting much more validation, more
and more survivors of mind control start speaking out,
start going into the legal system, start basically getting
together and sharing experiences and forming advocacy groups.
I think that "the personal is political" - that old feminist
cliche - this is what I think will eventually allow more and
more gradual credibility. But we have a long way to go,
especially with organizations like the False Memory (I 
refuse to call it syndrome) Foundation.

WM:

Media has certainly played a large part in the public attitude
in contributing to that - I will say disinformation has done
(in my opinion) a real irresponsible or unthorough job of looking
into these issues. What is your opinion of how the mainstream
media has done in covering issues like mind control and
ritual abuse.

GFT:

We have some basic problems because dissociation is very 
complicated. It's not something that somebody is going to
understand in a five minute sound bite, or in a sound bite,
let alone five minutes. Dissociation, traumatic memory, all
of that kind of contextual information that lends credibility,
provides the context for things that when somebody first meets 
them, may sound very sensational, but if they are taken out
of context it may be very hard for somebody to understand
and believe. If there is then that media bias against the
existence of these forms of abuse - mind control, various
kinds of sadistic abuse, cult abuse - what starts to happen
is that there is a kind of public brainwashing that is going
on, and there is a mass dissociation away from the existence
of these really terrible crimes. If people start to believe
in them, they start to feel a lot less safe living in our
society. They start to feel a lot less comfortable about
sending their children off to school or off to a birthday
party when they realize these kinds of things happen in
those kinds of places.

WM:

I think the public guilt has a part to play in that. If
they do recognize and start to believe that these kinds
of things have gone on, it begs public action and people
may be at a loss about what to do about it as well.

GFT:

I think definitely you are making an important point. If
people do believe, then they have to act, and you are right.
People don't know exactly what to do but I think the survivor
movement can lend some real direction here because I think
there are a lot of very strong survivors out there advocating,
informing, forming organizations that are doing some really
good work and it has to become - in a way there is a really
good metaphor here. In the way the dissociative barriers
inside someone who has been traumatized have to come down,
those barriers have to come down between people so there
is a group momentum that starts to force the existence of
this reality into the public mind.

WM:

Mainstream media are so geared towards very quick sound bite
oriented information. It has taken me now on this show,
forty hours to go through all this material and it does
take a fair bit of understanding and really looking at
it thoroughly to understand all the issues around it in
order to be able to believe this is going on.

GFT:

I think you are right. I think also there is something
socially that goes on that has a lot to do with our
denial about the existence of all kinds of abuse - and
that's just the way we deal with emotion. I have been
talking a lot about how, in the healing process, what has
to happen is the emotions have to be joined with flashbacks
for instance. That's part of the dissociation - people
dissociate from their emotions and that reality can change
shape. I think what part of what happens in our society
is that there is real emotional oppression in our culture.
What I mean by that is that when people start getting very
emotional - it goes back to childhood really. If all 
individuals in a particular culture - when their children 
get sad, or start to cry and they are told "don't cry" or
they start to distract them with a toy. The message gets
across very clearly, that crying is not something that
child is supposed to do.  Same thing with anger.

What happens to that child is that child dissociates
from those emotions. When the child dissociates from their
emotions, what then happens is when someone comes along
with those emotions - let's say we are talking about sadness.
Let's say the child was never allowed to cry. What then starts
to happen is when someone else cries, that child may start
to get very angry because the child doesn't have access to
his or her own tears, and there is fear around the tears.
Little boys often will be conditioned or programmed not
to cry, but it's okay maybe to get angry. So that what will
then start to happen is that the tears inside that little
boy might be there in empathy with another child or adult
crying - but it will come out as anger. Or maybe what happens
is that the child learns that when somebody cries you walk
away.  

What we are talking about horrific events that the
normal response to is tremendous emotion - anger, rage,
fear, terror - all of these emotions are normal responses
to horrific events. But if a person starts gaining access
to these emotions and then tries to express events that
bring up these emotions in someone else, what's going to
happen is dissociation away from them in individual after
individual. So as a culture there is a moving away from
intense emotion and what happens in that kind of dissociation
is that there is denial. It is much easier to deny the
terrible purposeful mind control that happens, or that
sadistic cults are abusing children in a terrible way or
that the neighbour is a pedophile. 

It does demand action as you are saying, but it also 
means that in order to empathize someone has to feel. 
If, as a culture, people have learned or been conditioned 
to suppress their emotions,they are going to rationalize 
something that prevents those emotions from coming out.
Part of that rationalization is the denial that this even 
exists. It does a number of things. It allows the person
to remain in homeostasis, in other words, to not get upset
because if it doesn't exist you don't have to be upset
about it. If it does exist, you not only have to be upset
about it, you have to do something about it. You have to
keep your children safe.

I think the media really feeds into this as well.

We were also talking about earlier the whole aspect of
betrayal. For instance - in a family - and this happens
over and over again. Let's say that one member of the
family starts to recall these kinds of events - some
sort of multi-perpetrator sexual abuse or being in a
child pornography ring and the father and mother were
part of how that child got into the pornography ring or
were even part of that pornography ring. Let's say it
is one parent, the father.  If then the other children in the
family are in the position of being confronted with this -
let's say the same thing has happened to them and they have
also dissociated the memory. This information means that
they can't maintain the same relationship with that father.
It means there is a betrayal that has to go on somewhere,
either they were betrayed by that father and they have to
change that relationship with that father, or else they then
can say that is a betrayal by the child who is telling, and
the child is making up a story.

This is part of the way both the criminal justice and the
False Memory Foundation have manipulated things. It has
become a wonderful legal defence to blame the therapist
because that way the adult survivor is not being blamed.
And that doesn't work well in the courts. Adult survivors
who were in a lot of pain and who were basically talking
about horrifics events that happened to them - the courts
would often lean in their direction a number of years ago.
It wasn't until the attorney started getting this defence
of "well okay they are not really doing this to the parent,
it was that terrible therapist who is just out there to 
make money who is implanting these memories in order to
get this person to come back, so they can earn money. It
is the therapist's fault. It is not this poor victim who
is not a victim of sexual abuse, but is a victim of the
therapist."

WM:

While we are on the topic of False Memory Foundation, they
have had a tremendous effect on the field of psychotherapy. In your
opinion how do you feel this foundation has affected the
quality of care?

GFT:

In a number of ways. The existence of the False Memory Foundation
and the kinds of issues they are talking about, the kinds of
court cases they have encouraged their members to proceed with,
against therapists - I think have made all therapists careful,
if it hasn't made all of us careful, it should make all of us
careful. In some ways I think it has had a very positive effect,
but in some ways it has had a very negative, harmful effect.

Let me talk about the positive first. I think that it has
helped a lot of therapists be aware that it is not only not
safe for them in terms of ending up in court, but it's not
good therapy to have suggestive, leading questions. It's
much better to ask open-ended questions like "can you tell
me more?" rather than to ask a leading question like, "was
it your father who was doing that?" That's not good therapy
to do that, and it can have an influence on someone if a
therapist or anyone continues to suggest something to someone
who is suggestible. It's probably a minority of the population
who are suggestible. 

The harmful effect is that it has certainly elevated the
level of fear for therapists. I think that anyone in therapy,
not just in therapy - we all need to have experiences validated.
We need to do reality checks. If I talk at one of my children's
PTA meetings and I may want to do a check with somebody who
was there - 'was that reasonable what I said?' And if I do
a check with a number of people who were there, what they
say is going to influence how I feel about what I said. And
that is important for us. We are social beings. We need that
kind of validation. If someone has been abused - particularly
if they have gone through the kind of abuse that a lot of
people don't know exists - like mind control or various kinds
of sadistic abuse - they need to have some sort of validation.

This becomes a dilemma. What is being recommended in a lot
of the workshops and training that psychiatrists and 
psychologists and other kinds of psychotherapists go through,
is that basically the message you give to the person who is
recovering memory is, you have to find out for yourself what
your own experience is.  On one level that is very true. No
one can tell another human being what their experience, what
their truth is. But on another level - if the therapist is
saying 'I don't know whether ritual abuse really exists' -
what they are saying in a way is 'I don't know whether you
are psychotic or not'. Psychosis is a disconnection from
reality. There are some really profound implications of
the directions that therapists are taking for their own
safety that I think really, as a profession, we have to 
examine. Discussion is good and operating with challenges
is very healthy, but I think operating out of fear can be
incredibly harmful and I think that is what's happening
with a lot of therapists and as a result, a lot of therapists 
are refusing to work with clients who are dissociative.

We have to be looking at how can there be good therapy that
protects everybody, but also doesn't do the client a
disservice.

WM:

And that expression of disbelief in a general sense of whether
ritual abuse exists or not is not great therapy from my
understanding. It creates tremendous trauma in the client
again.

GFT:

This brings up another whole area. People don't want to believe
these things have happened to them. Part of the whole process,
a healthy kind of therapeutic process, involves self questioning.
It's very important for the therapist not to come in and say,
'yes this happened to you' when the survivor is still wondering
'did it happen or did it not?'  But I think that if the
therapist is saying 'I don't know whether this kind of thing
can exist or whether this could have happened to you' and
is basically implanting doubts, that's what happening. The
doubts are being fed. It is much better not to feed the doubts,
nor to feed the certainty. It is important to stay in some
sort of position where the client is able to continue to
take the information that is coming up, and try to process
it in an ethical way for herself or himself, but to also look
at 'what kind of outside corroboration is there here?'
For instance if there is another sibling who has similar
kinds of experiences and if the person is not planning on
going to court (because you wouldn't want them to be sharing
those experiences to avoid contamination of evidence if
they were going into the legal system or the criminal justice
system). That can be one form of corroboration - if the
sharing happens after both people have been in their
therapeutic processes for a period of time. There can be
other kinds of corroboration. Let's say they have a memory
of something happening, being transported in a particular
kind of car. This is explicit memory and it could be wrong.
But if it's right, it could be very powerful - that they
didn't know for example, they had a red Ford in 1964. Or
they didn't know this little building was located there
and they go back and there it was. Maybe there were - as
in Sybil - marks that were made that they remember making
during a particular incident.

Gail Fisher-Taylor:

Those kinds of reality checks can be very powerful and they
may not hold in court, but ultimately this is not what this
process is about. It's about the person reclaiming self,
and having that kind of external validation can be 
extraordinarily helpful for a person.

Wayne Morris:

Do you think there might be possible dangers or pitfalls of
the therapist in helping their clients get that corroborative
evidence?

GFT:

It shouldn't be for evidence. A therapist is not a lawyer.
Their job is not to go out and help the person form a legal
case. The therapist's job is to help the person do what he
or she needs to do to heal. I think it is very important to
do reality checks, and I guess maybe reality check is a 
better way of talking about it than getting evidence. It
is basically looking at 'does this explicit way I am interpreting
my implicit memory have an accuracy to it?' 

WM:

How do you think the False Memory Foundation has affected
resources for survivors of sexual or ritual abuse, or mind
control?

GFT:

In terms of access to therapy, to groups which are dealing
with this kind of material; in terms of funding. The False
Memory Foundation has really impaired access to these kinds
of resources. In terms of books, discussion groups, in
terms of the internet - I don't think there has been impairment
at all. I think in some ways it has brought a lot of people
together to try to advocate against the False Memory Foundation
in terms of what they are saying. 

I do think that what the FMF says can be very harmful to
people who are at the beginning or in the midst of their 
processes. There is this cultural denial that the FMF is
feeding, and it has an impact on a very personal level.
Families use this in their arguments against the survivor
if there has been some kind of confrontation. 

The kinds of strategies which the FMF is encouraging are
extremely intrusive and violating as Judith Lewis-Herman
said at the recent ISSD conference, they are using the same
kind of intimidation tactics that perpetrators have used in
the abuse. There is a lot of 'perpetrator rage' there and
the FMF is harbouring a lot of perpetrators - maybe not 
every person who belongs - but there are a lot of people 
who do belong, who I believe, have perpetrated and are 
using this as a front.

WM:

Certainly there has been documented evidence of members of
the Advisory Board being involved in CIA mind control,
active pedophiles, and so forth. One of the arguments they
repeatedly use against therapists is that false memories 
have been implanted in their clients. Do you feel that it
is possible that people may have false memories of sexual
abuse?

GFT:

I think a lot of people have false memories, most of us have
some false memories. The way false memories often go is that
we tend to idealize people, idealize our families and what
happened in our families. We tend to not remember uncomfortable
events vividly, we might change them, we might think we had
a wonderful family when in fact we had a family that argued
all the time.  Those are the kinds of things that people
tend to block out and there is research that really backs
that up. It shows that when there has been documented abuse
or abusive situations (ie a group of boys were interviewed
many years later, and they tended to minimize the abuse
rather than remember exactly how horrific it was.
People have false memories that idealize and minimize.

I have been talking about homeostasis. We try to find
the things that are going to make us feel better, so we
tend to try to think that people are nicer than they are,
or situations are safer than they really are. We try to
bring down our anxiety levels, we try to make ourselves
feel better.  And it makes a lot of sense to me.

In terms of false memories in therapy, I've really had
to look at that and realize that of course that can happen.
People are interpreting their experiences in ways that are
inaccurate, that can be found to be inaccurate. Explicit
memory - they can remember something that happened yesterday
in an accurate way. But this also has to do with our adrenalin
level. If an experience happens and we don't pay attention to
it, our adrenalin is pretty low. We don't remember all the
details. We also filter out - something in our brains called
the 'reticular formation' which helps to filter out experiences.
If we weren't filtering out, and we were paying attention to
the sounds, and the sights, and the smells, our emotions -
all the things at once - we would be overwhelmed. Our nervous
systems wouldn't be able to handle it. 

Filtering is a very important part of how we experience things,
and how we remember our experiences. If we are in a particular
circumstance one day and we try to recall it the next, and
our adrenaline wasn't particularly high because it wasn't
a significant moment in our lives, we may not remember things
very accurately. If it's much more significant to us, our
adrenaline level will be higher and the adrenaline level
really affects how we remember things. 

If something was really emotionally significant to us, we
may remember certain aspects of things while someone else
who was involved in the same experience may remember totally
different aspects. Other things may have been significant to
that person. Let's say the visual things were very important
to us and the other person was really tuned into the sounds.
Let's say I am asked a question about the sounds - I may be
really inaccurate about the sounds and try to guess at things
to try to answer the questions. If the other person was asked
about visual - the same thing may be happening to him or her.
Accurate on the sounds, but inaccurate on the visual. There 
are aspects of each person's experience that might be
more accurate and less accurate of a particular event.

In a therapy context, we do tend to fill in gaps. The research
is very clear. We try to explain things that made us 
uncomfortable and we might not have an explanation for. Good
therapy will help the person remain in uncertainty in those
areas where there is uncertainty and to encourage a person
not to do that very natural process - not to exaggerate -
it becomes very clear. What are the major areas of
concentration for someone who is a visual person, an auditory
person, etc. What are the senses that are most important for
that person? How do they live their lives? It is very
distressing to people, but they need to learn that if they
have a fragment of a memory here and a fragment there, and
another there, it is important not to force them altogether
in a way that they won't fit. It's a very complex, difficult
layered process. It is very important though, when things
do fit, to look at the correlations, but also to look at
that this may or may not be the way that it was.

WM:

How does a group like the False Memory Spindrome Foundation
use the nature of inaccurate memory against survivors who
have had legitimate histories of sexual abuse?

GFT:

They take research about one kind of memory and they apply
it to traumatic memory. And they take research about ordinary,
everyday explicit memory and they apply it. They act as if all
memory operates the same way everyday memory would operate.
Now they are being a bit less extreme - they are acknowledging
that dissociation does occur. And it's not just one person.
There are different people speaking out for the organization.
Different people have different takes. The whole argument
about 'is there such a thing as repressed memory?' 

One of the people who is very active in the False Memory
Foundation whose research has been used and mis-used by the
FMS is Elizabeth Loftus.  Her studies are not done on
traumatized people. She has argued against the existence 
of repressed memory, and yet in a study she did with a 
number of other colleagues, even though it was a smaller
sample that had repressed memory - I believe it was 19%
of people who had repressed memory - even in Elizabeth Loftus'
study. It's harder and harder as the research accumulates to
deny the existence of dissociation.

Wayne Morris:

I would like to thank you very much, Gail, for joining us.
It has been fascinating talking to you.

Gail Fisher-Taylor:

Thank you -

*********************************************************
Wayne Morris:  

That was an interview with Gail Fisher-Taylor sharing her
views and insights into the effects of trauma, ritual abuse
and mind control. Gail is a psychotherapist working in
Toronto with trauma survivors.

Next we are going to hear an interview with Dr. Connie
Kristiansen, a professor of psychology at Carleton University
in Ottawa.  Dr. Kristiansen specializes in recovered memory
research and sexual abuse issues.

I would like to begin asking you about your background and
what things you are working on with regards to child abuse.

Connie Kristiansen:

I am trained as a social psychologist and I have been 
applying this background to first of all understand the
socio-psychological factors underlying people's opinions
in the recovered memory debate. I have also been examining
the nature of women's recovered memories of child abuse
and contrasting those memories, for example, with the
memories of women who never forgot their abuse. I have
done some research with adult women who have in fact survived
child sexual abuse.

Generally I have been doing psycho-social analysis of the
recovered memory debate and trying to gain more insight 
into the nature of recovered memory. I understand you
were attending the "Making Up For Lost Time" conference
in Thunder Bay, in 1994. What did you come away with that
might have been new information for you, were there any
expectations going in to the conference?

CK:

I guess the one thing I came away with was a greater
appreciation for people's concern with ritual abuse and
the mind control experiments that have been done. In my
mind I have difficulty believing some of the stories that
I heard. I am a little bit skeptical; however I know that
people don't believe all sorts of things that can indeed
be true. I am trying to stay open minded with regard to
extreme forms of abuse.

WM:

With your experiences, how prevalent do you think child
abuse is in our society? Maybe you could talk about how
many (from people that have been abused) do suffer 
memory repression, memory loss, or dissociation?

CK:

My understanding, and my estimate I would make of the
incidents of abuse would be about 1 in 3 women being
sexually abused prior to age 18, and maybe 1 in 5-6
men - basing these estimates on a couple of large 
epidemiological studies done in both Canada and the
United States.  My review of the literature to date as
well as the findings of the Ottawa study we conducted here
out of Carleton indicate roughly between 40 - 60% of all
women who were sexually abused had at least some memory
loss for the child abuse event. In the Ottawa survivors'
study for example, about 50% of the sample 113 women said
that they had at least some memory loss.

WM:

Can you talk about how that mechanism, for a lack of a better
term, works for somebody who has undergone trauma and 
experienced some kind of memory loss? What is going on in
the brain and body.

CK:

There have been a couple of processes that have been talked
about to account for this memory loss. One is repression, which
I think is what most people think of and the evidence for
repression whereby a person unconsciously, unknowingly keeps a
lid on something traumatic that they don't want to know about.
The evidence for that kind of unconscious processing and
repression is actually quite weak. But there is strong evidence
that people will actively try to suppress information; and
in fact Freud himself sometimes spoke of repression as an
active rather than an unconscious process. If you look at
repression as an active phenomenon, whereby a person tries
to forget a traumatic event, and also forgets trying to
forget - then there is some evidence for repression. Probably
what most researchers are looking at to explain the memory
loss of child sexual abuse is the notion of dissociation.

Dissociation is a type of altered state of consciousness
that occurs as a result of trauma, and what happens during
trauma is that there are various neurochemical changes that
occur in the form of what you might call 'traumatic stress
response' and these neurochemical changes are known to change
and adversely affect our conscious memory processes. It
changes the neurochemicals that have been to be associated
with conscious memory process. These neurochemicals also 
affect various brain structures physically that are responsible
for conscious memory processing. Ultimately what seems to
happen is that during trauma, the neurochemicals overwhelm
our normal memory system, and as a result, people cannot
remember traumatic abuse in the way we normally remember
daily events. 

Rather what does get stored at the time of trauma is a 
non-conscious type of memory which operates in a different 
part of the brain which isn't made dysfunctional by the 
trauma. So the memories are laid down in this alternative 
memory system, and the memories there are raw perceptual 
sensory bodily sensations and emotions. They are not 
conscious memories - ie. I went to the store, then I did 
this, then I did that. You might remember for example, 
when you went to the store the fumes of the diesel bus that
had just gone by but you would remember those fumes out of
context, with no cognitive framework to embed it in. 

That's how we think memory is laid down at the time of
trauma - in this bodily and sensory form. That's actually
what we have seen survivors tell us - that when they
recover their memories they don't come back the normal
way like we talk about memory. The memories will come
sort of willy-nilly, out of the blue and the person will
feel like they are literally re-living some part of that
event. They have a smell, an image, a sensation or an
emotional experience that comes back and it doesn't make
sense in the current-day context. But what it is - is these
fragments of sensory and emotional memory that are flashing
back into the present.

WM:

Now, of course, this debate around recovered memory is
being hotly debated in North America. There are some groups
out there that have been very active in pursuing lawsuits
against therapists and survivors that are coming forward.
I am thinking particularly of the FMSF. What has your
experience been with that group?

CK:

I know that some of my academic colleagues who would advocate
in favour of False Memory Syndrome have tried to bring me up
on ethical charges. I hear that is something common by FMSF
advocates - trying to get the researchers on ethics. So far
they haven't been successful. Other experiences I have had
with them? They will write to me sometimes - with little
bits of information, sarcastic humour, nothing too nasty.

WM:

Are you aware of other therapists being intimidated by this
group?

CK:

Laura Brown - who is an active psychologist who worked on the
review of the recovered memory issue in the American Psychological
Association. Laura Brown's office has been picketed on a regular
basis, she has been perpetually harassed. So I know there is a
lot of harassment going on out there especially in the States.
Here in Canada I think we are a little more mellow. Give us
10 years. Maybe we will be on par.

WM:

How do you think this environment has changed the resources
available for people who may suspect they have been victims
of child abuse?

CK:

I gather that it hasn't been beneficial. Well, it's a knife
that cuts both ways actually. In one sense the publicity
given to child abuse has made a lot of therapists and people
who acknowledge the validity of the research findings on which
the information is based. People are learning about child
abuse and they are now taking it more seriously, so maybe
it means better treatment, better resources to some extent.
One good consequence of the recovered memory controversy
is that more money is being funded into research on both sides
of the camp. So we are going to learn more about traumatic
memory one way or the other. That can't be bad. Ultimately,
hopefully, it will help survivors.

On the other hand I think it had a really bad impact on
survivors in several ways. One is you hear the Criminal
Compensation Board being suspect about any claims based on
recovered memory, so survivors are having a rougher time
getting some financial compensation because of this date.
The Ottawa survivors' study assessed how this debate was
affecting these women and not surprisingly these women said
this debate was having an adverse effect on all the areas
of their lives that had been previously affected by the
trauma. In other words this debate is revictimizing some
of the survivors and making them experience more of those
symptoms again. So it is having a detrimental effect.

On the other hand a small minority said it has made them
as mad as hell and they are getting out there to do something
about it. So I can see it is activating some women in a
really positive way.

WM:

You mentioned the FMSF using other people to attack therapists
on the grounds of ethics. What other kinds of arguments are
they using? Are there indeed other organizations like FMSF
that exist and have been actively intimidating people?

CK:

I don't know about any other organizations but what they
are seeing is that some therapists are doing what they call
"voodoo therapy". In fact the FMSF has called me a "voodoo
scientist". They are claiming that some therapists are
actually causing the creation of false memories. In the 
cases where they are picketing and so on, I am pretty
convinced that this isn't going on. A lot of psychologists
know what they are doing, they are doing good work with
their clients, they are not suggesting things to their
clients. And I think some of the better work is probably
being done by the feminists because they have a sort of
non-authoritarian style. They are not inclined to tell
clients what they think happened or what caused their state
of being this way. Whereas more traditional psychiatric 
approaches tend to have an idea of what the person is like
before they have even met the person, more judgemental, they
impose their own reality on the client. So I think the
feminists have a good approach in terms of working with
recovered memory simply because they try to empower the
client to take better care of themselves, rather than the
therapist looking after the client and telling them what her
reality is.

WM:

What kind of approaches do therapists take with clients in
order to avoid being accused of implanting memories, and
has this changed because of the rise of the FMSF?

CK:

I know some therapist have actually refused to take on clients
who might take their alleged perpetrators to court on the
basis of recovered memory. Other therapists have stopped
treating survivors altogether. Others are being especially
careful to monitor their behaviour, to make sure they are
not suggestive, particularly when any abuse stuff comes up.

So people are using different approaches I think - depending
on how confident they feel in themselves, and I don't mean
in terms of their ability - but how they could deal with a
potential lawsuit and whether they really want to face that
possibility.

WM:

Do people have ways of documenting - like taping the sessions,
things like that?

CK:

I think a lot of therapists are learning that if they are
going to use techniques like hypnosis they should ideally
have an audiovisual session, because in that way there is
clear evidence exactly how suggestive was the process. So
that's highly recommended that you tape everything when
it comes to be about sort of abuse issues.

WM:

Some of the arguments in this debate are ie. children just
making up stories just to get back at their parents for
whatever reason. How difficult is it do you think to tell
whether somebody is actually just making up a story or
there is real signs of abuse there?

CK:

I imagine it would probably be pretty difficult. One of
the things we did in the Ottawa survivors study was look
to see if we could identify anybody who had this unrecognized identity
called 'false memory syndrome'. What we did is we
developed a list of the symptoms of FMS based on the writings
of the FMSF and Advisory Board members and we went out and
documented how many women with recovered memories satisfied
these criteria. And the rate was very, very low - a few percent
of the women with recovered memory could potentially be
classified as having FMS. The rate was just as high though
with the women who had never forgotten their abuse and had
continuous memory. So those criteria don't seem to differentiate
continuous from recovered memories. 

Moreover some of the criteria are downright silly. One
of them was you should suspect a claim of abuse if it is
denied by the alleged perpetrator. Well, I would expect that
many perpetrators would deny abuse had actually occurred. I
am not surprised that the criteria didn't differentiate.
Another criteria said these children were blissfully happy
as young children and teenagers and they were doing very
well in life until they met the therapist who implanted
the memories. When we looked at the data, we found that
the women with recovered memories reported as much as
symptomatology in childhood and teen years as the women
with continuous memories reported. So their symptom levels
are basically the same which was contrary to what the FMSF
was claiming.

WM:

Well, thank you very much Connie for joining us on CKLN.
I wish you all the best in your work.

CK:

Thank you.