Journal of Trauma & Dissociation - The science and politics of false memories

 Journal of Trauma & Dissociation - The science and politics of false memories

 

Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, Volume 23, Issue 2 (2022)
The science and politics of false memories

https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/wjtd20/23/2

 

 

False Memories And The Science Of Credibility: Who Gets To Be Heard?: Journal of Trauma & Dissociation

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15299732.2022.2028219

 

The guest editors are Michael Salter and Ruth Blizard.

Editorial
False memories and the science of credibility: Who gets to be heard?
Michael Salter and Ruth Blizard

 

"Consistently, and persistently, theories of false memories have been aptly available for the exculpation of the wealthy and the powerful. This point is illustrated by a brief overview of some of the cases where prominent false memory researcher Professor Elizabeth Loftus has appeared: in the defense of a Bosnian-Croatian soldier for aiding and abetting the rape of a Muslim woman, to exculpate a senior aide to then-Vice President Dick Cheney for misleading investigators regarding the leak of the name of a CIA operative, to question the credibility of Professor Christine Blasey-Ford when she complained about an alleged sexual assault as a teenager by current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for the defense team of the convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein and for accused child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

Most recently, in Australia, allegations of false memories were revived when it emerged that a woman known only as “Kate” (who, sadly, died by suicide in 2019) claimed to have been sexually assaulted by the Australian politician Christian Porter (and, at the time of the allegation, Attorney General) when they were both teenagers (MItchell et al., 2021). Porter, like Kavanaugh, vigorously denied the allegation. There was no court case but instead a journalist speculated that Kate suffered from “recovered memories,” on the basis that she had apparently read Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score prior to her allegations becoming public knowledge (Hardaker, 2021). By this logic, merely reading a book that mentions child sexual abuse could be the trigger for a false allegation; never mind that Kate diarized the alleged assault while still a teenager, or that she had described the incident to friends decades prior to reading van der Kolk.

In a sign of how much has changed since the 1990s, the response to this argument was not agreement but outrage. This outrage was evident across social media but also from within journalism itself. The media outlet who ran the original piece quickly assigned another journalist to cover the story from a more sympathetic angle, while Australian media outlets ran multiple pieces rebutting the false memory proposition. One journalist wrote about his own diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder and its impact on his capacity to recall traumatic events and correctly label them as harmful (Morton, 2021).

Undoubtedly, the emergence of the false memory movement three decades ago had a negative effect on professional and social understandings of trauma and dissociation. However, it also provoked researchers, practitioners, survivors, and advocates to redouble their efforts to develop the evidence base for trauma therapy. Reinders and Veltman’s recent editorial in the British Journal of Psychiatry laid out the cumulative neurobiological evidence for the trauma model of DID. The diagnosis that the FMSF insisted, a quarter century ago, was a passing fad with no scientific foundation is now out of the shadows (Reinders & Veltman, 2021). Meanwhile, the forms of betrayal, abuse, and violation that false memory syndrome sought to explain away as mere confabulations are now recurrent features of media and policy commentary. Multiple criminal cases and public inquiries have substantiated the seriousness of child sexual abuse and exploitation, institutional tendencies toward denial and cover-up, and the inadequacies of the current policy response."

Commentary
The Power of False Memory Rhetoric
Lynn Crook

 

Articles
Hyping Hypnosis: The Myth that Made Capturing the Friedmans Persuasive
Ross Cheit

The Policy Alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society
Ashley Conway and David Pilgrim

The history and politics of 'false memories': The Australian Experience
Kate McMaugh and Warwick Middleton

Attachment and Memory Stability
Paula Thomson and S. Victoria Jacque

"The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried."
—Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

The Survivorship Winter Journal 2022 and Conference 2022

 The Survivorship Winter Journal 2022 and Conference 2022           

 

The Survivorship Winter Journal 2022 is available for members online at https://survivorship.org/notes-and-journal

 

Articles include:

Why Do People Deny Survivors’ Experiences? - Randy Noblitt

Dr. Rainer H. Kurz

Survivor’s View of Recovery from Ritual Abuse - Neil Brick

 

 

The Survivorship Ritual Abuse and Mind Control 2022 Online Conference

 

 

The International Evidence of Ritual Abuse Conference 

 

Special Low Prices are available until March 31, 2022.

 

Clinician's Conference - Friday May 20, 2022 - "Exposing Ritual Abuse Internationally." The clinical conference will present empirical evidence of ritual abuse and complex trauma.

 

Survivor Conference - Saturday and Sunday May 21 - 22, 2022 - The weekend survivor conference for survivors and their supporters will discuss breaking the global silence of ritual abuse and will provide resources and support for survivors.

 

 

Conference information is at: https://survivorship.org/the-survivorship-ritual-abuse-and-mind-control-2022-conference/

 

 

Conference Speakers

 

Survivors may want to use caution reading this material or read it with a safe support person. 

 

Organized Ritual Violence in Germany - Claudia Fischer and Hannah C. Rosenblatt

 

In May 2017 we opened up a German website (https://www.infoportal-rg.de) with cases and evidence for organized ritual abuse and violence. We collect verdicts and publicly proven cases of cults that are involved in sexual violence and ideologically based homicides. In our presentation, we will

 

• share the concept and obstacles of this website

• share information about the survivors' community in Germany

• give some examples of German cases and the state of public discussion in Germany

 

Claudia Fischer is a German journalist (TV, radio, print and online) with 20 years of expertise in investigating stories about ritual abuse and sexual trauma. She invented the https://www.infoportal-rg.de website. She coordinates a group of survivors and other experts (lawyers, therapists, social workers) behind this project as chief editor.

 

Hannah C. Rosenblatt is a German survivor of organized violence. After their freeing, they started documenting their life with DID at einblogvonvielen.org which was followed by the podcast "Viele-Sein" in 2015. They educate about trauma and violence against people with disabilities, fight for needs-based psychotherapy and assist Claudia Fischer in the Infoportal project.

 

Should I seek freedom? Should I go through with recovery? A workshop to help you decide and a discussion of its benefits - Wendy Hoffman

 

If you’re living as an unaware mind controlled victim, you’re living in a vapor, seeing yourself and life through an indistinct veil of mist. You have strong emotions that can break through numbness, but you don’t know who you are or why you react the ways you do. You may also feel trapped in hurtful and unloving relationships and not able to mature into who you really are. All that can be changed if you are willing to go through with a recovery. It is hard work. It can be exhilarating. The enemy group will try to stop you. But if you want, you can find out who you are and what your life has been and can be in the future. This presentation explores some of the benefits of relinquishing slavery and learning who you are. Self-knowledge is the way out.

 

Wendy Hoffman had amnesia for most of her life. When she regained memory, she wrote books about her forgotten life. Wendy has published three memoirs, The Enslaved Queen, White Witch in a Black Robe and in 2020, A Brain of My Own. The Enslaved Queen has been translated into German. Her book of poetry, Forceps, was also published along with a book of essays, From the Trenches, written with Alison Miller. Her most recent memoir, After Amnesia, is published on the SmartNews website. It is presently being translated into German. What gives her life meaning is helping other surviving victims.

 

Complex Trauma Assessment Problems - Dr. Rainer Hermann Kurz

 

This presentation addresses serious assessment issues related to complex trauma in an extreme abuse setting that had life changing consequences. Many of the incidents observed by Becker, Karriker, Overkamp, & Rutz (2008) in their Extreme Abuse Survey (EAS) apply to this case. In a court setting the textbook of Miller (2012) and the Epstein, Schwartz & Schwartz (2011) book of UK case vignettes were drawn upon to explain the ‘unbelievable’ sequence of events that had unfolded.

 

An Advocate’s Journey into Extreme Abuse - Dr. Rainer Hermann Kurz

 

This presentation provides an autobiographical account of advocacy in a case of global significance. A mother emailed a warning to the advocate in his multiple roles as a psychologist, faith leader, and family man. She alleged that her father sexually assaulted her toddler son (i.e. his grandson) and that authority representatives took her child into care as three Psychiatrists had found her ‘delusional.' On a final session with a 4th court appointed expert (a Clinical Psychologist) the advocate was allowed to sit in the back of a session and found the mother reasonable, clear, and fluent in her responses. Disclosures before and after the session raised the possibility that the mother was a victim of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA), and that the sexual assault was meticulously planned to re-victimise her, destroy her credibility as a potential witness/complainant, and gain control of the toddler.

 

Rainer Kurz is a Chartered Psychologist based in London. Since 1990 Rainer has worked in Research & Development roles for leading test publishers. His PhD dissertation was on enhancing the validity and utility of ability testing. Rainer developed 50+ psychometric tests and authored more than 100 publications. He is a Consultant Editor for Test Reviews at the Psychometric Testing Centre (PTC) of the BPS. In an entirely private volunteer advocate capacity Rainer has been investigating a chilling ‘Child Smuggling’ case since 2012. He presented 30+ posters on trauma, dissociation and healing at international peer-reviewed conferences that are available here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rainer_Kurz2

 

Ritual Abuse Survivors Experience of Research - Dr. Laurie Matthew OBE

 

This presentation will explore the background and ongoing work of two survivor led and innovative non-profit organisations based in Scotland. Ritual Abuse Network Scotland (RANS) has provided support and information to adult survivors of ritual abuse for 20 years now and Eighteen And Under has worked for almost 30 years with young abuse survivors who are under 18. Both organisations have been at the frontier of raising awareness about ritual abuse in the UK and beyond. She will also share findings from recent research investigating ritual abuse survivors' experiences when seeking help from agencies and research exploring the needs of young abuse survivors for confidential services. The importance of survivor led participatory research will also be discussed in the presentation. 

 

Dr. Laurie Matthew OBE is founder and Manager of Eighteen And Under an award winning charity providing confidential support services to young people who have been abused. She is also a founder member and advisor to Izzy’s Promise the UK’s leading charity for survivors of organised and ritual abuse and of the Ritual Abuse Network Forum (RANS). She is the author of several books about ritual abuse and the Violence Is Preventable abuse prevention programmes for children and young people. She has over 40 years experience of directly supporting abuse survivors. Her recently published research has included participatory research with adult ritual abuse survivors and participatory research with young survivors of sexual abuse who were unknown to authorities. 

www.18u.org.uk  www.violenceispreventable.org.uk

 

A History of Ritual Abuse - Dr. Randy Noblitt

 

This two-hour presentation traces the history of ritual abuse, and critically evaluates the chronology and evolution of this topic in the scholarly literature. We will review and discuss the definition of ritual abuse from the APA Dictionary of Psychology along with other definitions and conceptualizations. We will consider ritual abuse allegations in the context of the backlash movement to including the false memory syndrome and sociocognitive theories. We will review contemporary international allegations of ritual abuse, also exploring historic accounts of ritual abuse. We will examine the frequently noted psychological sequelae in ritual abuse.

 

Randy Noblitt is a clinical psychologist and professor of clinical psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP) at Alliant International University, Los Angeles. He is the principle author of Navigating Social Security Disability Programs: A Handbook for Clinicians and Advocates (2020) as well as Cult and Ritual Abuse: Narratives, Evidence and Healing Approaches, 3rd Edition (2014). He is the co-editor and a contributor to Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations (2008).

 

Healing from Trauma by Shelby Rising Eagle

 

Shelby will discuss the steps she took to heal from her childhood trauma. "Your healing is for you to pursue and claim. Each and every one of you has your path to walk and you have it inside you to heal. It may work or it may not, but either way as your path unfolds you will get there."

 

Shelby Rising Eagle was born in the SF Bay Area raised in the Mormon Church. Mother was a multi-generational Mormon; father was a convert. She reports both parents participated in satanic worship, pedophile sex ring in the church. She has done over 20 years of recovery work. She is the writer of two books – How Would You Know? & How Would You Know My Whole Story? She owns and operates a Martial Arts School and is a Master in her style of martial arts and now testing for her 6th degree black belt. She is a master gardener and loves growing vegetables and flowers. She does workshops with therapists on working with victims with DID and the recovery process. She practices meditation for centering her life and progress towards a better life. She is committed to helping to up lift others in their recovery work. She teaches that everyone that they can recover and claim their life back from extreme abuse.

 

We recommend that survivors bring a safe support person to the online conference who is familiar with the issues ritual abuse survivors may need help with.

 

None of the material on this page, on linked pages or at the conference is meant as therapy, or to take the place of therapy.