About Allyssa Expertise False Memory Syndrome: I can answer questions about what I believe it is, one way it possibly starts and ways to deal with it from the accuser point of view. I can answer questions about how it feels to realize that it didn`t happen. I can discuss about how, at one time, I was 100% sure that it was totally true. I can talk about ways to deal with the feelings and emotions of being a recanter, especially if the person accused is no longer alive so there is no opportunity to apoligize. I can answer questions about the process I went through in realizing that it was not true. I would like to be able to provide hope to parents or others that have been falsely accused. I am in no way knowledgeable about any of the legal aspects that can sometimes be involved in this kind of thing. I can share about my experiences with inappropriate therapy and I can offer ideas on ways to determine if a therapist is appropriate or not before one gets involved. I can also answer questions about the great value of therapy with an appropriate therapist just based on my experiences. I am not a counselor or any kind of trained therapist myself so I could not answer questions about what types of specific therapy would apply to any specific type of problem other than what I have mentioned. I can answer questions about my experience with hypnosis and other coping tools I have used in terms of lowering anxiety and assisting with relaxation.
Experience I am a person who accused my parents of sexual abuse. Several years later I realized it did not happen and I recanted but my parents were deceased. I had an inappropriate therapist that I believe helped to fuel this process. I lost close to 10 years of my life to this that were spent dealing with things that I later realized did not even happen. I have lost communication with both my brother and sister and all of my neices, nephews, great neices, and great nephews primarily because of this. I have learned to forgive myself and move on despite the rejection of my family.
Question How intriguing. I am very sorry for what you have suffered. My curiosity is piqued. I'm assuming you're okay with talking about what happened to you since you've put yourself out as an expert.
How did you come to have False Memory Syndrome? Are there other causes? How did you find out you were mistaken?
Thanks.
Answer Hi Allison, Yes I do not mind talking about what happened to me. Well first of all keep in mind that I am not a medical expert and these are my opinions but my counselor agrees with me.
When I was growing up I did have a very dysfunctional family and I suffered from a lot of depression. I ended up in therapy when I was in college and unfortunately I got an unethical therapist. She lied to me and told me that she was 3 hours away from her master's degree. I found out much later that she only had her LVN in nursing and a summer course from some institute in California. A psychiatrist had hired her and was calling her a patient care coordinator and the therapy was theoretically being done under his guidance but it wasn't really and I'm not sure that kind of thing works anyway. She went with him on hospital rounds and wrote orders.
Anyway, I started seeing her at a time when I was very needy and she started to kind of fill that need. One time she told me that the symptoms I was describing were very consistent with those experienced by victims of incest. And could it be possible that had happened? I had just remembered a memory of an actual abuse by an ice cream truck vendor when I was in about grade 3 or 4 so my mind continued to ponder the idea of "could I have been abused?" When this really happened I blocked it out and did not tell anyone and remember it when I began to date and got kissed heavily for the first time. I only told my boyfriend and had never told my parents. It made sense to me in a weird way because I did not realize at the time that I had a very dysfunctional family and I could not figure out why I had so much depression.
Every time I started to get "memories" that validated her ideas and theories I got "warm fuzzies" from her which fed into my neediness. This started a cycle that went on like that with her as my therapist for about 3 years. She had lots of problems. She did not have boundaries, a concept that I did not even understand until I got a very ethical therapist later on. I would be manipulative and keep talking as long as she would let me and many of my sessions ended up being over one and a half hours. This caused her to be late for someone else. So you can imagine that I was not the only one that she ran over time with. So many times appointments were canceled. Finally at one point I had been canceled for about 5 or 6 weeks in a row and I really needed someone to talk to, so I called and made an appointment with another therapist that I knew about and he saw me within 48 hours. I continued seeing this man and over time began to realize what was and was not appropriate about what this lady did. That is when I learned that boundaries were more than a property line. Sherry had done some very unethical things. She used to have me come in at lunch when she had been unable to see me at the regular time if I brought her lunch. Sometimes when she gave me a hug if I cried, she would sit in my lap in the chair in her office. She is petite and I am a large woman. My current therapist has a no touch rule and that way there are no misunderstandings. She had invited me to her house along with a couple of other clients to have a "denial party" (her words) to have fun and pretend that nothing was wrong. At this "party" some of the people had wine and Sherry had pot that anyone could have used if they wanted it. On another occasion, I was invited to Sherry's house on my own and she had wine and pot there and offered it to me but I refused. I truly did not realize how inappropriate this was. To me it was just another person doing their thing. I did not realize what effect it was having on me. Sherry did these things due to the fact that she had no training and did not know any better. I do not believe that she intended to do damage but she did. She had also recommended a book called "The Courage to Heal." She really pushed reading it. The authors of this book tell stories about people that have been abused but didn't remember it. They talk about ways to determine if in fact it is really real! It was written during the 80's. During that time there was a movement that preached if you thought you were abused, even if you did not remember it, you probably were. This was a unique thing that happened in the late 80's and early 90's. I also read voraciously and devoured books that explained all kinds of stories of abuse. I inadvertently began to incorporate the details of various stories into my own. I am a fairly intelligent person and the stories my mind was coming up with were actually plausible if you were really warped and believed that several others were too. So I believed them and so did quite a few other people. I even had a confrontation session with my father. I remember him asking my doctor if there was any way if it was possible that I could be remembering something that was not true as if it was true and the doctor said that in his experience "NO". My father apologized to me and said that he did not remember anything but for whatever he did he was sorry. My mind even got creative to the point of creating some level of Multiple Personality Disorder. It was there enough that I was diagnosed with that by 2 different doctors and was totally consistent. I continued seeing the same very ethical therapist and we had worked on many issues and flashbacks of things that I thought had happened. I began to understand and get a feel for my own boundaries. Both of my parents died. My life went on. On my own I began to think about some of the "memories" and how some of them felt more real than others. I would ask myself to try to fill in irrelevant details and I could not. I began to realize that some of the things that I thought had actually happened had not happened at all. I gradually started to not make sense. At first I was even afraid to tell my therapist. I did not tell anyone for at least 6 or 8 months. I finally started talking about it and my therapist helped me look at it. He is very ethical. He never tells me how to think or anything like that. He sometimes presents another was to look at something but he will not tell me that something is a certain way within myself. He leaves it up to me to tell him and he just asks questions that make me think and sometimes challenges me to consider ideas that I never would have thought of before. I am the one that brought the FMS to him and said "What do you think of this?" Of course his classic response was "What do you think?" He never led my answers one way or the other. I just began to gradually realize that the "memories" really did not make sense with what I for sure did remember. There is a different quality to the real memories and the contrived memories. Like I said before, the contrived memories did not have details about things not related to the abuse, where as the real ones did. An example would be the weather temperature or a color of something. All of this was accompanied by quite a bit of prayer. My belief in God or a higher power, Creator is strong. To admit to myself, much less someone else that I was wrong was hard. At the time I accused my parents of abuse, I believed it totally. If someone had asked me to swear on a bible about it, I would have. So it was not easy to realize what I put my parent through. It was doubly hard to realize that I was not going to get to apologize to them in their lifetime since they died before I realized the truth. I have apologized to the spirit of my parents, wherever they may be and hope and believe that they and God hear me. But it does hurt that they are gone. That is one of the reasons I put my name on this list. If I can help any other person even begin to realize that they have FMS or a parent to understand their child and they are able to apologize to their family before they are gone then I will have done what God expects. Basically I just feel a need to give back because God has been there for me.
As far as are there other causes of FMS, I have no idea. I suppose there could be but I do not know what they would be. You could try contacting the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and see if they have any opinions on the subject.
No one told me I was mistaken and I would not have believed them if they had. It had to come from within me and it happened as I started to get more mentally healthy I was able to come to terms with how crazy my family really was and I began to realize how totally creative my mind had been to come up with all these "stories" that were believable. One of my drawbacks I think was how much I read about abuse. In retrospect I wish I had not done that at least in terms of the details of the stories. It is perfectly okay to read about how someone deals with adversity and gets over it but to focus on the facts too much is not healthy for the author or the reader. It is what many people want to hear or see but it is not a good idea to go there.
I have a sister that is 18 years older than I am. In the middle of all this I tried to convince her how real this abuse was by writing down a flashback in detail and mailing it to her, thinking that she couldn't help but see how real it was. Well I was totally wrong. All she did was accuse me of sending her pornographic mail. I really thought she couldn't help but see it but what I did not realize was how mixed up I really was so it did not come out as good as I thought. I had deluded myself into believing things were true that were not true including how believable the whole thing was. Unfortunately my sister and I no longer have contact due to many different situations mostly involving my family. I regret the things I did and said and would give anything to fix it but it is out of my hands now and in God's hand now.
I realize that this is a very long answer to your question but it is not a question that can be answered fully with a couple of short sentences. I hope that I have been able to answer your question and if you are thinking this stuff might apply to you keep thinking because it just might. Also spend some time and ask your higher power to help you deal with these issues and really believe that it will happen and it will. It will take time but it will happen. Feel free to write me back if you have any more questions or would like any clarification.
Have a great day and I pray that God may richly bless you!
Being mentally free is the best blessing God could ever have bestowed on me because I spent a lot of years dealing with many feelings I could not handle. I also had to come to grips with the fact that for a time I despised my parents and I got rid of many of the childhood keepsakes that I wish now I still had. While I cannot change that maybe I can prevent someone else from making the same mistakes I did. I wish you well!
