False memories of incest

I remember the hysteria of the 1980s around ritual satanic sexual abuse and how many innocent people were charged, especially if they ran daycares. Now this about false charges of incest.

My novel The Defilers touches on the issue of false memory and ritual satanic abuse. Now a woman who had become convinced her father had molested her after "recovered memories" came out in therapy, realized the molestation had never happened. Interesting.

During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans -- most of them middle-class, 30-something women in big cities, like me -- became convinced that they'd repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy.

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In the years leading up to that mass panic, I was working as a feminist journalist, writing exposés of child sexual abuse, trying to convince the world that incest was more than a one-in-a-million occurrence. In the process, I convinced myself that my father had molested me. After five years of incest nightmares and incest workshops and incest therapy, I accused my father, estranging myself and my sons from him for the next eight years.

In the early 1990s the culture flipped, and so did I. Across the country, falsely accused fathers were suing their daughters' incest therapists. Falsely accused molesters were being freed from jail -- and I realized that my accusation was false. I was one of the lucky ones. My father was still alive, and he forgave me.

Why write this book now?

In 2007, I was out for a walk with someone I wasn't even that close to. She asked me if I'd ever done anything I was ashamed of and had never forgiven myself for. And without hesitation I said, yeah, when I was in my 30s I accused my father of molesting me, and then I realized it wasn't true. She stopped walking and stood still, just staring at me and she said, "The same exact thing happened to me." When I came home from that hike I started calling people I had known back then and speaking to some of the therapists I had seen during that period. With the exception of my ex-lover, every other person I talked to who had accused her father in the '80s and early '90s now believed she had been wrong. Being a journalist, you realize there's a story there.

One of the problems with mental illness is that an organic disorder, a chemical imbalance, a nutritional deficiency causes mental noise or feelings of depression or anxiety and we have a natural tendency to supply a narrative to explain why we're feeling so low. It's got to be caused by some traumatic event, so we search our pasts for the origin for our woes. But it just may be we need some Vitamin B 12 in a form we can absorb or more Niacin or fish oils.