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Diagnosed with Complex Trauma and a Dissociative Disorder, Emma and her system share what they learn along the way about complex trauma, dissociation (CPTSD, OSDD, DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality), etc.), and mental health. Educational, supportive, inclusive, and inspiring, System Speak documents her healing journey through the best and worst of life in recovery through insights, conversations, and collaborations.
Over:
Speaker 2:Welcome to the System Speak Podcast, a podcast about Dissociative Identity Disorder. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend starting at the beginning episodes and listen in order to hear our story and what we have learned through this endeavor. Current episodes may be more applicable to longtime listeners and are likely to contain more advanced topics, emotional or other triggering content, and or reference earlier episodes that provide more context to what we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Our guest today is Lynn Crook, who was herself a therapist when she recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. She was one of the first survivors to successfully sue her parents, just as the memory wars of the 90s began. Since her successful lawsuit, she's been investigating false memory claims. She presented her findings in The US, England, and at the United Nations. She joined a comedy improv group to handle any hecklers that might show up, but they didn't.
Speaker 2:Lynn is an editor emeritus of Treating Abuse Today and is writing a book she's currently calling An Inconvenient Crime. During this interview, Lynn references the Lost in the Mall study, which was developed by Elizabeth Loftus and her undergraduate student, Jim Cohen, as a support for the claim that it is possible to implant entirely false memories in people. The premise of this study, as I understand it, was having children be told that an older relative was present with them at the time when they were lost in a shopping mall as a child, even though they never had been. This study was developed in the context of the debate about the existence of repressed memories or false memories during the false memory syndrome movement of the nineties. The undergraduate student originally designed the experiment for an assignment for his professor, Elizabeth Loftus.
Speaker 2:You can read more about the study by researching it or looking it up on Wikipedia. The study was intended to investigate the effect of suggestions on memory. However, there is some criticism that it cannot be generalized to memories for traumatic events specifically. One of the criticism is that there are too many variables in the study. And another criticism is that in the study, it's an older relative who gives details to the child.
Speaker 2:But that's not how therapy works. There's not a relative that gives details about abuse or the therapist does not give details about the abuse. In that way, some people feel the study failed in its application to the therapeutic setting, specifically for traumatic events. In 1995, Lynn Crook, and I quote from Wikipedia, who had recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse and provided corroboration for those memories, filed an ethics complaint with the American Psychological Association, charging Loftus with misrepresenting her recovered memory lawsuit in a media interview with Psychology Today. Loftus resigned from the APA before the complaint could be investigated.
Speaker 2:In a 1999 article in the journal Ethics and Behavior, Lynn Crook and Martha Dean questioned the Lost in the Mall study, arguing that methods used were unethical and the results were not generalized to real life memories of trauma. Loftus herself responded to the criticism, claiming that exaggerations, omissions, and errors in the description of the technique and mistakes about the study's representation in the media, but she did not support those claims with data. Loftus made it clear that the Lost in the Mall study and other studies using memory implantation techniques in no way tried to claim that all memories of childhood sexual abuse discovered in therapy are false. They merely tried to show how relatively easy it is to manipulate human memory if an older relative says they witnessed the incident. In 2019, Blizzard and Shaw published a critique of the methodology and conclusions in Loftris and Pickerel in 1995.
Speaker 2:They discussed how the false memory syndrome FMS along with parental alienation syndrome were developed as defenses for parents accused of child abuse as part of a larger movement to undermine prosecution of child abuse. They alleged that by examination of the research methods and findings of the study, no full false memories were actually formed. According to Blizzard and Shaw, the Lost in the Mall study did not provide a definition of what constituted a full memory and contained little explicit description of the methods of recruitments of subjects, experimental controls, and methods of reading full and partial false memories. Furthermore, it contained nothing on the training of investigators. While the authors of the Lost in the Mall study reported that three subjects developed partial false memories and two others developed full ones, only one brief transcript of a response was offered to substantiate those conclusions.
Speaker 2:They also pointed out that the Lost in the Mall study does not describe any subjects who unequivocally accepted the false story as true. Instead, both subjects were depicted as having formed full false memories disputed details of the false story presented. End quote from Wikipedia. It is also noteworthy that the false memory syndrome is no more. Links to these related articles can be found on the blog.
Speaker 2:Welcome, Lynn Crook.
Speaker 1:Okay. Fine. My name is Lynn Crook, and I got into this field, about 1988 when I started working for an agency, and I was doing community education on sexual assault. There wasn't very much out there, so I had to do some some self education. And a problem came up when I started having panic attacks at work.
Speaker 1:I had I was seeing clients, and I didn't know why I was having panic attacks. So I saw a neurologist. He said I was fine. He referred me to a therapist, and I was still having the panic attacks and so I decided what I needed was a trip to San Francisco with my husband. And I got back and I was fine.
Speaker 1:And the therapist said, tell me a little bit about your family. And I told him something that I thought was just general knowledge. I said, my father made me stop having periods. And it's even hard for me to say that right now, but and he said, how did your father make you stop having periods? And I panicked.
Speaker 1:And it was at that moment that the, the walls that I had carefully built up as a child started to wobble just a bit. And I went home that night, and, I had the first first flash flashback, and I thought it was no big deal. Then I had more. And I decided to sue for damages, which, Washington State was the first one to allow that. And I was successful in my lawsuit.
Speaker 1:It went to trial, and a couple of false memory advocates, testified for my parents. After that, one of the experts, Richard Aufschee, he wrote a book and put a chapter in my case, it was totally bogus. So there wasn't much I could do, so I just wrote an article in a journal. And there are other expert journalists, but leftists misrepresented my case to the media, and that's APA members aren't allowed to do that, so I filed an ethics complaint. And that's kind of how I got into this field as an activist because I knew that my memories weren't fault because I I had corroboration.
Speaker 1:And so I started just writing letters. I started meeting people, and I started collecting information. And the first important information that I collected was from my own trial where Elizabeth Loftus said something odd about the mall study. And I looked further and I did more investigation. I found out that the mall study had failed.
Speaker 1:So all these parents who were trying so hard to, discount the accused accusations had no basis on which to base their false memory claims. So I started going in that direction. Eventually, I ended up writing a book.
Speaker 2:Wow. So just for the listeners, let's back up a minute and catch up people who don't understand these references because what you've done is really so powerful and so, so critical to the field and to survivors and so important for people to understand. You are talking about Elizabeth Loftis and the Lost in the Mall study. Can you go ahead and explain just what that part is? We are talking about in the nineties during the false memory wars.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yes. We are.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. So during that time, this was someone who was frequently testifying on behalf of parents who were being accused, and she was using her study as an expert witness saying
Speaker 1:She was what she was actually saying is that recovered memories memories, there's no evidence that memories can be repressed and recovered later correctly. And what happens with a child, I think, or I know what I did as a child, I when it was happening, when my dad was doing it, I I was scared. I was unhappy. And when I went to school the next day, I didn't wanna think about it. And so I did my best to not think about it, to to what I learned was called repress it.
Speaker 1:So I learned to totally forget it. I learned to archive the memory so they wouldn't bother me during the day.
Speaker 2:I wanted to clarify that part so that people who are just now learning about this and have not read the literature or new survivors just struggling or finding out about their diagnosis or having memories come up, I wanted to clarify that to be sure that they understood first sort of the context. If you could go ahead now and say what you were sharing about the Lost in the Mall study itself. Itself.
Speaker 1:Sure. The Lost in the Mall study was what Loftus came up with so that she could testify for parents that $250 an hour, now it's $600 an hour. And she needed something. She was, I think, pretty desperate. And what she came up with didn't actually apply to what a therapist might do, but reporters never asked her about that.
Speaker 1:So the reason it didn't apply is because, the subjects were told, this is what your older relative told us. This is what happened when you were lost in a mall. And so for that to apply to therapy, a therapist would have to say, this is what your older relative told me about seeing you molested as a child. And that didn't apply to therapy, but it didn't matter because no one asked about it. And the second flaw with the molested is that it failed.
Speaker 1:It failed by 1994. Maybe two subjects of the 24 subjects said they were lost. It's hard to say, but it failed. So what Loftus had to do then was to increase the results to what she says is about twenty five percent. And that's false information.
Speaker 1:So there are two flaws with the MALL study. One, it doesn't apply to what a therapist might say. Two, it failed. I think the reason that she pulled that off is because she's a PhD and no reporter ever questioned her. They may have wondered about it, but the media does not question PhDs.
Speaker 1:So she pretty much had it made. She I think she must have known that pretty much anything she said would be accepted by the media. No one would question her.
Speaker 2:And this gave her that platform to continue testifying using that study and now it's still quoted.
Speaker 1:Yes. It's still quoted. She still tells it. She still says it to the media. She still discusses it in the media, and she has even testified.
Speaker 1:This was in a Los Angeles school district case. She testified that the law study does not be applied beyond the 24 subjects. So she can't say about a quarter. She she can't say anything about it, but she does.
Speaker 2:How did you realize what was going on with the Lost in the Mall study, and how did you respond?
Speaker 1:I first realized it when I was reading her deposition in my case, and she said that one of the first eight subjects had had said a false memory was implanted in one of the first eight subjects, and I thought that didn't make sense because there were 24 subjects. So how could she have a result that that was a quarter of of the 24 subjects when only one of the first eight? So I kept wondering about it. And so I applied for the human subjects review committee, report, which said that only two subjects said they were lost. And I wrote a article I coauthored an article about it in ethics and behavior that, the study failed statistically.
Speaker 1:And she responded in the same article, and she did some gaslighting of my, coauthor and me. And that was that was the first time that I was gaslighted. Except after she after I filed the ethics complaint, there was another time when she resigned from the APA. After that, there was a lot of gaslighting of me and my supporters. But also that gaslighting is not is not unusual for survivors because what I found is that anyone who accuses a family member of incest or accuses a priest or accuses a teacher is gaslighted.
Speaker 1:They're attacked personally, and that's supposed to shut you up.
Speaker 2:That's happened even on the podcast in sharing our story. We get a lot of emails that are very supportive and encouraging and people who listen to the podcast and are grateful for the podcast. But we also get emails from people who attack us for things we never even said or did or that don't have anything to do with the podcast at all. Doxing us, outing where we live and who our family is and our legal name and things like that that have been really damaging and that they don't understand or care, maybe, I don't know, about the consequences. How did you deal with the kind of gaslighting you went through and those kinds of experiences?
Speaker 1:Well, the first time, it was after it was after Loftus resigned, and I got called a bunch of names. And at one point, I had to laugh because they called me a blondie as they called me an airhead blondie, and I it made me laugh because it would take me a huge it would take a huge makeover for for me to become someone I get a wig. I would have to have my body redone. And after that, laughing at them really helped me kind of deal with it. The other time was when Loftus replied to our article, and in print, she called us names.
Speaker 1:And I knew one thing that means that they when people gaslight you, that means they have nothing better to say than personal attacks. So that's been helpful to me. So not getting upset about it because that that's helpful to me to keep a level head because what they're trying to do is to, make you do make make you say angry things that are inappropriate and then they win, so I don't do that.
Speaker 2:It's not going to stop them, and I know that emotionally and mentally I can fight that battle differently than the battle to protect my actual outside children.
Speaker 1:I in the book, I tell stories of people who were gaslighted. And I don't know of anyone who's had to move, maybe I just haven't done enough research, but I know it's been pretty awful. For example, David Kieloff here in Seattle, he was picketed for years. He was picketed, in fact, by one of Loftus' coauthors, Jackie Pickrell, and that was Chuck Noe who did the picketing. It's been awful.
Speaker 1:It he figures it cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars. So there have been a lot of people who have been gaslighted gaslighted like you. Because what I what I think is that child molesters are bullies because they have to silence their victims, and so they bully them into silence. So when we disclose, they revert to bullying again because that's what they know.
Speaker 2:It's so hard because on the podcast, we have been very careful at or at least tried to be careful not to use it as a platform for trauma dumping. We've not told specific details of our story. We've talked about the process of learning about DID and the process of what therapy is like, and we've interviewed people like yourself, but we have tried to make it a safe and educational kind of experience, not just a trauma of here are all the bad things that ever happened kind of thing. And our family's been through a lot. We have six kids adopted from foster care.
Speaker 2:And so there's a lot that our family has been through. And sometimes we've talked with the children about different topics and tried really hard to keep the focus on that way. And so to have such a limited sharing when people take that and make it such a scary experience and attack us for that, then it's a hard thing to keep sharing. It's a hard thing to continue to be vulnerable at any level when it doesn't feel safe while we're in therapy learning how to feel safe. And so that's really been a challenge, and I appreciate your courage in that you continue to share and advocate and do what you have done in the face of going through so much.
Speaker 2:I know that in the context of the nineties and the memory wars, there were so many therapists that stood up for their clients or advocated for their clients or testified in behalf of and at great risk to themselves and to their families. And I think that in some ways for people just now being diagnosed or for new survivors or younger survivors that feels far away, but it was not that long ago and it changed lives and careers. And I know that I myself was initially diagnosed in the very end of that, at the very end of the nineties, and it caused all kinds of problems. I was in college at the time, and my deans fought over the diagnosis and whether it was a diagnosis or not, whether it was real or not. They called my parents onto campus.
Speaker 2:It caught I had not seen them. I was not living with my parents. My parents did not have custody of me at that time. Like, I that was my taste of it. And because of that, it caused it made things so much harder and so much worse than what it was.
Speaker 2:And so it was a long time before we ever talked about it again. In fact, waited until my parents were dead to until both of them were deceased before we spoke up again and went back for therapy for help because that's how dangerous it felt. And not just in a paranoid, I'm scared because this was memory time stuff that was hard, but talking in now time became not safe. And it was a hard thing, and I think a lot of people are being triggered by politics right now and things when it feels not safe in lots of ways. And people like you who have continued to do their best and fought through so much and advocated through so much, I think that you are heroes and heroines that are sometimes under recognized, and I just wanted to tell you thank you.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much, and I'm really sorry that you had to go through everything you've gone through and that you too continue to do this kind of work. I'm just amazed by survivors. I truly am. Someone said years and years ago that if we are going to stop stop all this, stop, stop the memory wars, that it's up to survivors. It's not up to therapists.
Speaker 1:It's not up to researchers, but it's up to us, and I believe that.
Speaker 2:That's so powerful.
Speaker 1:There's an there's another I'm gonna switch subject slightly. There's another issue that I've I've been thinking about. It's that someone said, Anna Munch said that child sex abuse is a three person crime. There's the molester, and there's the victim, and there's also the institution of some sort that tolerates it. So for me, my father was the abuser.
Speaker 1:My mother was the conspirator in the abuse. And then when I told, she tried to recruit family members to become co conspirators in the crime. So it was the family that was the institution that allowed my father to molest me, and it would and then it was everyone else who became co conspirators. It was the person who said who told me, oh, I've heard about that false memory thing. How are your parents now?
Speaker 1:She became a co conspirator when she said that because I got so many responses like that that I eventually just stopped talking, talking about myself. It's only been in the last couple of years that I've started talking once more.
Speaker 2:It's so hard.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:It's a it's an extra layer of violation. It's another betrayal. It's more relational trauma. All of those things that we know cognitively. The wounds are so deep and it's so much to fight against.
Speaker 1:It is. And when other people decide to play judge and jury, people who know nothing about our case, people who weren't at my trial so they don't know, why the judge ruled as he did. They feel that they have the right to decide whether or not I was molested as a kid. And what helps is the handle that the false memory group gave, everyone else that you can tell any victim that her memories are false and that and then it's over for her. So you don't have to worry about what happened to her.
Speaker 1:Just tell her, oh, false memories, and it's still happening.
Speaker 2:When you are brave enough to reach out for help and when that help is taken away or attacked in some way, it is hard not to have those messages reinforced that it is not safe to continue sharing. And there's this shutdown that comes because of safety, we go back into that trauma response and put the walls back up because it's not safe to share anymore and present anymore. And even systemically for different people or the way things work internally, everything gets shifted back into protection mode. And so externally, everything gets presented differently, and it becomes a new struggle of the same messages as when you were little, except now you're an adult. I have to appear this way.
Speaker 2:I have to present this way. I have to stay out of things this way and have to make sure everybody assumes that I'm okay because it's dangerous for me not to be okay and I can no longer tell anyone about it.
Speaker 1:Because they won't believe you, and they will judge you. And when I I was I was fortunate because I recalled in 1989, and that's before the false memory stuff came up. And so I would the the scariest thing back then was for me to tell someone at work, and I I would be so nervous. And then they would I would tell them, and I could see their face, and it was very kind. And they said they usually said, I'm so sorry this happened to you.
Speaker 2:That's such a gift.
Speaker 1:Each each time it was so healing, and I did it a number of times. And after that, I felt less shame and less fear about myself, about what happened to me as a child. The things that so embarrass me, I could tell people, and that's all they'd say. They'd just say, I'm so sorry this happened to you. And it helped me heal.
Speaker 1:It helped me give it gave me courage. It gave me strength to, continue.
Speaker 2:So part of what helped you get through having to put those walls back up, so to speak, and and I'm making assumptions just for the general audience. But part of what helped you through that piece was that attunement of others being present and accepting and safe and receiving those pieces of you well, and that gave you or brought you healing enough to sort of build that internal resiliency to fight the shame and those layers that were coming against you and trying to squelch it all back down.
Speaker 1:Yes. It did. That's what gave me the courage and the resilience to continue. And maybe that that played a large part in why I do what I do today. Because right from the beginning, I was believed and the shame went away.
Speaker 1:And I first heard about fault memories. I read the article. It was in 1992, and it was Associated Press article. Loftus was, was quoted, and I went through it point by point, and I said, none of that applies to me. My memories are not false.
Speaker 1:And that was also very, very healing. But I never did believe the false memory thing.
Speaker 2:Tell us about your book.
Speaker 1:I started gathering information in the early nineties, and it was like putting a puzzle together, and I kept gathering information. I kept meeting people. I kept meeting people like myself, and I kept meeting people who had been harassed in some way by the false memory people. And I was kept gathering information. About ten years ago, a a woman was referred to me who's a research who became a research assistant.
Speaker 1:And at that point, I thought, why not put this into a book? So I started putting putting everything together. And about a year ago, I was doing my nineteenth presentation on this, and it went really well because what I did was tell the story of the evolve of why FLOTS and Memories came to be and how it was promoted even though it was so flawed. And the audience clapped. They understood what I was saying, and they asked questions.
Speaker 1:And I realized that I had a story, and so I assembled it. And this week, I just sent out did the first agent pitch, so we'll see. It was but it's a lot longer than you think. It was it was 30 pages, And we'll see if he likes it. And if not, I'll just keep trying to sell this story to an agent.
Speaker 1:If not, if that doesn't work, I will publish it myself. I think the story, the false memory campaign is fascinating. It shows how people who have bullied children and who have molested children can conceal their, story to the media.
Speaker 2:That's a classic evasive move just trying to sway opinion and distract from what the actual issue is. It's such a domestic violence kind of tactic, and it feels so relevant with the protests going on right now and people considering the concepts and trying to learn about the concepts of systemic oppression and things like this. I I feel like this is an example of it where someone who has a flawed study can make money for testifying about it and change lives and impact lives and harm lives and cause harm, that that can just happen and be okay and not stop. That's a problem.
Speaker 1:It is that someone can take a flawed study and become the go to person for the media and repeat the results the flawed results of a flawed study, say, 300 times. And I sometimes I wonder if what she has done is to she didn't well, she was not successful in implanting memories in her subjects, but she has implanted a belief in our culture that, it's okay to play judge and jury with survivors. Just tell them their memories are false. The PR campaign by the false memory people was brilliant. It was modeled along the, PR campaign for cigarette manufacturers in the fifties, except that what the fault memory people did, it was just better.
Speaker 1:It was really, really good. What they did at one point was to target groups with a million contacts, TV shows. They were so good at what they did and the media never questioned them. It is amazing. It remains amazing today.
Speaker 1:It would have been so easy right from the start to dismiss all the false memory claims, but it never happened. Of course, what the false memory people did was to harass all their critics to silence them because they're so good at that.
Speaker 2:I remember one of the things that happened several years after my college experience was my family sent me a recording from a show even that was on NPR about false memories and just seeing that it was so mainstreamed and now this lost in the mall study is still being used even in famous cases recently.
Speaker 1:There have been a lot of cases recently. I know it's mentioned a lot in the media because the popular press, maybe a reporter is assigned to do an article, yet another article on memory, and he says, okay. Gotta call Elizabeth Loftus. Probably the most interesting time that that happened was with Christine Blasey Ford when she made the accusation against Kavanaugh, that when she she he attempted to rape her when she was 15. I think a dozen reporters either interviewed Loftus.
Speaker 1:Anderson Cooper was one which really surprised me which either interviewed Loftus or quoted her on false memories, and she gave a different response to every single reporter. It was amazing. It was no one even questioned her ever, not even Anderson Cooper.
Speaker 2:Wow. So what what is your work? What does your activism look like now?
Speaker 1:Right now, as I finish writing the book, what it looks like is trying to get the book published. I I answer questions from people who call. I sometimes write letters to the editor. I'm still looking for information, so that's about what it is. Trying to get more information, fill in the some empty spaces in the book.
Speaker 1:The last public talk I gave was last year, so I don't do a lot of public speaking anymore even though I'm happy to do it. One of the best times I I had was at a Seattle conference when I did a workshop for comedy improv and anyone who wanted to try comedy in improv. And everyone who signed up for the workshop was had been diagnosed DID, and they were amazing. They were so incredibly funny that they were the funniest group I've ever seen. And do you know comedy improv?
Speaker 1:It's it's like, okay, pretend like you are in your, you're in your therapist's office and and it's trying to, make something funny and that's what DID diagnosed clients were able to do. It was amazing.
Speaker 2:Susan Peace Bennett was on the podcast and talked about how comedy can be so healing and why it's so important and not in a making fun of DID way. That's not what you're saying. But in a the the expression that can come from it and the healing can come from it and what happens in our body when we're able to relax and enjoy and laugh and the creativity that we have collectively and expressing that and sharing that. I learned a lot about that from her. She she's studied some of that.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm that's what I'm talking about. I they were the funniest group I've ever hung out with, and it makes me happy even as I think about how how funny they were. They were just they were amazing. They were totally amazing. And I don't know if it's a special skill that anyone diagnosed with DID has.
Speaker 1:But it was amazing.
Speaker 2:Oh yes. We're all very funny.
Speaker 1:And survivors have a wonderfully dark sense of humor. I think you've probably found that too. And it's not a sense of humor. It's not this is not jokes that I could could go public with. And the one typical joke is how many charmless does does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Speaker 2:How many?
Speaker 1:One. One, but the light bulb has to keep it a secret.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What
Speaker 2:would you want a new therapist who's just learning about trauma or DID, what would you want them to understand about the memory wars or this part of our history?
Speaker 1:What would I want a new therapist to know about the memory wars? That it it's silence. For a long time, therapists were very careful around clients who had been molested as kids because they thought that it would be easy for them to implant a memory, and then they would get sued. That was the giant fear of therapists. I went to a couple of workshops for therapists on how not to get sued, and what they said was, know, just keep really good notes.
Speaker 1:And what I know now is that it doesn't really matter what you do. If someone can be recruited to sue you, they will. Those the lawsuits against therapists kind of slowed down after a federal case, USV Peterson in Houston. And let's see, another one in North Carolina. And that's because when the cases, most most cases against therapists are settled, but when they go to court, the false memory testimony doesn't stand up well, and it's easy to dismiss.
Speaker 1:That's what happened in those two cases. And after that, the cases kind of slowed down. The memory warriors, they they aren't it's not an academic discussion. It's it's a discussion between trauma based therapists and academics who think that memories are either false or they are fantasy based. So the these memories are caused by victims who fantasize, say, about sex with their father.
Speaker 1:Or when they were a child, they fantasized about sex with father their father. Some of these, things that happened to children were sadomasochistic. So children would be fantasizing about zero masochistic fantasies with their with their parents. It just seems highly unusual. Children can't do that.
Speaker 1:But that for me is is the memory wars. It's trauma versus fantasy and false memories. Does that make sense? Do you have any questions?
Speaker 2:No. It does. I was just thinking. It does make sense. I was thinking how one of the things that I wanted to do with the podcast was help bring some healing between the clinical and survivor community because part of the side effects of what happened with the memory wars were that the cost of caring for survivors, the the risk for caring for survivors was so high for the clinical community and the things that happened to them.
Speaker 2:And even some people had patients that were not actual patients, but just sort of to set up the therapist. That made it so much harder and and the silence like you're talking about to be safe. The silence that kind of fell made it so much more difficult for so many survivors to get help. And so even though everyone cognitively kind of understands what happened, I think that survivors need survivors I don't think always had that side of the story understanding what clinicians were going through and I think survivors now sometimes are calling for action in good and healthy ways, in modern ways, in cultural ways as they have more access to each other because of things like the Internet or online groups and things like that. And so survivors are organized a little bit differently, and I think that there's still just so much hurt there sometimes that we're so quick to defend ourselves or ask for help in different ways.
Speaker 2:We forget about what the other people are just being people and that other people are human. I don't even know how to say it. It's just something that I can feel and sense. But part of why I have clinicians come on the podcast and speak is to share their stories just like I'm sharing my story and for us to see how human we are. And so new clinicians understanding the vulnerability of what more experienced clinicians have already been through and that there is a collective wisdom that they share that is not on paper in the books, and it's not taught in the textbooks or in the schools.
Speaker 2:And I know things like Bethany Brand trying to work on the textbooks and the top DD studies and things like that that are wonderful, but I just mean culturally of who we are as a community of clinicians and who we are as a community of survivors. Together we experienced a collective trauma with the memory wars and that we're all still healing from that, I think. And I think it was just it was not as long ago as it feels sometimes. And I just, I'm just remembering that and recognizing that. What would you share with a survivor who is just now realizing the significance of what happened to them in the past and as they're trying to find a therapist.
Speaker 1:Okay. So what would I say to someone who is just starting to realize what happened to them? I would say, take your time. Take it easy. Take your time.
Speaker 1:You can't speed through this. Make good decisions. Find people who can help you think things through very carefully. A partner is a good person for that. A friend, a sibling.
Speaker 1:Find someone. I think that's the most important thing. Find someone who can help you make good decisions. One or two of the decisions that I made when I was going through this process weren't good. They were based on beliefs that I had as a chill as a childlike.
Speaker 1:One of them was mothers will always protect their children. Well, that's obviously not true, but I based a decision on that, and it didn't work. So that's one of the things I've learned in my own healing process is to think things through. Don't do things spur of the moment and do it carefully. Speaking to your other what you were talking about before, after the trial, I did not I did not go back to counseling.
Speaker 1:I did not go back to seeing clients. I realized I could not do that because I knew that some faulty memory people would try to recruit someone to come into my office, present a fake story, and then sue me. So I stopped seeing clients, and for me that worked.
Speaker 2:It's so heartbreaking that someone seeking healing would be met with violence or someone seeking help would be met with more harm. It just hurts my heart.
Speaker 1:Yes. But, hopefully, we, you and I and others, do everything we can with people we meet to, listen to them and to respond in a healing way. And I will touch as many people as I can, and I'm sure that you will too. I mean, your podcast does that.
Speaker 2:What do you think is different now than in the nineties, or what do you think is better, or what do you hope gets better for the clinicians or survivors, either when for all of us together as one community, what do you think is different or better now than what it was?
Speaker 1:That's a really good question. I think this started changing. The fault of memory stuff started changing in o two when the Boston Globe started covering Catholic cases, and we had cases in which there was more than one victim per perp, and that was more believable for the media. Right now, we're seeing amazing stories of institutions where the reporters dig deep for their stories. They don't don't just go to the, they don't just say go to the teacher and say, oh, you were you've been accused.
Speaker 1:What do you have to say about that? That they go to they listen to the victims, and they go deeper to find out what process was going on within that school or church that allowed the molestation to continue. That's what I think is different, that we're seeing stories that go deep into the process of how molesters molest, and I think it's been a healing process.
Speaker 2:So almost the more that we collectively are able to have a voice and claim our voices, almost the bigger and better impact it has for healing for others as well, because it is recognized as a systemic thing.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you said that because the the more that people speak out, the more we believe the people that we know. So if I read about oh, let's see. The latest book was Chanel Miller's book, Know My Name. She was read by the the Stanford student. She speaks out, and I hear her I hear what she says, and it makes me more compassionate.
Speaker 1:I am anyway, but it makes me more compassionate towards everyone. Understanding her personal story helps me understand my own also. There's another one out there by Ronan Farrow. It's called Catch and Kill. He says that when he was trying to get these women to come forward and talk to to and talk about Weinstein, then he remembered that what he told his sister when she was coming forward to talk about their father, he tried to silence her when she was doing that.
Speaker 1:And all of a sudden, he realized that that that isn't he wanted he wanted his people. He wanted his the women that he was interviewing to speak out, but not his sister. And he made it very clear that he recognized that.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:So he learned.
Speaker 2:That's part of why the podcast is called System Speak. It's not just about DID system or calling a diagnosis this or that. It's about the system of all of us together and the community of all of us together and why speaking up makes a difference and being present with each other makes a difference and listening to each other makes a difference. I think it's really part of what empowers us.
Speaker 1:It is. I'm getting a lump in my throat as I hear you say that. It is. It's very empowering When I speak up, it's empowering for others. And when others speak up, it's empowering for me, and it's empowering for all of us.
Speaker 1:Knowing that when this happened to and speak out is rule leveling for all of us, I think. It's it's empowering. It's powerful.
Speaker 2:I think that's really helpful in giving the courage to help us keep going and to help others keep going in their own ways and in their own voices, even though not all of us can do it in the same way. And I appreciate your efforts in that for the community and in the community.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you. Does this in their own way. And I used to think, well, if you'd only do this or this x or y or z, then it would really work for you, but it doesn't. It it's we all choose our own path. And I think they're all going in the same direction towards healing all of us and our community.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Was there anything else that you wanted to share before I let you go?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Peter Barry speaks highly of you.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you. He is a very kind friend. I met him through the podcast, but he's a very good friend now.
Speaker 1:That's what he said. Yeah. No. I I think that what what you said helped me say more than I was thinking of saying. So I thought it was a good interview.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Sure. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Your support of the podcast, the workbooks, and the community means so much to us as we try to create something together that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing, and you can join us on the community at www.systemsspeak.com.
Speaker 2:We'll see you there.