From: Trouw (A Netherlands newspaper) Asha ten Broeke, a psychologist, writes about science, and is a columnist for Trouw. For reasons of privacy the names in the article below are fictive. Translation by Adrian Mak.
The alternative psychotherapy circuit has an innocent image. Yet, not always deservedly so. Some methods used by "healers" who dig into their clients' past, may generate false memories This leads to nothing but sorrow.
It may start with a dream involving incest. Such a nightmare may mean nothing, but for Marieke it led to a long search for the truth. She at first was doubtful and told her brother so. Although she could hardly believe it, she was unable to tell fantasy from fact. Did something so seriously happen in my youth that I totally repressed the memory? Was I abused?
Marieke (37) looked for help from alternative practitioners, a "body work" practitioner, more frequently a holistic life coach. She had gone through three difficult pregnancies, was often depressed in her teens, and once had a boyfriend who was sexually violent. "She never wanted to talk about that" say her parents Rik and Anja. Although it worried them, they admit that relations with their daughter were difficult. They were reduced to be mere spectators when Marieke began to avoid them as she more and more began to rely on the alternative therapists.
One of these is Rob Derksen, life coach and founder of holistic establishments Elfenlicht (Fairy-light) and De Zuil - Vitalisering (De Pillar - Vitalizing). "The causes of nearly all mental problems find their origin in childhood" he maintains. Only after you have re-lived these past emotions, will your soul be healed. Even disorders which science views as incurable, such as schizophrenia and autism can be healed by this method, declares Derksen. This is the attitude of those in the holistic sphere. "Scientific arrogance maintains that alternative therapists are ignorant", he maintains. "Scientists think that their methods are the only proper ones; that is just what I find so very dangerous and too narrow minded".
"I have the innate ability to perceive intuitively what I have to do" says Derksen referring to his work as healer. "Hence, I receive images and feelings. It's as if by knowing it in my heart, yes, there is here a background of abuse." He then shares that feeling with the client. Next he employs a choice of methods to bring these difficult childhood memories back into consciousness.
He names regression therapy as one example: "You lead someone into what some call a trance or being hypnotized. Next you guide that person through whatever breaks through the surface." In his sessions Derksen is even able to retrieve memories of events of which the client had not one single notion prior to therapy. Once he had a client who was afraid of relations with men. By working through that behavioural pattern it was discovered that the woman had been abused by her brother, says Derksen. "Hence, [abuse] may have the effect that you fully suppress the truth to the point of nearly total forgetting."
Whereas Deksen with all his caring behaviour thinks that he helps to heal his clients, to memory expert Elke Geraerts, Derksen's manner of therapy causes all kinds of alarm bells to start ringing. Geraerts, connected with the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, has for many years been investigating the ease by which our memory can be fooled to the point that people begin to believe in life events that never has happened. In her work she frequently meets people who have acquired false memories after being influenced by a misguided therapist.
Derksen's approach deeply worries her; when she was confronted by the fact that in the past ten years he has treated more than four thousand patients she gasps audibly. "It is hardly possible that when in therapy one continues to manipulate and influence remembering, the resulting memories are accurate", says Geraerts. "After a time one will not be able to separate what the therapist caused you to imagine what might have happened in childhood from what really happened in childhood" Hypnosis has long been demonstrated to lead to false memories. Dream interpretation, similarly. The approach of Derksen she called "unseemly dangerous".
Memories are not fixed in the brain like data on a hard disk. To the contrary one's memories are changeable and frightfully open to manipulation. Since the nineties, it has been demonstrated many times that using suggestions is a relatively simple way to create false memories.
In her experiments Geraerts caused people to believe that they once fell ill after eating egg salad (Geraerts et al., 2008) other studies describe memory distortion in people reporting abduction by space aliens. (Clancy et al., 2002). Such false memories are persistent. In the journal article of Geraerts' egg salad experiment, one reads that memory led to significantly reduced consumption of egg salad sandwiches, not only directly after the false suggestion, but even four months later.
Memory research psychologists may create such a false memory by simply leading someone through a made up event: " Try to imagine that you are on a spaceship. What do you see?" Such leading almost precisely matches the method used by alternative therapists who during age-regression steer their clients towards and through their allegedly forgotten childhood.
In the experiments this technique works with about one out of three participants; with them this clearly creates a false memory. Often these are folks who by nature have a rich fantasy life and are gullible, according to Geraerts. Rik and Anja recognize their daughter in that description. Marieke was always too easily influenced, they admit.
Rik and Anja suspect that their daughter was strongly affected during successive days of intensive sessions with the alternative therapy which she frequently attended. There, her parents suspect, under the guidance of Rob Derksen she began to delve more deeply into her childhood, her dreams and imagination. She shared what happened in these sessions with her mother, who with dislike, describes the group pressures her daughter encountered.
"A number of times Marieke described with pride how 'breakthroughs' were forced on clients, After many hours of pressure a client finally began to talk about traumatic events. One incest victim had to be compelled to talk about her past. When that met with hesitation the group pressed in on her and screamed at her until finally she told her story." Anje adds, "I found that very weird."
Although Derksen in several tonalities denies using suggestion, he admits employing group-pressure to force breakthroughs. "That can be quite vehement" he says. He regularly experiences that in his group sessions there are several incest victims: "People who for the first time dare to say, I also experienced something similar, but I was in deep denial." Personally Derksen regards that as a fortunate outcome of his sessions.
According to Elke Geraerts, psychological experiments show however, that false memories do not just result from the influence of a therapist with a suggestive agenda, but also through pressure by group participants. She links these findings to group sessions, where talk of incest memories exert a pull on those easily convinced or compliant, more inclined to fantasize, causing them to believe that they also could be sexual abuse victims.
Marieke meanwhile became more and more convinced that she was such a victim. She decided to take her eldest daughter to Derksen, to discover whether grandpa had done something similar to the girl. "Our granddaughter said nothing" says Anja, but Rob Derksen, using his clairvoyant gifts concluded, that grandpa although he became excited, had not touched her inappropriately.
"It offends me deeply", says Elke Geraerts, "Manipulators of this kind should not be allowed to use such practices. A medical practitioner who by using absurd cures injures patients, will not be allowed to continue in his profession. The same should apply to alternative therapists." Geraerts emphasizes that flawed methods are not just used on the alternative circuit. "Even people with standard training to become clinical psychologists do indulge in similar malpractices. But it strikes me that although I don't know their number, most of the offenders are alternative practitioners. They believe they can play god and consider themselves rather special; this causes most of the misery".
For Anja and Rik the grief became real when the bomb burst. After years of alternative therapy Marieke accused her father and her brother of sexual abuse. She alleges that while her mother was visiting relatives abroad, her father abused his children. At first she claimed that this abuse happened only once, when she was six. Some time later she started to say that her brother almost every day raped her.
"We don't like to repeat exactly what she said; of what, all told, she accused her father and brother.", says Anja. "It was so disgusting, so vulgar . . ." She becomes silent while Rik continues, " I supposedly did things to her, and while abusing my son, forced her to look on . . ." Anja interrupts, "Rik, please stop. Enough"
Anja was placed in an impossible position. "When at first I heard it, I was so shocked that I thought, do I live with a beast. And then you have to question your partner, because you want clarity. And I had promised Marieke that I would go to the bottom of all this. You have to have doubts about your husband and son, when a daughter tells you something like that".
But the facts in Marieke's story did not appear to be correct. Anja had not been abroad in the year that her daughter was six. It is also hard to imagine that the gross abuses which Marieke described in her memories could have gone on totally unnoticed at the time. After a difficult time, Anja had to conclude that what Marieke described as memories could not have happened at all.
That does not lessen the pain. Anja does not doubt that her daughter truly suffers. "To Marieke the memories seemed all too real. I know that she was deeply traumatized when she told us all that she had come to believe."
"The suggestive methods so commonly applied in the alternative circuit, only resulted in making victims of all of us in this family." Anja continues, "Sometimes a neighbour asks why Marieke never visits. What are you to give as a reply? You live with a secret that is not of your own making. We say that she has joined a sect and has chosen to go through life without us. Our family has been torn apart.
About suggestion and imagination
Prior to the 1988 appearance of the self help book Courage to Heal, most psychologists accepted that incest was rare. If it happened in more than one out of a hundred families, it seemed much. However according to authors Ellen Bass and Laura Davis the number was much larger, up to one out of three.
The countless victims allegedly had repressed the abuse memories, which found expression in vague complaints such as depression and nightmares. Therapy was supposed to recover those hidden memories.
The countless victims allegedly had repressed the abuse memories, which found expression in vague complaints such as depression and nightmares. Therapy was supposed to recover those hidden memories.
The book caused an avalanche of abuse accusations and incest law suits. In the nineties memory researchers made short shrift of ideas about repression: memories recovered in therapy are usually false.
Most psychologists by and large know how to avoid the risk of creating false memories by avoiding suggestive questioning and by not asking clients to imagine events.
Memory experts such as Maastricht University's Harald Merckelbach and Erasmus University's Elke Geraerts fear that this knowledge has hardly penetrated the alternative circuit.
