As hypnotherapists we do not diagnose. If you have been in practice for any length of time you recognize this is as good because sometimes clients seem to have something suspicious going on, and it turns out to be completely innocuous once you connect with the actual initial sensitizing event (ISE).

In the world of psychotherapy however, diagnosis is part of the process. Unfortunately, diagnosis is not always an exact science, political agendas and belief influences the kinds of diagnoses and therapies considered appropriate by some few individuals. One such risky form of therapy is Recovered Memory Therapy, which uses hypnotic techniques as part of the modality. Unsuspecting hypnotherapists can be drawn in to it, it could result in malpractice should the client decide she was harmed by this approach, and financial compensation awards have been in the millions when false memories are caused. Here I outline for you what RMT is, how to recognize it, why it may be a suspect therapy using information from experts (this is not just my opinion), how the hypnotherapist might be pulled into it, and reference my work using materials you can read.

Please note: I acknowledge that a licensed professional may use controversial or unusual techniques in her office based on client assessment. The goal of this paper is not to review all the available literature on RMT, but to highlight the work that shows how false memories are caused and how that impacts hypnotherapists and their practice.

We are now a separate profession. We must also accept that this means we are legally responsible for our work, even if a psychotherapist made the initial diagnosis. We need to be aware of how mistakes made by others might cause us to inadvertently contribute to a client’s harm. I will use the feminine she/her for this as it is primarily women involved, though men may be as well.

Imagine this, if you would please. You’ve been having various troubles most of your adult life. A string of failed relationships with men, a persistent anxiety that leeches out your energy and you feel stuck...again. You occasionally have bouts of depression, and have some body image issues sometimes even bulimia. You decide to try counseling and get past this once and for all, and you’ve been seeing a kind and caring psychotherapist for a couple of months now. She’s a real sweetheart, nurturing and warm. You really trust her.

Today you started out with sharing how your childhood was with your unkind father. You always felt shamed and worthless around him, and you still seem to feel it. The therapist responds with “Well, now you are ready! You see, I’ve known for some time now that you were sexually molested as a child, though you’ve completely repressed this, but what you’ve just told me lets me know that you are ready to address this now. You’ve done well to come this far, now we can really get to it!”

As you sit in the office chair the world seems to have stopped, time seems to have slowed down and every beat of your heart seems to come after an eternity. A strange hollowness comes over you. You can’t feel anything as you try to grasp what you’ve just been told. Sexual abuse? Did she say that? How did she get that impression? “No,” you stammer in a shocked fog, “he wouldn’t do THAT...I was not molested...nothing like that happened; it wasn’t like that ...”

“Now Sheila, I’m CERTAIN you were sexually abused. You have ALL the symptoms. I’ve just been waiting for you to be ready to address this. You have simply repressed this. You are through with denial. Now we can go to work and find the repressed memories and you will finally get better.”

Abused? I was sexually abused and don’t have any memory of it? She is so calm, so certain. Repressed: that sounds official, it must be right. Clearly she knows all about this. Abused, she said: she knows and can tell. But why don’t I remember anything at all? Am I losing my mind? I can’t trust my own mind! Thank goodness I trust her.

Welcome to the world of RMT. How many of you caught the shock induction which resulted in the acceptance of the fact the client was abused because she has ALL the symptoms? Did you notice the bypass of the critical factor in that she was told that the therapist (an accepted authority who has well established rapport) is CERTAIN? Not only that, but she will get better only by accepting this (did you see the embedded command?). Notice also that all of that was offered by a trusted authority while she is in shock, a naturally hypnotic state of focused attention so that every word goes in and is accepted as fact as long as it is in the best interest of the SC mind to accept it. Does anyone doubt her SC mind will see it as “in her best interest” to find abuse memories, even if it has to create them? And in fact this can happen with this therapy. In over 1000 documented cases (Mersky H. 1996) people have discovered that the seemingly real “abuse” they “remembered” with this therapy was not historical fact but was ugly vivid fantasy.

As for that symptom list that the therapist wholeheartedly believes indicates hidden sexual abuse in her client and which so handily convinced the client that this was a scientific fact, I will use the authoritative words of the American Psychological Association:

“There is no single set of symptoms which automatically indicates that a person was a victim of childhood abuse. There have been media reports of therapists who state that people (particularly women) with a particular set of problems or symptoms must have been victims of childhood sexual abuse. There is no scientific evidence that supports this conclusion." (APA, 2005)

Still somewhat in shock and with an unreal feeling, you listen as she explains that a part of your personality split off to protect you from the memories because they were too horrible to remember. That part of you holds every single memory of ongoing sexual abuse intact but buried : repressed, and it is this split aspect of your personality that has been trying to get out and make itself known that is causing all your problems. You have an “alter” personality who took over for you when you were being molested. The alter went into the background between times and you knew nothing about her or her memories; she is a separate you. You feel numb, in shock, but the therapist’s calm, confident diagnosis and attitude seem reassuring as the world seems to arrange itself into an entirely new, weird order and you begin to digest what you’re being told about being two people in one body, one you know as you, and a mysterious alter self you do not know at all.

Dissociative Identity Disorder is the name for this idea of part of the personality splitting off and creating a separate identity as a result of trauma. “Multiple personalities” the popular name to those of us who’ve seen TV versions and read books describing it. This is not a schizophrenic person with split personality, this is an otherwise healthy person with supposed trauma memories who subconsciously split off an alter to hold those memories. It sounds official and very well accepted doesn’t it? However, this theory is not accepted by most experts. In a large survey of psychiatrists, only 1 in 4 felt that the DID diagnosis should be included in the DSM-IV without reservation and that it is strongly supported by research(Pope HG Jr, Olivia PS, et al. 1999) . In Canada, it was a mere 1 in 7. There is some good research that indicates DID may be iatrogenic (caused by therapy) (Piper A, Mersky H. 2004) .

Let’s evaluate from the hypnotherapy model. As hypnotherapists we do parts therapy, and leaving parts as separate entities is a risk that is easy to avoid. Simply integrate and do not solidify these parts. If you do not do this, your client will feel unsettled, distraught and odd. But what if your paradigm was that this “part” was psychogenically separate and distinct, and furthermore that the part was evidence of abuse, and that the part was needed as a separate entity to be questioned and quizzed about its memories of abuse? In this model it is easy to see it would be possible to accidentally encourage identity separation believing you were being therapeutic. In fact, people who are treated for DID with RMT are MORE likely to commit suicide, cause self harm (cutting etc), and need hospitalization than people who are not. (Fetkewicz J, Sharma V, Mersky H 2000) .

The other side of this model is supposed repression. The theory of robust repression is that people can repress ongoing and severe trauma completely and it will be “as if” it never happened The person goes on to make memories of a normal childhood, some good events, some bad, but nothing related to sexual trauma appears in the person’s recollection of their life at all. The RMT therapist believes that a client can literally be raped by her father at a tender age, get up a few hours later and go to school where she appears to a be a normal, healthy little girl who does well on her math test, having utterly and completely forgotten, or repressed, the entire incident.

Please do note here that the other explanation for why a person might have no abuse memories -that it did not happen- is not considered a possibility to the RMT therapist and it is this dogmatic belief in the existence of the abuse, no matter what the physical and material evidence is, and the ability of the SC mind to create needed information and constructs that sets up the false memories.

We’ve already established that the symptom list is not a legitimate scientific tool in the eyes of the APA and that DID is another area of significant professional controversy. And here again another key aspect of RMT, robust repression or the notion that you can have survived years of sexual abuse and trauma and have not one shred of a memory about it, is a highly debated area of research. There is a considerable amount of research on memory, and most of it finds that memories of trauma are remembered very well, often to the point of obsessively thinking about it. People who go through wars (Merkelback H, DekkersT, et al 2003) and through known trauma like the Chowchilla children (Terr, L 1983) remember their trauma and have numerous behavior issues that impact their daily lives in an intrusive way, in spite of therapy.

Once again the APA has made a statement on this subject “the reality is that most people who were victims of child abuse remember all or part of what happened to them.” (APA 2005)

It is this lack of solid scientific support for robust repression, the cornerstone belief of RMT that is a key point which makes it possible for a client to sue her therapist for malpractice and win. It is also why courts have disallowed recovered memories to be the basis for a case against a father decades later when a woman sues for damages (therapy fees, pain and suffering) there must be other evidence of abuse to corroborate the accusation. Memories “found” in RMT are not at all reliable and are not proof of anything except therapist bias and belief, client suggestibility and naturally occurring hypnosis.

False memories however are a documented and well known possibility of RMT. Furthermore, there is no way for the client, the therapist, or anyone else for that matter, to tell real from false memories, excepting material evidence of the abuse. (APA 2005) Some therapists actively alter the submodalities of the material based on what they believe happened, for example asking a client experiencing an image in a dissociated way (ie they imagine themselves over there doing that) to step into it and experience it in an associated way. This can be therapeutic if the person is dissociating from a real, freestanding memory, but since people may imagine themselves doing things they’ve never done in a dissociated way and real memories as associated images, this shifts the “realness” to one of a true memory. (Horton W. 2001) These images are revisited and revised over and over, either at therapist urging or simply by client fascination with her possible history and they become familiar. It becomes real to the client no matter if it is historically real or not.

She gives you a book which is called The Courage to Heal which she tells you is the bible for this kind of problem, and asks you to read it before the next session as it will trigger the memories that will empower you to finally be free.

Here I will quote Paul Simpson PhD, a psychologist who used RMT then discovered it was not well supported in research as he had been led to believe by people selling RMT seminars:

“..written by two authors with no formal degrees in psychology...” and on survivors literature in general including Courage “with impressive sounding elaborate theories the notion of repression is taught as fact and statements by “experts” are presented. Faulty studies are cited and phantom statistics are discussed in an effort to lend an air of credibility...the numbers of people shown to be suffering from forgetting of abuse.......shown to be in the millions. This makes it seem we are only now coming to terms with this crisis”(Simpson P, 1996 pp27-28) .

As you begin to read, you find many authoritative statements about sexual abuse. This is very, very common! You are learning much. It’s called robust repression and people have normal memories but were actually abused horribly by their family members which were totally repressed. Some people develop multiple alters, each one holding different memories of sexual abuse. People can completely repress years of abuse and have not one single memory at all, it says so right in the book. And the stories! Reading each woman’s story, you find yourself morbidly fascinated by the range of human behavior and cruelty. Some of these women were forced into satanic ritual abuse and had to drink blood of murdered babies and they recovered the memories only years later with the help of a therapist. Who knew? Therapists, apparently. You read with real personal interest, maybe this is like my story....maybe this is what my abuse is like...I wonder what I’ve repressed?......But my Dad didn’t seem like THAT kind of guy. But I have all the symptoms, so I MUST have been abused. Why else would I have these problems? It has to be......it’s so very common.....and I have ALL the symptoms.

Remember that reading is a natural hypnotic state. It is a focused state of attention in which other distractions and things seem to fade away, the classic definition of hypnosis. Using this book and especially calling it the “bible for survivors” or in some other way implying it is a widely accepted factual authority on the subject, both convinces the person that this is a universally accepted therapy and provides fodder for the abuse memories. While when reading a book people usually have no trouble knowing what was in the book and what happened to them personally, as well as maintaining a healthy skepticism about what is offered, in this model the client is told she does not know what happened to her and she is actively looking for it while what she is reading is supposedly true stories of others who have her issue written by presumed experts. Furthermore, she has no ability to maintain a healthy skepticism about anything related to this therapy. She has been told essentially that she cannot trust her mind or the memories she has always known, but she does trust her therapist.

Not long after reading the books she will start to have “flashes of memory” as her SC mind takes bits from her real childhood that are true, like the dining room table she used to be so familiar with (because the synapses were well traveled), and tentatively adds in new material that might be there to flesh out the desired memories which the expert has told her unequivocally are there. As she tries out the memories mentally, she checks to see if they feel “real” or not, and as certain scenes are tried on repeatedly, they become familiar and begin to feel like real memories. This phenomenon has been reproduced in experiments. (Mezzoni G, Memon A. 2003) Essentially, it has become her job to find these memories and it occupies her mind completely. Her obsessive preoccupation with what has been repressed will result in molestation dreams as her mind tries out the idea (just like you dream of anything you focus intensely on), and during the day bits of these images will come up in fractured pieces. This, she is told erroneously, is confirmation of the abuse.

The therapist is confident the material exists because the client has the symptoms listed in the book, and when she diagnoses hidden abuse in clients, the memories appear as they work week after week to find them affirming in her mind these kinds of memories existed all along just as she suspected. To her personally it has been solidly proven. She questions the studies that show repression is unlikely because it appears to her that it happens all the time. Unaware of her role as creator, she is shocked at the horror of sexual abuse. She is amazed at how often it comes up in her office.

So, this begs the question how common is sexual abuse? One person I know being treated by a therapist was told it is very common and it is well known that 80% of girls are molested in their families. This is hearsay of course, but another client had given me the same outrageous statistic some time earlier, so it is being repeated near me somewhere.

In fact, in 2003, the most recent year for statistics, 1.2 % of children were maltreated and 9.9% of those were sexual abuse victims according to the Department of Health Report of Child Maltreatment, and sexual perpetrators were parents only 3% of the time (rather than neighbors for example) . (US Department Health and Human Services 2003) This means that of the fraction of children who are part of the CPS system, children who are examined and questioned by psychologists and social workers trained to discover child sexual abuse, 9.9% are molested and not typically by parents.

So we have established that RMT is a therapy that can result in false memories, that it is coercive and leading, that it is not well supported in research, that it actually increases incidences of hospitalization and self harm, and that research indicates that people usually remember their trauma all too well. As to whether it is good therapy, I quote McNally

“The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry. It has provided the theoretical basis for recovered memory therapy the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era”. (McNally J, 2004)

Additionally, it defies logic. A child who was molested a few hours ago and is suffering from physical trauma right under the noses of professionals who’s job description includes reporting to CPS somehow miss it, but a therapist can magically detect it decades later with a symptom list? Does that make sense? Why wouldn’t the “symptom list” for children suffering hidden trauma the CPS worker or school counselor or nurse uses on kids be just as accurate? Does it seem likely that the health statistics are off by orders of magnitude and most men molest their daughters?

And finally, when a case goes to court and someone sues a therapist because they discover their RMT memories are false, the courts have found that a therapist may be negligent on many levels, but including such things as inappropriate diagnosis (they ignore the real issue, i.e. anxiety), applying unproven techniques, not informing the client of possible false memories, and not ensuring that there was other corroborative evidence of abuse etc. (Simpson P. 1996) This pertains to you also.

So now we come to why on earth it matters to hypnotherapists. If an RMT therapist, via regression, repeated interviews about what happened, guided imagery and body memories cannot uncover memories of sexual abuse she believes is there, she may call you. She will believe that any images you are able to bring up will be forensic and historically accurate (Yapko MD. 1994) simply lacking the background in hypnosis to understand correctly what is and is not possible.

I urge you to think carefully before getting involved in this case for several reasons. First to take this client suggests forensic ability with hypnosis. While it is true that detailed memories can be enhanced and revivified in a very realistic way and that it is experienced as more real than free standing memories, it is not true that everything your client recalls is historical fact. What is seen is a mix of perceptions, attitudes and beliefs. It is the last category that gets the hypnotherapist into trouble when someone who has been prepared to “find” molestation is hypnotized by you: belief. If your client believes that abuse will come up then it may, even if you are careful about being non leading. Remember she is well convinced that it is in her best interest to find the memories so she can get better. A tremendous amount of leading has already taken place before you ever got there, possibly including being told that the real expert in hypnosis, you, will be able to break through her “denial” and get the desired memories.

In my opinion it would victimize the client to hypnotize her to look for the memories which she says are not there when she’s resisted the coercive techniques so far, and the existence of which are based on unproven symptom lists, therapist bias about what is wrong with women (and what is wrong with men), and a therapy which has been referred to as a “catastrophe for the mental health field”. Perhaps she has anxiety, or whatever took her to the psychotherapist, because of an ISE that has nothing whatever to do with sexual molestation. We’ve all certainly seen some “suspicious” symptoms turn out to be completely innocuous when the real cause was discovered using hypnosis.

Here are some facts about memory that will give you the background you need:

Hypnotically viewed memories feel much more real than free standing memories though they may not be historically accurate. Again, a client may experience a gestalt of memories as one incident, may add features of one incident to another, may experience the memory as it was perceived by the child they once were, or may confabulate what they think is there. Of course, if you are leading then you can contribute your “stuff” to the memory as well.

If you uncover sexual abuse in a person who never had any notion of it in their life before she met you, think hard about how that came about and review the session. If you often have people uncover sexual abuse when they had no freestanding memories of it before they met you, you have a problem. Your stuff is getting to your client through counter transference, projection, mutual unconsciousness, leading or a leading pre talk. Find the hole in your process and fix it. You need to be sure you are not creating ugly falsehoods that hurt people. You may not be aware of it, but if an innocent father is hurt (his reputation, his relationship with his daughter etc.), he can sue you even if you never met him because you hurt him by not taking reasonable care to protect truth. (Pope HG, Hudson JI 1996)

Another thing to remember is that severe ongoing trauma is very hard to forget, though things that were not trauma to the person at the time can be simply forgotten. For example, a child who willingly played “doctor” with her cousin may accurately recover such a memory. Since it was not traumatic at the time it was simply forgotten, though mother’s later comment about “nasty boys” might make it an actual ISE. This is not repression, but forgetting of a non traumatic sexual childhood event that made little memorable impression. Don’t use leading language or exaggerate the context of the event and turn it into trauma as you talk to your client during or after the session.

Also remember an affect bridge induction does not make your work forensic. Memories are created by one synapse then the next one firing in order. Well traveled synapses get refreshed regularly so you remember easily things you use often. But over time, the right order gets confused or forgotten, accounting for things like seeing the kid in your high school year book and thinking it is Jacob Smith when it was Jay Small, or not even remembering a name at all. This is called memory decay and it is simply biology that you will have this occur with time. This contaminates memories and affects dream content as we age. (Kavanau JL. 2002)

When you were a kid, you saw something like the dining room chairs often and those synapses were well traveled. As you connect via the affect bridge to an incident in your past, those chairs will be viewed exactly as they were which is why the memory feels so extra real. Those synapses were found again easily possibly surprising yourself with the vivid recollection, but the rest of the scene may be again a gestalt, confabulation, beliefs, perceptions of the child, or could be exactly as it was. After a session, see how the memory jives with the client’s freestanding memories, and do not imply that everything viewed was an exact replica of history, because you don’t know that it was. An affect bridge induction connects to the feelings. . The feelings are related to how the SC mind perceives and understands, not to the exact historical event, and it is the feelings we work with. The viewed event is simply a vehicle for the change work not necessarily literally accurate historical fact.

If you are contacted by an RMT psychotherapist to get memories:

Find out if the client had any freestanding memories of sexual abuse before therapy. If not, I suggest you might want to decline to participate in what could be implanting false memories. Let the responsibility for this to remain with the person who diagnosed it. Should such a thing end up in court as a false memory case, you would not want to be characterized as the expert who was brought in for the hypnosis part of it that caused the memories.

The therapist is not likely to want you to assist her client to release, reframe and relearn. She is there to find memories forensically, work on them using the RMT approach, fix blame, and find a “reason” for her client’s anxiety (or whatever she came in with).

If you study NLP you will recognize a nominalization in the word “anxiety”. Anxiety is a process, not a thing, so to stop doing the process is a good way to address it. In the psychotherapy world this is called Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), and it is more effective than RMT (which has a poor long term track record) (Stocks JT, 2000) . “Finding the memories” is not only possibly creating a false history to work on in the case where no memories exist, but it is also to pretend that you need the memories to move ahead therapeutically, which is untrue. In other words if repression had occurred, it is not true that remembering is essential to healing. According to the APA, it would be a rare occurrence for traumatic repression to take place. (APA 2002)

Additionally since you are a professional, your acceptance of the client for memory retrieval further reinforces the notion that such memories exist and are in fact repressed. It may feel to the client she has gotten a “second opinion” although we have nothing whatever to do with diagnosing such things and you have in no way concurred that the client has “symptoms of hidden sexual abuse”. Our motto is “Stay stupid” and to let the client develop her process in the way her SC mind directs free of your, or anyone else’s, bias. It is not part of the hypnotherapy paradigm to decide ahead of time what the trouble is then work from there. To quote Wil Horton “I like my own paradigm, thank you very much.”

Also, teach the RMT therapist that hypnosis does not uncover accurate history necessarily and that beliefs ahead of time, for example that abuse will come up, are leading. You are the hypnosis expert. This is a time to step up and be bold.

If a client contacts you:
Listen to her narrative. If she says she has seen a therapist who told her she was sexually molested and she now wants to see if her memories are real because they seem to be not quite real to her, realize this may be a person who was subjected to RMT. After seeing the memories during regression should you do that, they will seem more real than before and she may then go ahead and go back to the therapist to “finish the work”, erroneously believing that she now knows for sure the memories are real. Assess carefully before going ahead, and I suggest not using regression as this person’s memories have already been contaminated. Teach the client the truth about memory and hypnosis or you may reinforce a falsehood.

Ask if she ever went to a hospital because of the memories. If so, maybe teach EFT or use NLP with her psychotherapist’s approval but DO NOT regress this client! Decompensation due to memories created during RMT is common (Fetkewicz J, Sharma V, Mersky H. 2000) . Hypnosis will make the memories more vivid and real to her, possibly sending her back to the hospital. This could potentially be a case of malpractice for you.

Ask if she had freestanding memories of sexual abuse ahead of therapy. If so and you have the knowledge and skill of advanced techniques, then you might go ahead cautiously with regression, informed child etc. to release the issue. If you do not know how to do this, get training. This is not an area for guessing what to do. I use Cal Banyan’s 5-PATH tm, C Roy Hunter’s Parts Therapy, EFT and NLP and have wonderful results with people who need to be free of intrusive free standing memories of sexual abuse.

We are now a separate profession. We enjoy more stature as a helping modality than ever before in history. Being responsible for our work also means being able to assess and evaluate an individual client and her situation before taking it on so the client is safe and seeking our help with an accurate understanding of what hypnosis can, and cannot, do. We are not the forensic arm of the mental health field and we have the right to protect the integrity of our work and the responsibility to protect our clients. Psychotherapists certainly are licensed professionals and may use unproven or controversial techniques in their own practices but it is my belief that hypnotherapist ought to be able to recognize such a technique and avoid participating in it as there is no way for them to know that certain kinds of memories exist and ought to be “specifically uncovered. It is my sincere hope this work makes it easy to meet these goals.

References:

1. 1. Mersky,H. (1996) Ethical issues in the search for repressed memories. American Journal of Psychotherapy. 1996 Summer; 50(3):323-35
2. 2. American Psychological Association. Questions and Answers about Memories if Childhood Sexual Abuse. Retrieved Nov 18, 2005 from http://www.apa.org/pubinfo.mem.html (referenced several times)
3. 3. Pope HG Jr, Olivia PS, Hudson JI, Bodkin JA, Gruber JI. (1999). Attitudes toward DSM-IV dissociative disorders diagnoses among board certified American psychiatrists. American Journal of Psychiatry. 1999 Feb; 156(2) 321-3
4. 4. Piper A, Mersky H. (2004). The persistence of folly: a critical examination of dissociative identity disorder. Part 1 the excesses of an improbable concept. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. 2004 Sept; 49(9):592-600. Review.
5. 5. Fetkewicz J, Sharma V, Mersky H. (2000) A note on suicidal deterioration with recovered memory treatment. Journal of Affective Disorders 2000 May;58 (2):155-8
6. 6. Merckelbach H,Dekkers T, Wessel I, Roefs A. (2003). Dissociative symptoms and amnesia in Dutch concentration camp survivors. Comprehensive Psychiatry 2003 Jan-Feb;44(1):65-9
7. 7. Terr L. (1983). Chowchilla revisited: the effects of psychic trauma four years after a school bus kidnapping. American Journal of Psychiatry. 1983 Dec;140(12):1543-50
8. 8. Horton W (2001) NFNLP Master Practitioner Englewood: National Federation of NeuroLinguistic Psychology P7 Discussion DVD 1
9. 9. Simpson P. (1996) Second Thoughts: Understanding the False Memory Crisis and how it could affect you. Nashville, Atlanta, London, Vancouver: Thomas Nelson Publishers. P27-28
10. 10. Mezzoni G, Memon A. (2003). Imagination can create false autobiographical memories. Psychology Science. March;14(2):186-8
11. 11. Department of Health and Human Services. (2003). Report of Child Maltreatment. Retrieved online Nov 15 2005. Website: http://nccanch.acf.hhs.gov/pubs/factssheet/canstats.cfm
12. 12. McNally J.(2004) Is traumatic amnesia nothing but psychiatric folklore. Cognitive Behavior Therapy. 33(2):105-8; discussion 109-11
13. 13. Simpson P. (1996) p212 quoting Dr Chris Bardon, a psychologist and attorney
14. 14. Yapko MD. (1994). Suggestibility and repressed memories of abuse a survey of psychotherapists’ beliefs. American Journal of Clinical Hypnotherapy. Jan;36(3):163-71 discussion 172-87
15. 15. Pope HG Jr, Hudson JI. (1996). “Recovered memory” therapy for eating disorders: implications of the Ramona verdict. International Journal of Eating Disorders , Mar;19(2):139-45
16. 16. Kavanau JL. (2002). Dream contents and failing memories. Archives of Itailan Biology, April;140(2):109-27
17. 17. Stocks JT. (1998) Recovered memory therapy: a dubious practice technique. Social Work Sept;43(5):423-36. Review.
18. 18. Fetkewicz J, Sharma V, Mersky H. (2000) A note on suicidal deterioration with recovered memory treatment. Journal of Affective Disorders 2000 May;58 (2):155-8

     

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