Trauma-focused treatments do work, though not all the time and not for every person. It is important for doctors, psychotherapists and other health care providers to begin a treatment plan by taking a complete medical and psychiatric history, including a history of physical and psychological trauma.
Knowledge about details of traumatic experiences and some of their possible effects can help professional caregivers formulate a treatment approach that might reduce symptoms and improve daily functioning. The point of trauma-focused therapy is not to make people remember all the disturbing things that ever happened to them. People do not need to remember every detail in order to heal. Rather, the goal of psychotherapy is to help people gain authority over their trauma-related memories and feelings so that they can get on with their lives.
To do this, people often have to talk in detail about their past experiences. Through talking, they are able to acknowledge the trauma—remember it, feel it, think about it, share it and put it in perspective. At the same time, to prevent the past from continuing to influence the present negatively, it is vital to focus on the present, since the goal of treatment is to help individuals live healthier, more functional lives in the here and now.
Just as it is harmful for people to believe that something horrible happened to them when nothing did, it is equally harmful for people to believe that nothing happened when something bad did occur. Ultimately, the individual involved—not the therapist—must reach a conclusion about what happened in the past.
Good therapy shouldn't create or reinforce false beliefs, whether the beliefs are of having been abused or of not having been abused.
Competent therapists realize their job is not to convince someone about a certain set of beliefs, but to let reality unfold for each person according to the individual's own experience, interpretation and understanding. Helpful psychotherapy provides a neutral, supportive environment for understanding oneself and one's past. Every profession has specific standards of conduct for its practitioners. Based on the current state of knowledge, it is safe to say that some practices are risky.
She implanted memories in people that they had gone to Disneyland to meet Bugs Bunny. They posed for photos, shook his hand, some even got a lollipop.
In questionable therapy, people are told that many, many people have repressed memories and that you need to uncover them to feel better. That is a plausibility-enhancing message. The second step, she says, is to create a sense of recollection. Then you engage them in imagination exercises where you put sensory details into this belief. And it starts to be experienced as a recollection.
At the same time that Loftus was conducting these tests, she began actively working as an expert witness and consultant in criminal court cases. Her testimony cast doubt on eyewitness reports, especially those that came about through hypnosis.
She convinced dozens of juries that what one person thought had happened might not have been real. Loftus found that false memories were littered across law enforcement, and that there are numerous ways a memory can be pushed on a witness. In the cases Loftus consulted on, some of the clients were guilty— for example, Ted Bundy and Martha Stewart—and some were not.
But over time, the notion that some memories might not be real especially fantastical ones unearthed by hypnosis took hold in academia and the courtroom. Eventually a certain pattern started forming in many inexplicable stories of abuse. An adult sees a therapist for anxiety or depression or maybe an eating disorder.
Looking for a silver bullet to explain the problem, the therapist suggests hypnosis. Sadly, good hypnosis instruction is hard to find, and plenty of places will teach you just enough to be dangerous. Responsible hypnotists like David Patterson take years to perfect their craft, learning to avoid specific words that might bias the subject or accidentally implant ideas.
There are very few documented examples of repressed memories. Loftus says there is simply no evidence that people can create amnesia through sheer terror, and that all the examples compiled in the s could be explained in other ways. Often, she says, they are just false memories. Richard McNally, who has co-written books with Schacter, is equally skeptical that a person can somehow eradicate traumatic memories and then discover them again years later.
He has a simpler explanation, though: Maybe they just forgot. Only if they somehow remember the experience as an adult would they realize—and be traumatized by—what has been done to them. For Kristin Grace Erickson, the realization that her childhood abuse had been a combination of overreaching psychologists and her overactive imagination was a bittersweet revelation. And the more she thought about it, the more she realized the similarities with events she had seen on television. Erickson remembers that she was trying to be helpful and that she believed her parents and the doctors unconditionally.
Plus, she says, she enjoyed the attention. Some have discovered their memories to be false; others knew they were lying from the beginning but just wanted to make the adults happy. The child answered no. He asked again, this time asking if it had been a liquid. Again, no. Her sister, however, had died several years before the woman was even born. Erickson says that she was a troubled and anxious child, and the story that she had been molested in preschool gave her parents something to pin it on.
Although she no longer believes she was abused in ritualistic fashion, she still has trouble trusting people and taking things at face value. To make matters worse, many false memories possess a kernel of truth, hidden under layers of invention. Though one might argue having small kids camp out in a preschool playground is a little odd and maybe created an opportunity for parents to mistrust the school.
When she woke the next morning, she remembers that someone said a snake had ventured too close to the kids and that Toward had killed it. She never saw the snake but it was all very exciting at the time. These memories, she now thinks, were the seeds of an invented satanic ceremony around a fire with children drinking snake blood. In the process she learned that he had been found guilty of statutory rape.
And although tens of millions of dollars went to the victims of supposed ritual abuse, not a penny went to the two kids Toward had actually abused. Erickson stopped her campaign. Eventually, Toward—who was born in Europe—was quietly released from prison under the condition that he leave the United States forever.
Already a subscriber? When questioned closely by psychologists from Harvard University about their feelings, victims of childhood sexual abuse revealed some surprising impressions. First, the abuse apparently was not seen as traumatic, terrifying, life threatening, or violent at the time. Some psychologists believe that forgetting childhood sexual abuse is a deep-seated unconscious blocking out of the event, an involuntary mechanism that automatically keeps painful memories out of consciousness.
Everyday forgetting can include voluntary suppression, insufficient reminders, or avoidance.
0コメント