The validity of recovered memories, a debate once of interest to few outside the psychological professions, is now a central issue in the lives of many, as grown children deal with newly discovered memories of past abuses, and parents deal with their children’s allegations and estrangement. Those who support the reality of such memories point to the fact that incest is far more prevalent than was once thought. Recovered-memory skeptics assert there is little scientific evidence that these memories are based on reality and not just created in therapy. In the middle are the families that are shattered, whether by abuse or by false accusations.
Investigative journalist Mark Pendergrast never expected to find himself in the middle. When his daughters’ vague accusations of childhood abuse first arose, he knew little about the issues involved. Before long, both his daughters had severed all contact with him. Stunned and grieving, he agonized at first over what he might actually have done to hurt his children. After discovering that many other parents were in the same situation, he began researching the phenomenon of repressed memories. He learned how hypnosis, suggestion, social contagion, group influence, and other factors can alter and even create memories. Eventually, he concluded that his family had been ripped apart, his children harmed, by pseudoscientific therapy heavily slanted toward recovering memories of childhood sexual abuse and incest.
He wrote about his conclusions in Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives, a comprehensive critique of recovered-memory therapy. Rather than disguising his personal stake in the matter, Pendergrast went up front with it, opening his book with a poignant, first-person account of his own experience. It is that portion of the book which appears here, along with a part of the book’s epilogue, an open letter to his daughters.
“Both of my children have changed their last names,” Pendergrast writes in his introductory chapter, “presumably on the advice of their therapists, and I have changed their first names here. . . . I do hope, however, that my daughters will read this book and realize what has happened to them. If there is ever a second edition, my most fervent wish is that my children will co-author it with me.”
Pendergrast’s proposal was turned down by every major publisher he approached, even though his last book, the revealing corporate history For God, Country and Coca Cola (Scribner’s), was named a Notable Book of 1993 by the New York Times. In reaction to his suggestion for the new book, many editors told him it was inappropriate for someone who had been accused to make a case against recovered memories. Ironically, after many years of children’s voices being silenced, the voice of the accused parent is now often dismissed, as if to say, “Of course the guilty will defend themselves.”
Finally, Upper Access Books, a small Vermont publisher, was willing to get behind Victims of Memory and published it to wide acclaim. Psychology Today columnist Frank Pittman has called it “a courageous, terrifying, and necessary book,” while a recent Scientific American says it is “an impressive display of scholarship,” adding that Pendergrast “demonstrates a laudable ability to lay out all sides of the argument.” Whether one trusts in the validity of repressed memories or not, Pendergrast’s book cannot be easily dismissed.
— Andrew Snee
“We gotta get going, Where we going? What are we gonna do? We’re on our way to somewhere, The three of us — and you (thump).”
My kids and I are on our way to the dump, jouncing along in my beat-up old Chevy pickup, unrepentant clouds of burned oil punctuating our song like visible notes out the exhaust. This song is normally reserved for the beginning of long trips, but Stacey requested it, and on this spring morning in 1973, with the Vermont sun finally dissolving the last vestiges of dirty snow and red-winged blackbirds claiming every fence post, the happy, lilting tune seems appropriate. On the final beat (thump), we all bang the dashboard.
“What’ll we see there? Who will be there? What’ll be the big surprise? There may be caballeros With dark and flashing eyes.”
How I love these little girls, I think as we sing and bounce along. They are so innocent, so beautiful, so full of life. I can never get over having been part of their creation.
“We’re on our way (clap, clap), Pack up your pack (clap, clap), And if we stay-ay-ay, We won’t come back. We’re on our way, hey, Though we ain’t got a dime, But we’re going and we’re gonna have a happy time. Cuanto le gusta, le gusta, le gusta, Cuanto le gusta, le gusta.”
Then the song starts over, because I can’t remember any more of the words. In fact, I have no idea whether I’m saying the Spanish correctly or what it means. I learned the song from my parents, all seven of us kids pitching into the chorus as we barreled down the road in our 1950s station wagon. My parents must have been crazy, I reflect, to take seven children on a camping vacation. Stacey and Christina, as wonderful as they are, are handful enough. Still, I enjoy knowing that I am passing on a tradition, and perhaps my children will sing this song to the next generation.
Going to the dump is an adventure we all look forward to — except my wife, Joanne, who laughingly complains that we bring back more than we dump. They aren’t, however, the same items, I point out. Besides, it’s fun for the kids. They love dump-picking too, and we take only the best castoff toys.
Today, we retrieve a real treasure, a small sliding board with a broken ladder. “I bet I could make you guys a playhouse,” I say, “and you could slide out of it with this.” Five-year-old Stacey thinks that’s a great idea and grabs one end to help drag it to the truck, while Christina, a year-and-a-half younger, solemnly regards us, sucking her thumb. She removes it only to shout instructions: “Look out, Stacey, don’t step in the mud!” Then she pops it back in. “That must be the best-tasting thumb in the world,” I say. “Can I try it?” This is a long-standing joke between us. Christina shakes her head emphatically from side to side, stifling a smile, holding her thumb firmly in her mouth, while I try to pull it out. Finally, giggling, she relents and lets me have a taste.
It seems such a short time ago, that spring day, but it was more than twenty years ago, and Stacey and Christina have grown into exceptionally intelligent, creative, attractive, caring young women. Both have graduated with high marks from Ivy League schools. And both, through therapy, have recently retrieved “memories” of sexual abuse they think I inflicted on them. I don’t know exactly what I am supposed to have done, because they will not tell me. In fact, they don’t communicate with me at all, and I am forbidden to call or write.
It all started about five years ago, when Stacey and I went to see Christina perform in a play. By its end, Christina’s convincing portrayal of a damaged young woman had both of us in tears. What I learned only recently is that, after the play, Stacey told Christina that she had acted like someone who had been sexually abused. Stacey had just declared herself a lesbian, which may have had something to do with it. At the time, being a lesbian — particularly on college campuses — was also a political statement about the patriarchal society and generalized male oppression.
I didn’t object to Stacey’s new status. It was none of my business, and I liked Mary, her lover. At one point, when my car broke down in New York City, I spent nearly a week in Mary’s apartment, along with her homosexual male roommates, and she introduced me to the gay bar scene. As Mary and I danced among the men, she laughed and said, “We’re probably the most unusual couple here — a straight man dancing with a lesbian.”
Soon after appearing in the play, Christina, who apparently was already seeing a college counselor, initiated a search for repressed memories of abuse. I didn’t know anything about it at the time, though I noticed she began to act very strangely toward me then. Finally, months later, she said that she had something important to tell me, but didn’t want me to ask her any questions about it. She then told me that she had been molested at the age of nine by one of my housemates during a summer stay at my house. She had previously repressed the memory, she said, but now she remembered.
I was completely unprepared for this revelation, which hit me hard. All my life I had tried to protect my children from harm, but I’d always been particularly worried about Christina, who seemed so gentle and vulnerable. Now I’d found that the most unspeakable horror had occurred years ago, right in my own household. “What are you saying? Who did this to you?” I demanded.
Joanne and I had divorced when the kids were six and four, and, after the divorce, I’d had a number of housemates because I couldn’t afford a decent home alone. My mind whirled back to Mack, a heavyset depressive who’d lived with us that summer. He had told me that he spied on his old girlfriend, pacing outside her window, and I’d always felt uncomfortable around him, though it had never occurred to me in those days to worry that he might molest my children.
“Was it Mack? Did Mack do this to you?” Christina nodded. “Oh my God! What did he do to you? Nine years old! Are you telling me he put his penis inside a nine-year-old girl?” This was exactly what Christina did not want to hear. “Shut up! Shut up!” she cried. She wouldn’t reveal any details, except that it had happened on my bed, and she’d knocked a lamp over in the struggle.
From that point on, my relationship and communication with Christina deteriorated. It seemed that everything I did or said was wrong. “Do you want me to confront him with you?” I asked. “Do you want to sue him? Would you like me to kill the son of a bitch?” “No,” she answered, “I want you to find out where he is and tell me, but that’s all. This is my concern, and I’ll confront him only when I am ready.” I tracked down the man’s location and informed her, as she’d requested.
Frantic to help her in any way I could, I bought a book called The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, and sent it to her. I skimmed the book, which appeared reasonable enough, discussing how difficult recovery would be, how to build self-esteem, how to seek support. I found a one-page section directed to “Parents Who Didn’t Abuse” and began to read it. “Don’t allow yourself to be overwhelmed with guilt or regret for what you didn’t do before,” the authors wrote. “Your feelings need recognition and expression — and for that reason you should seek support for yourself — but don’t lose sight of the chance to be an understanding parent to your adult child in the present. Your compassion, courage, and willingness to change are extremely valuable.”
All of that made sense to me. God knows I wanted to help Christina in any way I could. I should have read further, however, and more carefully: “If the survivor feels you didn’t protect her, she may be very angry at you. Although no one is ever responsible for someone else abusing a child, children have the right to expect to be protected by their parents and other caretakers. . . . Accept the responsibility for not protecting your daughter. Apologize.” This should have been my first hint that Bass and Davis had an agenda against parents, but I didn’t get it.
Even though I wanted desperately to be supportive of Christina, nothing I wrote in my letters seemed to help, and I could sense her withdrawing. Her letters became formal, cold, almost robotic. She dropped out of college, moved to New York City, and began going to therapy twice a week. I paid the bills.
Confused and upset, I sought out Kate, a therapist who specialized in sexual-abuse issues. We explored my mixed feelings of guilt and anger. After three sessions, she encouraged me to clarify why I was paying for all of Christina’s therapy. “In many court cases,” she pointed out, “the perpetrator is forced to pay for therapy as part of the judgment. It sounds to me as if Christina is blaming you for what happened to her. And that isn’t fair.” Subsequently, I wrote to Christina asking why her mother wasn’t paying for half of the therapy, making it clear that, one way or another, I would make sure she got as much help as she needed. I let her know that the situation was devastating for me, pointing out that if I had known about the abuse I would have done anything in my power to stop it.
In response, Christina wrote me a letter accusing me of violating her “physical and emotional boundaries” from high school on. She gave only two specific examples, one of which was my pressing her for details of the abuse when she first told me about it. The second was that I had located Mack and told her where to find him, against her wishes. I was mystified by this second charge because I had done only what she had asked me to do.
I couldn’t clarify any of this, however, because of the final injunction in her letter: I was forbidden to write or call, because it would just upset her. She needed space from me. For the indefinite future, I had lost my daughter.
Distressed, I tried to talk with Stacey about what was happening, but she didn’t want to discuss it. “Christina won’t have much to do with any of us,” she said. “She’s not talking to Mom much either. Don’t push her. She’ll come around.” When I asked if she had any idea what “boundaries” Christina was talking about, Stacey said, “Well, you know, Dad, you oversensualized with us when we were little.” This stunned me. “What are you talking about?” I asked. She refused to elaborate. “No, Stacey, I really want to know. What do you mean?” But she wouldn’t say and quickly changed the subject.
I couldn’t believe this was happening, but I felt sure that Christina would come to her senses soon. She didn’t. By the following summer, the only contact I had with her was a request for tuition money — she was enrolling in college again. When I got the endorsed check back from her, I noticed that she had signed it, “Christina Pendergrast / Christina Sloan.” What? I called Joanne, my ex-wife, and asked her about it. “Yeah, she changed her last name. Her therapist thinks it will help her somehow.”
I was beginning to suspect that Christina’s therapist was some sort of quack. Any good counselor would have gently suggested by now that I be brought into a session. Christina and I had issues that needed to be addressed. This was an unhealthy situation. I broke the enforced silence, begging Christina in several letters to allow me to come to just one therapy session. There was no response.
Two years after Christina cut off contact, Stacey, now twenty-four, came home for one of her infrequent visits from Oregon, where she worked as an actress. At her request, I arranged for her to accompany me on a writing assignment to a country inn, followed by an afternoon sailing on a friend’s boat. I was excited to see her, but our time together turned out to be quite strained, and I got the distinct impression that she was simply fulfilling an unpleasant familial obligation. After the inn visit, she announced that she wanted to cancel the sail and go back to her mother’s house.
On the trip back, I once again asked if we could go to counseling together. (Just before she’d gone to Oregon, Stacey had agreed to attend a session, but had then reneged.) It seemed to me that what Christina was going through had to be seen as part of the family web, that it was like the proverbial elephant in the living room that no one talked about. I wanted to explore what Stacey had meant by her remark about “oversensualizing,” to hear about any problems she felt she had with me. Now, in the car, I tried again. “There seems to be a kind of wall between us,” I said, “and it really bothers me. I know you love me, and I love you, but something is going on here, and we don’t seem to be able to talk about it. I think a counseling session might help.”
Stacey reacted with fury: “I hate it when you say stuff like that. I don’t want to go to a stupid counseling session. There are no deep, dark secrets here. I share a lot more about my life with you than most children do with their parents, but you’re never satisfied. I’m more like Mom; I just don’t want to have all these deep discussions.”
Before going back to Oregon, Stacey visited Christina in New York City. I was glad, because their relationship had been strained ever since they had attempted to live together two years earlier. I had been gently trying to convince Stacey to resume contact, and now it was happening.
Three weeks later, Stacey sent me the worst letter of my life. It began:
Dad,
I’m sorry if you aren’t ready for this letter, but it must be written. Things are clearer to me now, so I can address the huge problem I have with you more completely. I have recently recalled some memories I have of you. These are things I have always remembered but put on the back shelf; I have never spoken of them before recently. Because they made me sick and upset.
She described skinny-dipping at age seven and a massage four years later that had made her feel “disgusting and horrible.” She said that I had discussed sex with her when she was “just too young,” telling her that it was “natural” and “healthy.”
The letter went on with statements that were almost too painful for me to read: I had made her and Christina my “surrogate wives.” I had cried in her presence too often. “I remember thinking once that if I didn’t hold you like you wanted,” Stacey wrote, “you might kill yourself and it would be my fault.” She wrote that I had no “boundaries,” that I often made other people uncomfortable. Though I considered myself open-minded, she said, I was really manipulative and controlling, particularly with women. I had, for instance, insisted on her going hiking when she hadn’t wanted to, assuming that it would be a good experience. “Maybe you don’t see it in yourself,” she wrote. “I’m sure you don’t see your relationship with your daughters as abusive and manipulative, but I do.”
All this was awful enough, but the next paragraph took my breath away: “And I know what you did to my sister.” That’s all she would say about it. “I am writing to you about me, my memories and my feelings. I will only ever deal with you about me; I will never talk for my sister. You have to recall what happened and deal with this on your own.” She advised me to get therapy and not to expect any help from her. “You took it from me when I was a child, but now that I am an adult I don’t have to do that anymore.” She went on to suggest that I had probably been abused as a child myself by someone who had said it was “healthy” and “natural.”
Finally, Stacey forbade me to contact her for a year and a half. At that time, provided neither I nor anyone else in my family had tried to contact her before then, and assuming I had changed through therapy, she might resume contact with me. Her last paragraph read: “A closing note: no, no, you weren’t the worst father in the world. Of course not. But you did some pretty selfish and destructive things and you need to change. Get professional help.” She signed it simply, “Stacey.”
I read and reread this letter, trying to sort out my feelings, trying to understand how Stacey could believe this. How could she recall with such clarity many things that had never happened, as far as I could remember? And how could she twist other incidents into something repulsive? The father she wrote of sounded horrible, insensitive, abusive, but he was not someone I recognized. Was this true? Had I abused and manipulated my children?
Although the letter portrayed a sick person who likely needed years of therapy, the allegations weren’t all that damning. Though I didn’t remember them specifically, some of the incidents Stacey mentioned might well have happened. I’m sure we did go skinny-dipping, something I had done both as a child and as an adult. And yes, I thought it was a wonderful, natural thing. But I certainly couldn’t imagine forcing her to do so. I might have given her a back rub, but I couldn’t imagine massaging my child in a way that was unwelcome, or that could be interpreted as sexual.
With its self-righteous, angry tone, the letter didn’t sound like Stacey. It came completely out of the blue. We seemed to remember radically different childhoods. Most of my memories of Stacey and Christina were joyful, playful, and open. Also “natural” and “healthy,” as Stacey so scathingly put it. I was a child of the sixties, and I wanted my children to grow up with a matter-of-fact attitude toward their bodies. I considered sex a normal part of life, and when the subject came up I would tell them whatever they wanted to know.
There were very few difficult incidents with Stacey and Christina during their childhoods, so I remembered them quite clearly, and I could see the basis for some of what Stacey wrote. When she was about thirteen, I tried to have a “birds and bees” conversation with her, because I didn’t know what Joanne might have told her. Stacey blew up before I even got started. “Dad,” she said, “you and Mom have already told me all this stuff a million times. Why can’t you be like other parents? It’s like you want me to go out and have sex.” I was startled. “No, Stacey, I don’t want you to have sex. It’s just that your body will mature soon, and I wanted to make sure you understood what your period is and how to prevent pregnancy in case you did have sex.” Afterward, I bought a book written for teens about sex and asked Stacey to keep it in her room. “You don’t have to read it,” I said, “but if you want to in private, you can.” Now, as her letter made clear, this parental behavior was being interpreted as sexual abuse.
I was distressed by Stacey’s statement that she had thought I would kill myself if she didn’t hug me. I was, in fact, quite depressed during part of their childhoods. In the wake of the divorce, I had a hard time trying to get my life back on track. My former wife was angry at me, I couldn’t land a steady job, and I missed my children. I did cry easily at times, and I reversed the proper roles by making my children my confidantes and supporters. In retrospect, I certainly deserved criticism for my behavior at that time.
But now, as I read Stacey’s accusations over and over, I wondered whether there were additional incidents I just couldn’t remember. The most disturbing lines in the letter were the mysterious references to Christina: “You used us (but mostly my sister) physically,” she wrote. What was that about? “I know what you did to my sister. . . .” It was clear that Christina had told Stacey something really awful that I had done to her. But what could it be?
Finally, I pieced together what had probably happened: During Stacey’s trip to New York City, Christina had told Stacey something terrible that I had done to her, something she must have recently recalled in therapy. Horrified and upset, Stacey had sought a therapist herself when she got back to Oregon — that would explain her writing that she had never spoken of these memories until recently. This therapist must have encouraged her to reinterpret her childhood and told her that I, too, had probably been abused as a child. At this point, I began to wonder just what kind of therapists there were out there.
I located Sarah Pagett, a local hypnotist, and made an appointment. Like most people, I thought that hypnosis could tap directly into your subconscious to help unearth long-forgotten memories. I also felt compelled to write Stacey one final letter. I was careful not to deny anything — that would only have exacerbated matters — but I also didn’t confess to anything. Mostly, I wanted to tell her that I honestly didn’t know what I was supposed to have done to Christina:
Dear Stacey,
I got your letter about my inappropriate behavior. Thank God it’s all out in the open now, even though most of it came as a complete shock and surprise. Some things you wrote about I remember; some I don’t. I understand clearly now what the unspoken “wall” was that I sensed. I will try to understand how coerced you have felt. I will go to therapy.
It’s clear from your letter that you think I did something truly sexually abusive to Christina, and that you don’t want to talk about it. That’s understandable. I just want you to know that, as of right now, I have no idea what it is that I purportedly did to Christina. I am not lying.
I would very much like to talk about you and me someday, perhaps in a few years. Of course, I also hope that you shorten your year-and-a-half timetable, but that’s up to you. You will not hear from me again until March of 1994 unless I’m dying, or a short note to let you know where I am if I move.
And I am infinitely sorry for everything I may have done to screw you up and hope to stop as of now.
Love,
Dad
On the outside of the envelope I wrote, “LAST LETTER FOR 1.5 YEARS. PLEASE READ.” Stacey sent the letter back, folded and unopened, along with a curt note: “Don’t contact me now for three years. Every time you try the time will increase. Deal with this on your own.”
It is difficult to convey the horror of losing your children like this. I found it hard to sleep, to concentrate. Every night I had beautiful dreams in which my children were young and loving, and every morning I woke up to a reality more like a nightmare. How could this be happening? I wanted so badly to be able to talk it all over. I was more than willing to discuss anything from the past, and I would certainly never touch my children again — I wouldn’t dare even shake hands — without their requesting it. But I couldn’t tell them any of this. I had simply been cut off, surgically and angrily.
I did go to see Dr. Pagett. She told me that hypnotism could sometimes help to enhance memory, but that it was not a magical way to tap into the past. She asked me at length about my own childhood, in which I recalled no abuse, and about how I had raised my children. She commented that I appeared to have been a good father. Then we had a hypnotic session in which I tried to recall the skinny-dipping incident. During it, I pictured Stacey shivering and clinging to the side of the pool, but I wasn’t sure whether it was a real memory or something I pieced together in my effort to explore the statement made in Stacey’s letter. Hypnotism wasn’t what I had envisioned. I felt relaxed and inward-looking, but I was certainly aware of what was going on.
I also joined a grief group, many of whose members were mourning a loved one’s death. In an odd way, I envied them. At least for them the separation was irrevocable, and no one was blaming them for it. For me, the loss of my children was a constant wound, and it was caused by their apparent hatred for me and what they thought I had done to them. I lived in tortured hopes that they would contact me again, and in fear that this would continue for the rest of my life.
I tried to keep informed through my ex-wife, Joanne. At first she was polite enough, if cool. She would tell me sketchily how Stacey and Christina were doing. It struck me as ironic that she was now my sole source of information about the kids, because I had longed for the time when our children would be adults and I would no longer have to deal with Joanne’s bitterness. I hadn’t discussed the abuse allegations with her, on the advice of John, my therapist ( I was seeing another one now, in a vain attempt to find some explanation or peace; altogether, I have consulted six therapists since the accusations). Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I wrote her a long letter, explaining everything that had happened, taking as much responsibility as I could, and asking for clarification. I waited a month for a response, then called her.
It was a one-sided conversation, with Joanne simply screaming at me for fifteen minutes. “You trashed those kids’ lives!” she yelled. Both children, she said, had told her that I had threatened to commit suicide if they ever told the awful things I had done to them. I also supposedly had burned Christina with an iron to terrorize her into silence. Although Joanne wouldn’t tell me what other atrocities I purportedly had committed, she said that both Stacey and Christina were actively recalling more and more memories in therapy. Then she hung up on me. She continued to hang up every time I called after that, so I gave up.
That conversation shook me, but in a strange way it was a relief to realize that this had gone beyond interpretations of things I might or might not have done. These were accusations of things that simply had never taken place. I most certainly had never threatened to commit suicide or intentionally burned Christina. I began to move beyond confusion and guilt. Instead, I felt an increasing concern for my children. Something horrible seemed to be happening to them: their minds, their memories, were somehow being twisted, distorted.
But I couldn’t shake all of the good memories I had. When they were little, I would play “feet games” with the girls, which they loved. They could stand on my hands or sit for “elevator,” “roller coaster,” or flips. Joanne and I read Winnie-the-Pooh and many other children’s stories to them. I built a playhouse (with an exit down the sliding board from the dump) and hung a huge tire swing from the maple in the front yard. I made a set of blocks out of two-by-fours, with which the kids and I made “monstrosities” that often reached higher than they were. At night, I made up stories about their stuffed animals. We always sang together in the car. They were beautiful, happy children, and our house was the social center for other neighborhood kids. Christina’s “Silly Puppy” stories could make Stacey laugh so hard she got the hiccups.
After the divorce, we continued to see each other almost every weekend, except for one disastrous year when I moved far away and sank into a depression. I realized then that my career was not as important to me as being near my children. I quit and moved back, though I struggled for quite a while to find a decent job. We continued to have wonderful times together, though. They lived with me for half of each summer. They wore out the grooves on old musicals — Oklahoma, South Pacific, West Side Story — and we all memorized zany Monty Python records. They imaginatively filled in gorgeous, elaborate coloring books, wrote poetry, and read young adult fantasy novels. In the summer, we went swimming in a wild river with deep pools and clambered over boulders until we reached a magical rock formation, a sort of natural whirlpool spa where the water poured through a hole. We named it Pendergrast Dome.
I was unwilling to enter into a relationship that would conflict with my role as parent. I dated several women briefly, but I had fathered children at a young age, and most women my age were not ready to take on the role of stepmother. Finally, when the children were in their teens, I began a long-term relationship with Betty, a divorced woman with children of her own. Stacey and Christina liked Betty, though they had little in common with her children.
As teenagers and college students, Stacey and Christina continued to seem fond of me. Their friends came over often. We enjoyed a dictionary game in which we made up silly definitions for strange words, we played charades, and we watched Cheers every Thursday night. Like me, they both enjoyed acting in plays, and I helped them memorize lines. We hosted the postproduction party at my house one year. Stacey became enamored of a cappella singing groups, so we formed our own, aptly named the Lost Keys, with two of her male friends, and practiced once a week.
“Dad, the funniest thing happened last night,” Stacey reported while she was in college. “A bunch of us were in this greasy spoon, and it was really late. I got into this really interesting conversation with the guy flipping the hamburgers, and my friend just stared at me. When we left, she said, ‘Do you always get off on talking to strangers like that?’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah,’ and I realized that I was just like you. Dad, that was a nice thing you gave me.”
When she was a freshman in college, Stacey sent me a single sheet of paper announcing in bright crayon, “I LOVE YOU, DAD!” with a small note at the bottom saying, “Sudden burst of appreciation.” I have similar memories of Christina being caring and thoughtful. The night we went backstage after that fateful play she was in, I was still wiping away tears, and Christina hugged me and asked, “Are you OK, Dad?” I kept thinking of the letter of recommendation one of Christina’s high-school teachers had written for her:
Miss Pendergrast is a talented, caring lady. She possesses a fine mind, capable of identifying, analyzing, and solving problems both in and out of the classroom. Her mind and logic are tempered with a gentle, empathetic approach to life that continually nurtures the respect and love that her peers hold for her. I have seen Christina help one fellow student on a difficult theoretical problem, then turn to another to provide comfort and support during a time of family crisis. I hope that my son, now seven years old, grows up to become the kind of person that Christina Pendergrast is.
That was true. The Christina I knew was a kind, understanding, intense, empathetic young woman. We used to have wonderful talks about the meaning of life and how to understand and help others.
I had a hard time connecting the Stacey and Christina I knew to the angry young women who had cut off all communication with me. Everything had been utterly changed. So I sought out their old high-school friends, looking for answers. I told them about my children’s accusations, asking if they recalled anything negative the girls might have said about me. They were dismayed and confused. “No, Mr. Pendergrast, they never said anything bad about you at all,” one of Stacey’s friends said. “In fact, when the rest of us were bitching about our parents, Stacey would say, ‘Not my dad.’ She’d always be talking about you: ‘my dad’ this and ‘my dad’ that. How you knew all these songs, and how you raised bees, and how you were a writer, and how cool you were. I just can’t believe this is happening.”
One of Christina’s friends said, “I know for a fact that Christina adored you. She sometimes had trouble with her mom, but you were a really important person in her life. This doesn’t make sense.”
“Here’s something you might be interested in,” an acquaintance said one night. She handed me a magazine ad. “Has your grown child falsely accused you as a consequence of repressed ‘memories’?” it began. “You are not alone. Please help us document the scope of this problem. Contact: The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, 1-800-568-8882.”
Curious but apprehensive, I called and left my name and phone number. Two days later, a woman from Maine called to welcome me to the loosely knit organization. We talked for two hours. She said that my story wasn’t unusual, that a third of the parents who had contacted the foundation didn’t know exactly what they were supposed to have done. The only thing all the cases had in common was that the children accused the parents of sexual abuse and completely cut them off, leaving no opportunity for dialogue.
That phone call marked a turning point for me. I got the FMS Foundation packet and devoured its contents. I discovered that The Courage to Heal (the book I had sent Christina when this all started) was quite controversial, implicated in virtually every case in which children had falsely accused their parents of incest. It seemed likely to me that Christina had read it long before I sent it to her. “If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms,” its authors opined, “then you were.” You needed to become enraged, confront and cut off your perpetrator, and consider “getting strong by suing.”
I bought my own copy of the book and read it carefully. I was appalled. The authors appeared to be trying to convince women that all of their problems in life stemmed from long-forgotten sexual abuse. “If you don’t remember your abuse, you are not alone,” Bass and Davis wrote. “Many women don’t have memories, and some never get memories. This doesn’t mean they weren’t abused.” When memories do come, according to the book, they arrive as vague dreams or obscure intuitions. “Often in the beginning stages, belief in your memories comes and goes.” With time, rehearsal, and encouragement, however, the “memories” become all too real.
Then I read the section on “Believing It Happened,” in which they relate the story of Emily. “When confronted with the abuse, her parents denied everything and her father offered to see a counselor, take a lie-detector test, anything, to prove his innocence.” What was wrong with that? Plenty. Whenever Emily talked with her parents, she became ill. “The conflict between what she knew inside and what they presented was too great.” The solution? Try to sort all of this out with her parents and a good counselor? Try to understand the pain and confusion her father was experiencing and appreciate his efforts to reconcile? No. “It was only when Emily broke off all communication with her family and established a consistent relationship with a skilled therapist who believed her that she stopped doubting herself and got on with her recovery.”
I began collecting other self-help books of the recovery movement. I found that Stacey’s letter was filled with jargon and concepts from these books: boundaries, manipulative, surrogate wives, inappropriate. I learned how “memories” were extracted by questionable methods such as hypnotic age regression, dream analysis, guided imagery, automatic writing, or massage, and of how therapists regarded their job as “bearing witness” to their clients’ narratives and overcoming any doubts they might have of their validity.
I learned that the process of memory retrieval was often gradual and slow, and that the number of accused molesters in a given case tended to grow over time. (That would explain why it had taken Christina’s therapist two years to dredge up something concrete against me. Stacey, already prepared by Christina’s experience, apparently had found her “memories” more quickly.)
Next, I ventured to the library for esoteric tomes on hypnotism, dreams, memory, and anything else I could find that might help me to understand this bizarre phenomenon. Finally, I began to interview other parents in my situation, then some of the accusing children and their therapists. I stopped hand-wringing, and immersed myself in an effort to understand what was really happening.
I attended the first national FMS conference in April 1993. I felt a surge of hope as the speakers repeated much of what I already knew about hypnotism, suggestibility, social coercion, group contagion, and memory distortion. Six hundred people listened attentively, furiously taking notes. It struck me as odd that some of the most renowned psychologists and sociologists in the country were presenting their findings to a group of middle-aged and elderly people accused of sexual abuse. The question of repressed memories, which had been merely the arcane subject of academic squabbling a few years before, had now become a life-or-death issue for these beleaguered parents and siblings.
Over and over, I heard horror stories from other parents. One man, for instance, following the suggestion of his son’s therapist, had checked himself into a psychiatric hospital for what he thought was a two-day evaluation. Then he couldn’t get out. Eventually, the therapists convinced him that he was the high priest of a satanic cult. “It’s like a vortex that you can’t get out of,” he told me over lunch. “After a while, the people in my group would have agreed to anything this therapist said.”
I began to understand something of what had motivated Stacey and Christina to rewrite their pasts and to hate me. In therapy, I learned, manufactured memories of sexual abuse usually incorporated pieces of real memories. For instance, Christina really did bump into a hot iron at my house when she was young. And, for all I know, Christina now thinks that our game with her thumb was part of a satanic ritual, and Stacey is convinced that the “caballeros with dark and flashing eyes” were molesters.
That sounds flip, but black humor has become a necessary defense for most accused parents. This process is one of the most painful, inexplicable, debilitating things that could happen to anyone. Your own children hate you and are convinced that you damaged them irrevocably, stealing their innocence, abusing their trust so terribly that they had to repress all memory of it simply to survive the nightmare of their childhood. It is a chilling scenario, one that continues to haunt all of the parents. Could it be true? Could we have done something awful to our children without remembering it?
And so I went over and over my memories of Stacey and Christina, reviewing, trying to listen honestly to my conscious, my subconscious, hoping to find clues to a mystery that threatened the very foundation of who I really was, who my children really were.
During the conference, I listened to a panel of women known as “retractors.” They had gone through the therapy mill, become “incest survivors,” cut off ties with their families, and finally come out the other side. Where once they had directed their anger at their parents, now they raged against the therapists who had led them to believe they were incest victims. It was here that I first understood that the parents’ tragedies were almost minor when compared with those of their children, whose very identities and pasts had been stripped away. Many of the retractors had been hospitalized after suicide attempts, had spent all their savings on therapy, had lost their friends, relationships, and jobs. Gradually, I began to worry more about my children than about myself: what were they going through?
Pendergrast concludes his book with a long, heartfelt letter to his daughters. We have included a small portion of it here as an epilogue.
— Ed.
Dear Stacey and Christina,
This is certainly an odd way of writing to you. I apologize for making it so public, but I have no other way of reaching either of you. I’d rather write to you privately, and separately — or, better yet, get together to talk. But because that doesn’t seem possible right now, I decided to write to you in these pages, on the chance that my message will reach you. . . .
You have no idea how close I’ve come to finding both of you and just knocking on your doors. That would probably be a mistake, since you’d only interpret it as one more broken boundary. Along the same lines, perhaps I should not have written this book, should have waited for you to contact me when you’re ready. But what if you never did? . . .
I’m a very stubborn person, as you know, and I will never give up hope of reuniting with both of you. Do you remember how much I always liked King Lear? Certainly, Lear was a patriarchal son of a bitch who, as Goneril says, “hath ever but slenderly known himself.” That’s why I’ve always found the play so moving. He loses his identity completely — no more king, father, or even man. He is simply a “poor, bare, fork’d animal,” like everyone else, and mad to boot. Well, maybe that’s what this repressed-memory delusion has done to me, and to you, and maybe we’ll come out of it in some way wiser. I’m not saying that this is all for the best. I think what you’ve gone through is horrendous, and I would not wish my suffering on anyone.
But someday I hope we can speak as Cordelia and Lear do near the end of the play. “We are not the first / Who with best meaning have incurr’d the worst,” Cordelia tells her father. No, Lear says, don’t worry about it. “When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness.”
And so I do, Stacey and Christina, getting down on my knobby knees for you.
I love you,
Dad
“Daughters Lost” is excerpted from Mark Pendergrast’s Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives. © 1995 by Mark Pendergrast. It appears here by permission of Upper Access Books, One Upper Access Road, P.O. Box 457, Hinesburg, VT 05461. Credit card orders at (800) 356-9315.
