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Chapter Three

Remember: Tell the Tale in Detail

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“It seems to me that there are more hearts broken in the world that can’t be mended, left unattended. What do we do? What do we do?”

—Gilbert O’Sullivan

Remember: Tell the Tale in Detail

Dennis was sixty-one years old when I met him. A delightful man with two somewhat inconsistent passions—NFL football and cross-dressing—he presented with some of the classic symptoms of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, all of which he believed had been caused by priest abuse, exactly fifty years ago.

Dennis was very discouraged; not only were his Dolphins in last place this season, but he believed he would never recover from his deep-rooted shame and self-contempt. Dennis had worked for the government consistently throughout his life but had always felt he was a failure. His interests could afford him temporary respite and escape from his sense of failure and disgust but never made him feel like a whole man or a worthwhile person or husband. Unfortunately, his wife could never understand why Dennis had so much self-contempt. She tolerated his cross-dressing, as she knew this was something that brought him a lot of excitement and positive feelings, though she didn’t appreciate him spending more time in the bathroom on Saturday nights then she did.

In the second session I asked Dennis what had happened to him fifty years ago.

He said, “Do you mean with the priest?”

“Yes.”

“You know, you are at least the fourth psychologist I’ve seen, and the first one to ask me what happened.”

“What did you do with the others, exchange recipes?” I asked, demonstrating my amazement that in fifty years, he had never had to address the trauma, despite receiving professional help.

Dennis reluctantly began to share his stories of the sexual abuse, even though he felt emasculated by the tears and helplessness he experienced as he related the details of each episode. Dennis explained to me that he had never told anyone his story. After prompting him with the question of what had prevented him from doing so, he went on to tell me about the story of his brother. Dennis explained that one day, he and his little brother were in the back of one of the priest’s cars driving to the church. There were two priests, one in the front seat with Dennis and one sitting with his brother in the back. Suddenly, his six-year-old brother blurted out, “Father Patrick is touching me!” The priest in the passenger seat turned his body all the way around and got in Dennis’s brother face and yelled, “You will never speak of this again to anyone!” Dennis told me that he was in shock and speechless as both boys remained silent for the rest of the ride, gripped with fear. Three days later, in a terrible accident, Dennis’ brother drowned in a pond near his house. Dennis believed that God himself had punished his brother for speaking against the priest, and that Dennis, in turn, was never to speak about what happened to him. He never did, until, of course, he and I began psychotherapy.

On approximately our sixth session, Dennis claimed, “Doc, this is just not working. It’s getting worse. Now I am even dreaming about the priest. How is this supposed to help me if it’s now infiltrating my dreams?”

I had a strong hunch that because he was relating his stories one by one, (this is the only way to successfully treat traumatic memories, one at a time,) he had stumbled upon another memory that was now manifesting itself in his dreams.

“Tell me about your dream.”

“I don’t know, I feel like he’s coming into a room and whispering my name: Dennis, Dennis, where are you?”

Since it was already apparent to me that this was a memory couched in a dream, my job was simple: encourage him to complete the memory that was now surfacing.

“Where is this dream taking place?”

“Oh, s**t! I know where this is! We are away at a church weekend retreat. It’s late at night, and all of us kids are asleep in a big room. Father Pat is creeping into the room trying to locate my bunk. I remember now—this is where it all started.”

Dennis expressed his anguish, first in tears and then in some words of rage directed at the priest. I asked him to share everything he could remember about the incident until he had completely depleted his memory of these experiences.

Dennis never had this dream again. He didn’t need to. He had processed the dream and the accompanying feelings, and he chose to release the ugliness of the rape in a letter directed to the priest (more on this technique in later chapters).

Dennis was in therapy with me for less than three months before he told me that for the first time in his life, he believed he was finally finished with the priest. (There were only three or four memories of being molested by him.) In fact, he claimed that the only time he ever thought about the priest abuse now was in my office, when I asked him about it. He sent me a Christmas postcard featuring strong words of affirmation for our work together on the back and a picture of himself in drag on the front.

It took Dennis time to remember in the right way, but time does not heal emotional wounds on its own. It merely passes. An entire half century had passed since he was molested by the priest. During that period, unfortunately, Dennis had only stewed silently because of the molestation. It is almost impossible for a child to separate from having experienced something ugly without the child feeling ugly herself or himself.

Dennis became the ugliness of the molestation. He lived nearly his entire life in shame and self-contempt. Only by having the opportunity to remember and process each of the memories could he finally reach a place of self-forgiveness and release the traumas.

The Myth That “Time Heals All Wounds”

The myth that time heals all wounds is pervasive in our society. In fact, it is even perpetuated by the mental health profession. How many psychotherapists are guilty of promising their clients that this (whatever it is) will get better over time? To those who believe that myth, I can introduce you to Vietnam veterans who are worse today than when they came home from combat in 1968. Similarly, I’ve met survivors of incest, rape, and family tragedies who have become more embittered over the years. Healing may occur over time, not because time passes, but because time affords you the opportunity to let go and make peace with the trauma.

It Is Letting Go, Not Time, That is the Ultimate Healer

The successful treatment of trauma requires the client to directly face the unresolved drama. This is known as exposure: one must remember the trauma in its entirety and deal with the accompanying feelings. But while exposure to painful material is necessary, it is not curative. The cure occurs because the client not only faces what happened (finally), but then feels, expresses, and most importantly, releases the painful emotions. In other words, exposure alone is the equivalent of only remembering the trauma and never processing it nor putting it away. It is the release of pain and fear that is ultimately curative.

Prolonged exposure is a technique that forces you to continue to re-experience the trauma. Ideally, you would habituate to the experience, meaning that it then no longer evokes that same magnitude of hurt or fear. In my experience, it is completely unnecessary to make anyone repeat the experience of trauma. To the contrary, one complete telling of the trauma, inclusive of the feelings (felt, expressed, and released), is sufficient to help you to make peace with your unresolved issue.

Remembering, of course, is only the first step of healing from your pain in the past. Trying to skip this step is as ill-advised as trying to skip first base on the way to second.

Linda and the Chicken Wire

Linda came to me many years ago with this simple request: “I just want to feel something. I am completely numb and feel absolutely nothing.” At the time, I was unaware that Linda was blocking out the significant child abuse that had occurred when she was age four. She had been the victim of what is now called “human trafficking”, as she was sold to various men in her community for sexual services while her single mother was working, and had entrusted her care to a great aunt and her boyfriend. As she began to remember some of the horrific incidents and the specific places and faces of the offenders, Linda became understandably upset. She did not want to continue with this process of healing from her terrible memories. In fact, she was in the process of remembering an incident where she was looking through chicken wire. Day after day and even in her dreams, she had a disturbing sense of being small and looking through holes in a chicken wire fence. Whatever that memory contained, Linda was not up for it. It was disturbing enough for her that she decided to take a break from treatment. That break lasted for five years before her depression intensified to the point that she decided she needed to finish what she had begun. During these five years, she remained stuck in a place of remembering looking through that chicken wire. When she returned to treatment, this was precisely the place to which we needed to return. She was finally capable of finishing remembering the story of being locked in a little crate from which she had looked out through chicken wire. By remembering and grieving through that terrible event, she never had another image, dream, or disturbing thought about the chicken wire again.

The healing process lasted for years—Linda had an unusually large number of abusive events to work through—until each one of her memories were remembered. But at the end of her treatment, two days after her final session, Linda called me to say she was experiencing feelings she had never had before and realized that these were feelings of happiness. She said it had taken her seventy years of life, and more than twenty years of therapy, to finally experience what it meant to be happy, but that had required flushing out all the ugliness of her childhood abuse.

Remembering rarely takes this long, but I relate Linda’s case because it demonstrates how not remembering keeps people stuck. Despite doing her very best to run away from treatment, Linda could not escape the image of the chicken wire until she decided to face and process the memory. Only then did it go away forever, as it was finally finished.

Exploring Memories

What if you can’t trust the accuracy of your memories?

I know there are many of you who are skeptical as to whether the mind can repress memories for decades and then recall them in detail. While much debate has taken place on “recovered” versus “false” memories, it’s not really an issue from a therapeutic standpoint. After more than thirty years of full-time practice and 70,000 therapy sessions, I have seen dozens of people who have repressed segments of (or entire) memories, all of whom were successfully treated when the memories were allowed to surface. The byproduct of a repressed memory surfacing has without exception been positive. Not one of my clients used the material to blame others for their lives; no one attempted to take anyone to court and sue them. The memories were ultimately digested and processed in such a way that they could now be integrated into the recovering person’s life. I have read about people creating “false memories,” but in my outpatient practice this has not been an obstacle to treatment.

Still, you may be skeptical: How do you know if you can completely trust the veracity of your memories? Generally speaking, we do not create false memories, as much as we confuse other data in our heads with what actually happened. For instance, Lenore Terr, a psychiatrist renowned for her work on repressed memories, wrote that based on her research, people do not make up a scene of being molested, for instance, but may confuse the color of the shirt the perpetrator was wearing with a different color that he had worn on another occasion.36 Our memories may not be 100 percent factual, but they are crucial to recovery even if some details are not perfect.

Science has demonstrated that our memories are indeed fallible, which is a problem if you’re trying to prove something in court. However, when it comes to treatment and recovery, perception, not fact, is king. It is perception, never reality, that creates emotion. Whatever you remember happened is what needs to be brought to the surface. Ultimately, the facts do not matter in this process; when it comes to healing, the emotions contained in the memory must be remembered, expressed, felt, and released.

I have spent hours with people remembering scenes from devil worshiping cults, wherein they describe horrible things from infanticide to daemonic or angelic presences. Did these things really happen? It is not up to me, the psychologist, to determine what from these memories is real. They are the memories and perceptions of the client. It is the expression and release of these memories that allows them to finish with the memory and complete their healing process. Remembering and working through their stories provides them with peace and healing about their respective childhoods. And remarkably, I have never needed to go back and redo a finished memory years later. What is finished remains finished for the rest of their lives. The healing takes place. While I make it a general practice to believe my clients, I don’t ever need to validate their memories with anyone else, not with the perpetrators and not in a court room. Our work is strictly for the client’s own benefit and never for forensic purposes.