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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
It's an interesting question - if the way forwards is to rehabilitate and forgive abusers, how do we do that with our governers, leaders, politicians?

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Originally posted by Martin60:
Even more so. I'm sorry mate, it's got to be said. I was thinking of this BEFORE I read your response, it leapt up during.

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
There are still groups like the False Memory SIG who insist that any and all cases of more serious nature are made up - but again, they will gradually die a death under the accumulation of evidence.

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Originally posted by Liopleurodon:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
There are still groups like the False Memory SIG who insist that any and all cases of more serious nature are made up - but again, they will gradually die a death under the accumulation of evidence.

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I don't think that people who worry about False Memory Syndrome necessarily believe that all cases of a more serious nature are made up. I certainly don't think that. It's more about the issue of unethical practices among therapists. There may be some people, unfortunately, who have got involved in campaigning about FMS as a cover for their own abusive ways and there's no way of avoiding that unfortunately. But you badly misrepresent or misunderstand the nature of concerns about FMS if you think it's about claiming that abuse victims are all lying liars who lie.

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
OK - I'll post a few links, because this is important.

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
sorry - references

The above refs are easy enough to follow up on Google if you're interested in them. The article in PT is unfortunately not available outside a library loan or if paid for.

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Originally posted by North East Quine:
From the OP:

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Why are reactions so visceral? Is it a learned response, a "2 minute hate" that is condoned by society as one of the last allowable outlets for undiluted rage? Or is it a natural parental response to feeling that your children might be under threat? Is it the reaction to this threat that is excessive, or the reaction to other threats (domestic violence; sexual assaults on adults) that is too weak?

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What strikes me as odd is that there wasn't this reaction, say 40 or 50 years ago. My local community had a sad old man who used to "flash" schoolgirls, and the onus was on the schoolgirls not to look. The reaction would be totally different nowadays. At least part of the huge wave of prosecutions of historic sex offences is because at the time, people were willing to turn a blind eye, or minimise in some way, or disbelieve victims.

I would lean towards "learned response" partly because sexual offending is understood differently nowadays.

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Originally posted by Dave W.:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
sorry - references

The above refs are easy enough to follow up on Google if you're interested in them. The article in PT is unfortunately not available outside a library loan or if paid for.

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Not all that easy, I'm afraid. There doesn't seem to be anything in Psychology Today that matches that description - I think you mean this letter from Rainer Kurz (not "Kirtz") in The Psychologist. It doesn't seem to be a response to either an article in New Scientist or a program on the BBC, but rather to an article in a previous issue of The Psychologist which discussed various possible explanations for "memories" of alien abductions. It seems Kurz is unhappy that the article didn't mention abuse as a source of these false memories - not that the memories aren't false - which rather undercuts your point.

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Not that aliens are going to be prosecuted and rehabilitated.

It doesn't undercut the point in that the memories are substantially real - the details may be disputable in some cases, but not in most cases. The perceptions that anyone who has a memory of being abused will take that to a court, or that well trained psychologists will deliberately elicit memories of abuse, or that they will encourage their patients to take thinly evidenced cases to court - are all very far from the truth.

I think you should read the titles of the ESTD literature library to get some idea of what happens, and then have a look at news reports for how many cases go to trial. Hardly any organised or ritual abuse rings get prosecuted because they deliberately damage their victims capacity to remember. The names of people in some of these rings are quite often known to practicing psychologists who over a period of years will see several people who all have corroborating stories. Translating that into a court case is almost impossible for several reasons, one of which is memory distortion. It is utterly degrading for someone to be told that they made it all up, when there is a clear physical memory of something having happened, and very few people will expose themselves to the high risk they run of that happening in a court.

So most cases that do appear before courts are mid to low level or a few particularly severe cases carried out by violent stupid rather than psychopathic individuals. In these, memory detail and evidence usually isn't a problem. But FMS is still one way that a jury can be swayed, because the arguments are - to a lay person - persuasive.

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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron

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Originally posted by Liopleurodon:
OK. We’ll do this thing and I’ll rely on the hosts to let us know if they think that this should be taken somewhere else.

Firstly: please don’t make assumptions about my motives. I will assume that you are making your arguments in good faith. Telling me that I “don’t want to believe that these things can happen” is patronising and wrong.

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Well, nobody *wants* to believe that awful things can happen to children, of course. But I fully acknowledge that terrible things do happen to children and actually, my first instinct is to believe people who tell me that they’ve been abused. I’m by no means any kind of abuse apologist. I’ve interacted with many adults who were abused as children. In one awful case a pair of siblings had to be rescued from a paedophile ring and put into foster care. So I know it happens.

In terms of evidence: at best you’ve indicated that a bunch of people have written things.

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They may back up your arguments.
I don’t know because you’ve not directly linked to anything that might persuade me. The one link you’ve actually provided goes to a vast database of articles on lots of different topics, some of which might be relevant. I don’t know. I’m not going to sift through all of them in the hope of backing up your argument. I could do something similar with links, and perhaps I will shove some of them in in a followup post, but you know that there are people who disagree with you so I don’t suppose that my demonstrating their existence will get us anywhere.

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So far, your main argument is that some therapists (not the majority, incidentally) believe that recovered memories are reliable. I know that, but it doesn’t tell us anything. Lots of people can be wrong at the same time. What gets us to the truth of things is a careful examination of the evidence. For recovered memories, there’s enough evidence to demonstrate that a huge number of them are not accurate.

I realise that a lot of sexual abuse can happen without any corroborating evidence. A guy can go into his stepdaughter’s bedroom every night for six years and leave no trace except the memories and the pain caused to her. In many cases, that’s just how it is, and he has the power over her to manipulate her into keeping quiet. However, in many of the cases which we’re talking about, the acts described are so extreme, and the number of people involved so large, that it raises alarm bells for there to be no traces. The “victims” have no physical traces on their bodies of having been tortured as young children. Rooms in which murders supposedly occurred don’t even exist. Hundreds of children were somehow brought to the same place, tortured by a huge cabal of adults, not one of them said anything, no uninvolved adults suspected anything? We’re not talking about the balance of evidence being equivocal, as it often is. We’re talking about big glaring absences of evidence that should be there. Then there’s the evidence of people who’ll tell you that they became convinced that they had been abused before realising that it wasn’t true.
They then remembered nothing for thirty years until they went into therapy. The science of the memory of trauma strongly suggests that it just plain doesn’t work like that. PTSD tends to manifest as recurrent intrusive thoughts/flashbacks/dreams. It doesn’t disappear.

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And why does this only happen with sexual abuse?

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Why not any of the other awful things that sometimes affect children – war, natural disasters, being savaged by an animal, nearly drowning? These can cause PTSD but for some reason not repressed memories.

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Don’t tell me that therapists never try to suggest things or ask leading questions. I know they shouldn’t, but I’ve directly experienced a therapist trying to lead me towards his hypothesis that all of my problems were caused by something awful happening to me when I was very young. I’m pretty sure I know what he had in mind. Honestly, if you think that everything from depression to anorexia to a phobia is caused by early childhood abuse, and that memories are repressed and can be recovered and this aids healing, I don’t think that you can avoid having that creep out into your interactions with clients.

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Therapists are human – they have their biases and buttons and beliefs like anyone else. I remember as a teenager in the 1990s that “you might have been abused; just because you don’t remember it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen” was all over magazines for teenage girls. This stuff was everywhere. That bloody book was a bestseller.

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Criticism of repressed/recovered memories is not some outdated concept from the 1970s. It’s a very active area of research today. I know this, because I work at a university where there are researchers studying it as we speak. Memory generally is fallible and suggestible, particularly when it comes to stressful situations, and particularly in young children. It’s also been found that it’s surprisingly easy to implant memories of things that didn’t happen through suggestion. That’s not to say that people are making stuff up or lying. I believe them that they believe that it happened.

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:

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Originally posted by Dave W.:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
sorry - references

The above refs are easy enough to follow up on Google if you're interested in them. The article in PT is unfortunately not available outside a library loan or if paid for.

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Not all that easy, I'm afraid. There doesn't seem to be anything in Psychology Today that matches that description - I think you mean this letter from Rainer Kurz (not "Kirtz") in The Psychologist. It doesn't seem to be a response to either an article in New Scientist or a program on the BBC, but rather to an article in a previous issue of The Psychologist which discussed various possible explanations for "memories" of alien abductions. It seems Kurz is unhappy that the article didn't mention abuse as a source of these false memories - not that the memories aren't false - which rather undercuts your point.

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Not that aliens are going to be prosecuted and rehabilitated.

It doesn't undercut the point in that the memories are substantially real - the details may be disputable in some cases, but not in most cases.

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Originally posted by Dave W.:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:

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Originally posted by Dave W.:

quote:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
sorry - references

The above refs are easy enough to follow up on Google if you're interested in them. The article in PT is unfortunately not available outside a library loan or if paid for.

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Not all that easy, I'm afraid. There doesn't seem to be anything in Psychology Today that matches that description - I think you mean this letter from Rainer Kurz (not "Kirtz") in The Psychologist. It doesn't seem to be a response to either an article in New Scientist or a program on the BBC, but rather to an article in a previous issue of The Psychologist which discussed various possible explanations for "memories" of alien abductions. It seems Kurz is unhappy that the article didn't mention abuse as a source of these false memories - not that the memories aren't false - which rather undercuts your point.

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Not that aliens are going to be prosecuted and rehabilitated.

It doesn't undercut the point in that the memories are substantially real - the details may be disputable in some cases, but not in most cases.

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No, the memories referred to in the letter you cited (sloppily, mistaking both the name of the author and the publication) were false. Kurz does not believe those people really were abducted by aliens; his complaint about the previous article doesn't support your position in the slightest.

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:

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Originally posted by North East Quine:
From the OP:

quote:

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Why are reactions so visceral? Is it a learned response, a "2 minute hate" that is condoned by society as one of the last allowable outlets for undiluted rage? Or is it a natural parental response to feeling that your children might be under threat? Is it the reaction to this threat that is excessive, or the reaction to other threats (domestic violence; sexual assaults on adults) that is too weak?

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What strikes me as odd is that there wasn't this reaction, say 40 or 50 years ago. My local community had a sad old man who used to "flash" schoolgirls, and the onus was on the schoolgirls not to look. The reaction would be totally different nowadays. At least part of the huge wave of prosecutions of historic sex offences is because at the time, people were willing to turn a blind eye, or minimise in some way, or disbelieve victims.

I would lean towards "learned response" partly because sexual offending is understood differently nowadays.

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Possibly it was seen as more of an illness and less of primarily a moral evil. Certainly when I was young my mother worked at a mental hospital and there were one or two old men in there who had originally been committed because of (nod, wink) little boys (nod, wink).

They were primarily seen as people who needed keeping away from the community because of their problem.

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
Hi Liopleurodon
Not you specifically as a person - but in our society there is a marked unwillingness to believe that the worst stuff is possible or happening, or to engage with it. That is, after all, how Barnsley happened.

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That bunch of people are the top dogs in their field. Allan Schore, Ellert Nijenhuis et al have international reputations second to none. Well earned ones.

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Many people have reputations in a field. Including, for instance, Elizabeth Loftus and That Horrible Goldsmiths Man Of itself, it means nothing. Whenever you have an academic dispute, people on both sides have reputations. Hell, you can find almost any position with a clever person who agrees with it. Show me what these people say. Show me the evidence. Show me why they’re respected in scientific terms. Show me case studies. Again, I’m not going to search through the database for the titles of papers. That papers exist doesn’t of itself tell me anything. It’s what’s in them that makes the difference, but again, I’m not going to do your work for you.

What is so frustrating here is that the world would come round to the horror if the evidence was found. I would come round. Honestly. As I've said, my first instinct is to believe people. The reason why people believe in the reality of - for instance, the child abuse that took place in that children's home in Jersey - is that the evidence is consistent with it having happened.

I also, unfortunately, have no doubt that a nasty character of defence lawyer will drivel on about FMS in a case in which it’s not even a remote possibility and doesn’t fit the pattern, just to discredit a genuine victim. That’s what they do. So let’s be quite clear here about what I think. I’m not saying that abuse doesn’t happen – even the most awful and egregious forms of it do happen. I’m sceptical about a very specific scenario, in which memories surface years later, in therapy - memories that need help and coaxing to come out, or emerge using techniques such as hypnosis or administering “truth serum”. When these memories arise in people who read books that tell them that repressed memories of extreme abuse are a common issue. When they make allegations of extreme and horrific violence that would inevitably cause permanent damage to a young child’s body, but there is no sign of any such thing on theirs. When they talk about people killing and eating babies regularly but there’s no record of these babies existing or disappearing, or any trace of human remains at the site where it supposedly happened – and forensic science is very good at uncovering traces of human remains. If the rooms where it happened even exist. When they go to therapists who seem to have a large number of clients who remembered extreme abuse after starting therapy. We know that at least some of these people were not actually abused, because they have later testified that they became muddled and confused in therapy and developed disturbing memories which they later realised were definitely not true. The others -?

Here’s the key issue. In science, if you have a slightly uncertain hypothesis, which can then be backed up by known scientific measures that work, you can make it much stronger. If investigators who first heard these extreme allegations discovered that there really were torture chambers, if they took cadaver dogs to the site and found scraps of human bone, if they searched the homes of perps and found old photos they’d taken, or if they found records of missing babies, it would lend these allegations weight. I realise it’s more difficult to do this decades later, but it’s not impossible. Cold cases are opened all the time. If the police had reason to think that a group of people still living had tortured and murdered children thirty years ago, they would be all over that. Imagine what it’d do for careers to be the ones who caught those monsters. If they thought it was happening now they’d be all over that too. These things have been investigated. The evidence hasn’t been found.

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Our God is an awesome God. Much better than that ridiculous God that Desert Bluffs has. - Welcome to Night Vale

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:

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Originally posted by Dave W.:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:

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Originally posted by Dave W.:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
[qb] sorry - references

The above refs are easy enough to follow up on Google if you're interested in them. The article in PT is unfortunately not available outside a library loan or if paid for.

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Not all that easy, I'm afraid. There doesn't seem to be anything in Psychology Today that matches that description - I think you mean this letter from Rainer Kurz (not "Kirtz") in The Psychologist. It doesn't seem to be a response to either an article in New Scientist or a program on the BBC, but rather to an article in a previous issue of The Psychologist which discussed various possible explanations for "memories" of alien abductions. It seems Kurz is unhappy that the article didn't mention abuse as a source of these false memories - not that the memories aren't false - which rather undercuts your point.

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Not that aliens are going to be prosecuted and rehabilitated.

It doesn't undercut the point in that the memories are substantially real - the details may be disputable in some cases, but not in most cases.

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No, the memories referred to in the letter you cited (sloppily, mistaking both the name of the author and the publication) were false. Kurz does not believe those people really were abducted by aliens; his complaint about the previous article doesn't support your position in the slightest.

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I repeat that aliens are not going to be prosecuted, rehabilitated or have revenge taken. You are taking an extreme position in order to prove a point. That Socratic type of argument may be OK for debating societies, but it doesn't account for the more accountable and more explicable events in this world.

I could speculate on alien abductions, but it's way off the OP, and we'd be just two guys talking about things we can't account for, have no experience of, and know nothing about.

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What I'm getting from your posts is that, logically, you don't trust your own senses or memory, because you're not prepared to trust another person's.

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
If you had ever been in a car accident and it had taken several hours to cut you out, your memory would consist of large blank parts - which may be recovered later or may not. And also some very vivid parts - which would be very accurate, but skewed to your own point of perception. And there would be a few other fuzzy memories. If you then suffered PTSD, the treatment might (it doesn't always) result in some very clear and vivid and accurate memories re-surfacing. They would be fragments of the total event, but would represent moments that were for some reason key to how the experience was processed by your brain. Those memory fragments would be very reliable, but of course would be from a personal point of view. They would be much clearer and have a much stronger accompanying emotive content than usual memories. These fragmentary snapshots are not normal memory - though they might be comparable to, say, the memories described by Krishnamurti - because they would be snapshots taken when you were in a non-normal state of consciousness. Comparing trauma memories to your normal everyday memories is another case of apples and oranges. The "film running in my head" reported in some cases of PTSD is not a vague woffly memory of a film - it's very real and present as if it is happening here and now, in minute detail. If you will - like every sensory channel in your body had been stored for a few seconds on HD and was being replayed through your nervous system. Telling someone that their memory of this kind is "fantasy" or "unreliable" is - mistaken. If the situation was deliberately and maliciously manipulated to confuse these trauma memories, then yes - they would be partially incorrect. But even then, aspects of them would still be extremely clear and precise and accurate. I've spent over a decade talking to people about their sensory experiences an dthe mental processes accompanying those, and - it is a mistake to think that everyone else has even vaguely the same experience of life and mental processes that you do. The fact that courts have to assume commonality of human experience in order to uphold the law is both a strength and a weakness. Strength because it enforces a common humanity, and a weakness because witness reports are taken at face value assuming a common experiential basis.

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Originally posted by Liopleurodon:
..... I even created a false memory in the last 24 hours. I realised that I needed to buy milk, and in that moment I imagined the effort of going into the shop, buying the milk and putting it in the fridge. Somehow when I thought about it later, I thought I'd actually done that instead of imagining it and was genuinely surprised to discover that there was still no milk. My memory is messing up all the time - not just about interpretations, but about really basic and bland factual information. So is everyone else's.

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
As Dave W said, my memory of the journal name was sloppy - because I am not particularly interested in collecting journal references.

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Originally posted by Dave W.:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
As Dave W said, my memory of the journal name was sloppy - because I am not particularly interested in collecting journal references.

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I said you were sloppy; I didn't say anything about your memory.

In any case, this is another bad example for you. You said you were posting references "because this is important." And I don't believe you were recalling the reference from memory, because it's ridiculous to suppose you correctly remembered the volume, issue number, and page number of the article, but then misremembered the title of the academic journal The Psychologist as Psychology Today, a magazine for the general public.

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:

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Originally posted by Liopleurodon:
..... I even created a false memory in the last 24 hours. I realised that I needed to buy milk, and in that moment I imagined the effort of going into the shop, buying the milk and putting it in the fridge. Somehow when I thought about it later, I thought I'd actually done that instead of imagining it and was genuinely surprised to discover that there was still no milk. My memory is messing up all the time - not just about interpretations, but about really basic and bland factual information. So is everyone else's.

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The only time I had an experience anything like that was when I had a very realistic dream of a whole day in the office, and then spent most of the next day unpicking the dream from reality as I found people did not recall specific conversations. If your memory is getting so mixed up with your imagination, that is probably another side effect of the anxiety and probably also of the medication, and maybe also exhaustion. Depending on the cause, something like that is reversible in anything between a couple of months and a couple of years - there are lots of modalities that can help - e.g. SensoriMotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, or probably anyone who has EMDR training to at least level 4 are a few examples. None of this is available in the NHS for any except the most extreme cases, so it's not cheap. Counselling would usually make this worse, and CBT would normally give self-management tools but not a resolution. I've probably stepped over the house guidelines here, but what I'm saying is that - whatever you may have been told, anxiety is reversible and you have options other than lifetime medication.

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
I'd also add that memory is unreliable when we are not particularly emotionally connected to the information. So the part of the brain that deals with memory (the "mammalian" midbrain) also deals with emotions.

As Dave W said, my memory of the journal name was sloppy - because I am not particularly interested in collecting journal references. In a trauma situation, the fight flight hyperaroused attention becomes VERY interested in any detail that constitutes a potential mortal threat, or any detail that presents a possible escape route. Thus, memories are different according to their emotional content. Therefore I have poor and ill-defined memories of everyday events in my life, but very clear memories of peak events.

Peak can be "awesome" (as in a view of a sunset I had in Africa in one particular place 30 years ago, or a set of trees I sat in when I was about 7 years old) or hyperaroused (as in a man wearing a black leather coat who attempted to mug me about 20 years ago). These incidents had strong emotional overtones for various reasons, so the memory is clear with a lot of detail. Similarly, I mentioned Krishnamurti - if an "altered state" of background presence is cultivated, then every experience generates a crystal clear memory. Most people are not in this state most of the time.

The textual memory is retained through repetition, so it is probably partly a hindbrain/cerebellar memory - the cerebellum likes to "remember" repetition and rhythm.

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
And I am frankly bored by journal reference requests. Boredom results in poor attention and poor memory. Good memory arises from genuine curiosity, love of the subject, and other stronger emotional cues.

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You consistently seem more interested in shooting the messenger, Dave - because you don't like what I'm saying about FMS - than the OP. So thanks for the fish.

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Memory of events and interpretation are closely linked. The usual claptrap sprouted by populist science is that memory is fallible - but actually, it is the interpretation that is potentially fallible.

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