What can be done to prevent psychologists and therapists from implanting the idea of childhood abuse?

Although some prodding may be necessary to help call repressed memories to mind, too much can lead to memories that may be false. One way that would deter all forms of leading is to create ethical standards that psychologists and therapists must abide by. This would help deter large amounts of professionals creating memories in potential victims. Psychologists also have a professional and personal responsibility to their patients and must ask themselves if they believe that they are giving too much information to these vulnerable people, and if they are possibly creating memories that do not really exist. They must set their own moral standards that will help prevent false memories from occurring as well. They may know that they can further their career by being known for helping all of these people realize what had happened to them in their past, but they must also realize that they are using immoral ways to get ahead. Another way to stop the implementation of false ideas us to use other methods of therapy that do not require as much interference by the therapist. One possible method that may be hit or miss is a form of art therapy. Although it is not foolproof, it is a way to get individuals thinking about the past and to get them remembering things that they have not thought of in a while. Psychologists or therapists would need to talk to possible victims about their past experiences, whether they be good or bad. Once they have a strong foundation and have the patient thinking about their past, they can move on to a more complex way of bringing up memories. The professional would then sit the patient down in a plain room and have them draw a layout of their childhood home and other places where they spent a lot of time. Then, the patient would be asked to go a level deeper and draw pictures of rooms that they spent a lot of time in as children. They would draw whatever they can think of from their childhood that was in the room, whether it is something big like a bed or something small like an alarm clock. The psychologist would then have the patient discuss different senses and memories that come to mind about the room. They can think of different smells, sounds, feelings, and other sensations that were prevalent during their childhood in the particular spot. While discussing these, other memories that they have not thought of in a while may come to mind. It also may call to mind memories that they did not know exist. This method would ensure that there is virtually no leading by the psychologist, and the individual thought of the memory all on their own. Another possible method that is more controversial is hypnosis. The victim would be hypnotized by the psychologist or another expert. Most individuals when hypnotized do not remember what occurs while they are in the trance, so it is debatable whether or not questions asked by the psychologist can lead to false memories. Without the ability to read minds or the ability to tell outwardly if someone is lying, these methods may still cause individuals to think that psychologists are doing too much leading for saying anything at all. No matter what they do, psychologists will have to be very careful to find the happy medium between persuasion and helping. How do you respond to adults who claim to have recovered memories from before the age of two?

While its possible that the individuals who are claiming this may simply be wrong about the age at which this memory occurred, it is certain that people cannot remember events that happened to them before the age of 2. We, as humans, do not remember being born, learning to walk or talk, and even potty training is hazy for most. In a recent experiment involving nine month, seventeen month and twenty four month old babies, the babies were shown how to do a simple task. They were then brought back after 4 months and asked to do the same task. The nine month old babies had trouble completing it but the older children could complete it from memory. scientists have come up with two explanations for this. one is that speech ability affects memory development, meaning that a child who is just learning to speak will not be able to remember things as well as a child whose speech is better developed. the second explanation is that all children between nine and seventeen months old are just beginning to develop their frontal lobe and hippocampus. Since these parts of the brain are associated with memory, it is conceivable that a childs long term memory would increase during this time period. Therefore adults who claim to have recovered memories from before the age of 2 are mistaken. Before the age of 2 , a childs brain isnt developed enough to retain long term memory. No researchers report reliable memories in adults for events that occurred before the age of 2. This means that people who claim to remember things from their life this early on are not really recovering memories. Recovered memories are real in a majority of cases, just not the cases involving 2 year olds. According to an article called Repressed Memories and Recovered Memory Therapy, researchers agree that memories of events that took place before the age of 2 are never remembered into adulthood and cannot be recovered, patients who recall abuse that occurred before the age of 3 are probably based on false memories. While these memories may be false, this does not mean that all recovered memories are false. Just like there are individuals who will sue a fast food restaurant for having coffee that is too hot because they spilled it on themselves, there are other people who will go to desperate lengths to get money, including those willing to throw their families and friends under the bus and make up stories of abuse. The individuals who do truly recover memories of abuse from after the age of 2 are suffering because of the selfish individuals who are using repression as an excuse to gain money. When new laws came out making it possible for people to be sued for events that happened years in the past, there were and will continue to be some truly deserving people who benefit from these laws. There will also be people who continue to try and cheat the system and gain from something that never happened to them, making it tougher for the suffering individuals to get the closure that they desperately want and deserve. In Merideth Marans article, she said that she had falsely accused her father of sexual assault based on a recovered memory. The court system often uses testimony of witnesses who claim to have true recovered memories. How can we be sure that the recovered memories are reliable? No memory is full proof. Memories have the ability to change over time. In the brain, memories

can get mixed up or be completely forgotten, especially in cases of dissociative amnesia. Dissociative amnesia is a mental disorder which is described as an inability to recall important personal information usually of a traumatic or stressful nature that is too extensive to be explained by normal forgetfulness. This amnesia can alter memories that come to mind easily, but it still makes them false even though an individual is sure that they happened. Another factor to consider when discussing the legal side of the memory debate is the way that the court system works. Statistics show that eyewitness testimony is the leading cause of misidentification in court cases. It is the weakest form of evidence. In a court case, there has to be more than just a witness testimony in order to convict. According to Jean Mercer PH.D, it is impossible to prove that something such as a repressed memory does not exist or did not exist in the past. The only way to be more certain about a fact is to investigate it. If someone claims to have been sexually assaulted by another person, police should try to learn where this person was at the time of the crime and so forth. The supreme court ruled on a repressed memory court case saying that there needs to be more evidence than just a recovered memory in order to convict a defendant. This other evidence is what would create a basis for a conviction rather than just the testimony of one witness. In the article science in the memory debate, Dalenberg found that memories of abuse were found to be equally accurate whether recovered or continuously remembered. For example, it is certain that war veterans went through the traumas that they experienced even though these traumas were forgotten and later recovered. The memories of someone with a history of abuse are real recovered memories. When someone with no history of abuse or neglect comes forward with a story, their story may be false and the only way to discern whether or not their memories are plausible is to acquire hard evidence such as DNA. Yes, it is possible that some people culminate stories of abuse in order to draw attention to themselves or for monetary gain, but now that there is more research in the field of recovered memories it is less likely for these people to win lawsuits.

Memory is an ability that is deeply underappreciated by individuals until it is gone. Teens, young adults, and even middle-aged parents and the elderly have memories dating all the way back to childhood or the good ol days that are forever imprinted on their minds. But what about the memories that arent remembered so fondly, or the ones that dont come to mind so easily? Or, what about the memories that the brain has made sure dont come to mind at all? Can these memories be discarded as false just because the body has taken measures to protect victims of traumatic experiences from reliving their horror every day? Many abuse victims, whether it is sexual, emotional, or physical, find refuge from their trauma within their own minds. The brain works in a way that the particularly traumatic memories are repressed, or essentially forgotten, until stimuli or therapy brings them to light again. There is evidence in the cases of World War II veterans who have forgotten their experiences that were particularly traumatic. It is absolutely certain that these individuals have seen horrific events in their experience at war, and there is evidence to support these claims. It is also certain that they have no recollection of these events. While fighting a war may be seen as a lot more traumatic than being abused to some people, the magnitude of emotional and mental damage that can be sustained by these abused individuals cannot be understood by anyone other than the victim or someone who has gone through similar horrors. While the process of repressing memories is not completely understood, psychologists working at Stanford and the University of Oregon believe that they have found the answer. Michael Anderson, an associated psychology professor at the University of Oregon, and John Gabrieli, a psychology professor at Stanford, conducted experiments to see what happened when memories were being suppressed. To do so, they tested 24 individuals by connecting them to an fMRI and giving them word pairs of unrelated nouns. They would flash the words up in five second intervals, and they repeated the process until they remembered about 3 quarters of the words. Then, the scientist split a list of 36 word pairs into 3 sets of 12, and gave the individuals different instructions for each set of words. The first group of words involved telling the individuals to look at the first word, and then remember the second. The second group involved looking at the first word and being told not remember the second. The third group was used as a baseline and was not used during the brain scanning part of the experiment. The first and second parts took 30 minutes each, while the baseline took less time. After the experiment, the researchers found that people remembered more of the words from the baseline group than from the group that they had actively tried not to remember. This showed that as people actively tried not to remember something, their memory got worse and worse until they did not remember at all. Their paper states: The core findings showed that controlling unwanted memories was associated with increased activation of the left and right frontal cortex (the part of the brain used to repress memory), which in turn led to reduced activation of the hippocampus (the part of the brain used to remember experiences). In addition, the researchers found that the more subjects activated their frontal cortex during the experiment, the better they were at suppressing unwanted memories. Anderson also associated the brain's ability to control memory to an individual's reflexive ability to halt an unwanted action. For example, Anderson recalled once standing at an open window and noticing a potted plant starting to fall. He quickly tried to catch the plant until he realized it was a cactus that could have injured him. "Our ability to stop action is so ubiquitous we don't know we're doing it," Anderson said. "This idea is that the neurobiological mechanism that we have evolved to control overt behavior might be recruited to control internal actions such as memory retrieval as well." So,like reflexively trying to stop the plant from falling to prevent destruction, the

mind reflexively protects itself from traumatic memories to prevent harm to the individuals well-being. To completely understand recovered memories, one must realize that memory science is not the only source that must be considered when trying to discover the truth. One must also realize that scientific authority does not mean that they are necessarily correct. Scientists may say that all of these recovered memories are false, and individuals will believe them essentially because they have the title of a scientist and may work in a lab. Scientists may have individual opinions on the matter, but until they have conducted research to support their ideas and show that they are correct, they cannot be considered true. When discussing False Memory Syndrome, or FMS, the most important thing to realize is that there is no scientific evidence to support the syndrome. It is simply a disease made up by the accused to falsify memories that could possibly incriminate them. In 1992, repressed memories were becoming popular and more well known throughout society. As the scientific community had an increase in breakthroughs involving repressed and recovered memory, there was also an increase in the number of recovered memory court cases by individuals who were just now coming to light with events that had happened in their past. These cases often involve victims of child abuse and other traumatic experiences. In 1993, just one year later,the number of repressed memory lawsuits was growing exponentially. Since there are a lot of people benefitting from the new laws and new scientific breakthroughs involving recovered memories, of course there are a lot of people questioning the validity of these memories. There are also reputations and relationships being tarnished by recovered memories, leading to even more cause to deny the existence of these memories. Doubters of recovered memories must consider the cases of World War II veterans that were inexplicably true, as well as cases of individuals who were definitely abused who recovered their memories when they were older. In a study done by Dalenberg, he found that women who were hospitalized for sexual assault 17 years prior to the experiment did not always remember the abuse. After remembering the events, the women with recovered memories did not provide information any less accurate than those who had always remembered. Recovered memories may sound too bizarre to be true, but the mind and body are still not fully understood about other processes as well. People have much to gain from recovering memories, but there is also much to lose. They face feelings that they have put off for many years, as well as questioning relationships that they have been sure of for as long as they can remember. There are individuals who will take advantage of this new finding and use it as an excuse to gain money in a court, but there are also individuals who are truly suffering who have found it harder to be understood due to peoples lack of desire to believe that peoples brains are complex enough to go to such lengths to protect themselves.