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Quantum said:
The idea that secret societies of satanists have been ritually molesting children is a conspiracy theory based around child psychologists leading children into remembering things that never happened, and adult recollections of 'suppressed memories' that are equally fictitious.
You know I agree with this, I really do, but it is so much more confusing in real life, when this affects someone you know. Is a long personal story appropriate here? I am a Temple newbie (by way of the excellent new recently updated thread feature), so forgive me if this post is not quite right for the discussion or the forum. It just strikes me that many people posting about this topic don't have any personal experience with the issues, and it might help to have a more complex view put forward. (I should also acknowledge up-front that this is a real red hot button issue for me).
My mum recovered memories of satanic ritual abuse, and for many years it tore our family apart - it was horrible. I was abused by my stepfather and I certainly never forgot a single thing. But it mattered to me that people believed me, so it was pretty hard to listen to my mum claim that my grandparents and aunts had done such terrible things (that she described in detail - man, it was bad). I wanted to believe her because when I was twelve she believed me (a lot of mothers don't), and because women are so often disbelieved. At the same time her accusations seemed ludicrous to me in the context of my own experiences with our extended family. It was a very hard time.
Eventually it became pretty clear that she was suffering pretty badly from previously undiagnosed mental illness (she never did get a good diagnosis), and at that stage the rest of the family were able to forgive her for the accusations because they could rationalise them in the framework of her being 'mad'. That was pretty awful for her though, because she so badly didn't want to be mad - the medication dulled her creativity and spirituality (which was based around being psychic, writing, painting, crystals, developing her own flower essences, etc etc), but the psychotic episodes that resulted when she stopped medication ended up with her arrested by the police and episodes in hospital. I don't think she ever forgot the memories of abuse, but she did somehow manage to forgive her mother and sisters (her father was dead by this stage). Dealing with her mental illness was also hard, but is a topic for another thread (perhaps the one in head shop).
Anyway, for me, the point that I eventually reached was to believe the core truth of her story, that she had been abused, but to see the florid stories of satanism and dead babies as a symptom of her psychosis - as a way of trying to process something very difficult. One of my grandfather's friends did abuse my aunt when she was a child, and my grandfather was a bit too interested in sex in a kind of creepy way, so it seems entirely plausible to me that he or a friend of his did something dodgy at some time during my mother's childhood.
Then what I think happened was that a couple of dodgy psychologists that my mum saw, one from a catholic counselling agency, and one very new-age type of counsellor, failed to recognise my mum's mental health problems, and drew out instead a series of more and more elaborate 'memories' that had that grain of truth but were also substantially drawn from her psychosis. If I could somehow exact revenge on those two women I would!
So, from my own experiences, I don't think that recovered memories of RSA are the result of sexual oppression - I suspect that they are more likely to be associated with mental health issues, though I am happy to have this claim challenged. I do think that irresponsible/misguided counselling can do an enormous amount of harm, and I think that the damage caused by the whole RSA thing to so many families is not only a tragedy in itself, but also a tragedy in that it has cast suspicion on all people who speak up about abuse.
(The postscript to my mother's story is that she died of a heart-attack four years ago. I think that the weight she put on from the lithium, combined with the strain on her heart of being mid-psychotic episode, is what caused the attack. I miss her, despite life being somewhat simpler now.) |
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