Recovered Memories Of Abuse

Buried memories of sexual abuse can have a devastating impact on a victim's relationships, work, and health. Using case histories, Renee Fredrickson stresses the importance of recovering these memories as a crucial step in healing, and she explains various therapeutic processes used in memory retrieval.

Decipher the complex interplay of neurology, psychology, trauma, and memory! In the midst of the controversies over how repressed, false, and recovered memories should be interpreted, Trauma and Cognitive Science presents reliable original research instead of rhetoric. This landmark volume examines the way different traumas influence memory, information processing, and suggestibility. The research provides testable theories on why people forget some kinds of childhood abuse and other traumas. It bridges the cognitive science and clinical approaches to traumatic stress studies. Written by the foremost researchers in the field, including Bessel van der Kolk and Jennifer Freyd, these scientific evaluations of the way traumatic memories are processed offer powerful new perspectives on the interplay of biology and psychology. Trauma and Cognitive Science discusses a range of traumas, including combat, child abuse, and sexual assault across the lifespan. Fascinating perceptual experiments shed light on the cognitive uses of dissociation, the encoding and recall of memory, and the effects of early trauma on subsequent information processing. Trauma and Cognitive Science offers solid information on the most challenging questions in this field: How is memory encoded, stored, and retrieved? How is it forgotten? How does trauma influence these processes? What kinds of memories can be created by suggestion? What physical changes take place in the brain under traumatic stress? How is consciousness disturbed during and after trauma? What are the ethical, clinical, and societal implications of traumatic stress studies? How can people suffering from traumatic memories be healed? Trauma and Cognitive Science also offers an astonishing array of true case studies, including the story of an adult woman who was raped, went to court, and saw her rapist convicted--and then forgot the whole traumatic episode. The independently corroborated accounts of recovered memories and the carefully designed research studies on multiple modes and levels of memory may offer the key to understanding how we remember and why we forget. The results of these controlled scientific studies have wide-ranging implications for abuse survivors, combat veterans, rape victims, and people who have survived traumatic events from earthquakes to car accidents. Written in clear, accessible prose, Trauma and Cognitive Science belongs on the bookshelf of all mental health professionals, researchers in the areas of traumatic stress and child abuse, attorneys, judges, and survivors of abuse and trauma.

Maintains that there is no controlled scientific evidence that memories of trauma may be "recovered" years later.

The question of whether memories can be lost, particularly as a result of trauma, and then "recovered" through psychotherapy has polarised the field of memory research. This is the first volume to bring together leading memory researchers and clinicians with the aiming of facilitating aresolution to this question. The volume offers a unique and timely summary of the theories of memory recovery, and how false memories may be created. Some of the first research relating to the phenomenal characteristics of memory recovered is reported in detail, suggesting important avenues fornew research. Theories of autobiographical memory, implicit memory, reminiscence, and the effects of repeated recall on memory are included. Recovered memories and false memories provides the most current and authoritative thinking in this area, and will be an essential sourcebook for memoryresearchers and psychotherapists.

Recovered memory therapy, which has become a rapidly-growing industry in the past ten years, is based on the controversial theory that adults often suffer emotional problems because of forgotten childhood traumas. People who experience everyday difficulties like anxiety of overeating are now often told by therapists that the root of their trouble is a 'repressed memory' of abuse in childhood. The cure is to bring back the memory - a process that usually takes many months - and then publicly humiliate the alleged perpetrators of the abuse, most often the victim's parents. But are the supposed memories recovered in therapy genuine? Or are they concocted by therapists and clients in the course of therapy? Attempts to find independent corroboration of recovered memories have drawn a blank. Contrary to folklore, there is not a shred of scientific evidence for the notion that a memory can be repressed, and there is plenty of evidence that false memories can be created.

Come to terms with your past while moving powerfully into the future The Courage to Heal is an inspiring, comprehensive guide that offers hope and a map of the healing journey to every woman who was sexually abused as a child—and to those who care about her. Although the effects of child sexual abuse are long-term and severe, healing is possible. Weaving together personal experience with professional knowledge, the authors provide clear explanations, practical suggestions, and support throughout the healing process. Readers will feel recognized and encouraged by hundreds of moving first-person stories drawn from interviews and the authors' extensive work with survivors, both nationally and internationally. This completely revised and updated 20th anniversary edition continues to provide the compassionate wisdom the book has been famous for, as well as many new features: Contemporary research on trauma and the brain An overview of powerful new healing tools such as imagery, meditation, and body-centered practices Additional stories that reflect an even greater diversity of survivor experiences The reassuring accounts of survivors who have been healing for more than twenty years The most comprehensive, up-to-date resource guide in the field Insights from the authors' decades of experience Cherished by survivors, and recommended by therapists and institutions everywhere, The Courage to Heal has often been called the bible of healing from child sexual abuse. This new edition will continue to serve as the healing beacon it has always been.

Beginning in the 1990s, the contentious “memory wars” divided psychologists into two schools of thought: that adults’ recovered memories of childhood abuse were generally true, or that they were generally not, calling theories, therapies, professional ethics, and survivor credibility into question. More recently, findings from cognitive psychology and neuroimaging as well as new theoretical constructs are bringing balance, if not reconciliation, to this polarizing debate. Based on presentations at the 2010 Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, True and False Recovered Memories: Toward a Reconciliation of the Debate assembles an expert panel of scholars, professors, and clinicians to update and expand research and knowledge about the complex interaction of cognitive, emotional, and motivational factors involved in remembering—and forgetting—severe childhood trauma. Contrasting viewpoints, elaborations on existing ideas, challenges to accepted models, and intriguing experimental data shed light on such issues as the intricacies of identity construction in memory, post-trauma brain development, and the role of suggestive therapeutic techniques in creating false memories. Taken together, these papers add significant new dimensions to a rapidly evolving field. Featured in the coverage: The cognitive neuroscience of true and false memories. Toward a cognitive-neurobiological model of motivated forgetting. The search for repressed memory. A theoretical framework for understanding recovered memory experiences. Cognitive underpinnings of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Motivated forgetting and misremembering: perspectives from betrayal trauma theory. Clinical and cognitive psychologists on all sides of the debate will welcome True and False Recovered Memories as a trustworthy reference, an impartial guide to ongoing controversies, and a springboard for future inquiry.