CKLN-FM Mind Control Series -- Part 25

Dr. Connie Kristiansen Interview

Back to CKLN Series Table of Contents

CKLN 88.1 FM Ryerson Polytechnical University Toronto, Ontario

Mind Control Series

Wayne Morris:

Next we are going to hear an interview with Dr. Connie Kristiansen, a professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa. Dr. Kristiansen specializes in recovered memory research and sexual abuse issues.

I would like to begin asking you about your background and what things you are working on with regards to child abuse.

Connie Kristiansen:

I am trained as a social psychologist and I have been applying this background to first of all understand the socio-psychological factors underlying people's opinions in the recovered memory debate. I have also been examining the nature of women's recovered memories of child abuse and contrasting those memories, for example, with the memories of women who never forgot their abuse. I have done some research with adult women who have in fact survived child sexual abuse.

Generally I have been doing psycho-social analysis of the recovered memory debate and trying to gain more insight into the nature of recovered memory. I understand you were attending the "Making Up For Lost Time" conference in Thunder Bay, in 1994. What did you come away with that might have been new information for you, were there any expectations going in to the conference?

Connie Kristiansen:

I guess the one thing I came away with was a greater appreciation for people's concern with ritual abuse and the mind control experiments that have been done. In my mind I have difficulty believing some of the stories that I heard. I am a little bit skeptical; however I know that people don't believe all sorts of things that can indeed be true. I am trying to stay open minded with regard to extreme forms of abuse.

Wayne Morris:

With your experiences, how prevalent do you think child abuse is in our society? Maybe you could talk about how many (from people that have been abused) do suffer memory repression, memory loss, or dissociation?

Connie Kristiansen:

My understanding, and my estimate I would make of the incidents of abuse would be about 1 in 3 women being sexually abused prior to age 18, and maybe 1 in 5-6 men - basing these estimates on a couple of large epidemiological studies done in both Canada and the United States. My review of the literature to date as well as the findings of the Ottawa study we conducted here out of Carleton indicate roughly between 40 - 60% of all women who were sexually abused had at least some memory loss for the child abuse event. In the Ottawa survivors' study for example, about 50% of the sample 113 women said that they had at least some memory loss.

Wayne Morris:

Can you talk about how that mechanism, for a lack of a better term, works for somebody who has undergone trauma and experienced some kind of memory loss? What is going on in the brain and body.

Connie Kristiansen:

There have been a couple of processes that have been talked about to account for this memory loss. One is repression, which I think is what most people think of and the evidence for repression whereby a person unconsciously, unknowingly keeps a lid on something traumatic that they don't want to know about. The evidence for that kind of unconscious processing and repression is actually quite weak. But there is strong evidence that people will actively try to suppress information; and in fact Freud himself sometimes spoke of repression as an active rather than an unconscious process. If you look at repression as an active phenomenon, whereby a person tries to forget a traumatic event, and also forgets trying to forget - then there is some evidence for repression. Probably what most researchers are looking at to explain the memory loss of child sexual abuse is the notion of dissociation.

Dissociation is a type of altered state of consciousness that occurs as a result of trauma, and what happens during trauma is that there are various neurochemical changes that occur in the form of what you might call 'traumatic stress response' and these neurochemical changes are known to change and adversely affect our conscious memory processes. It changes the neurochemicals that have been to be associated with conscious memory process. These neurochemicals also affect various brain structures physically that are responsible for conscious memory processing. Ultimately what seems to happen is that during trauma, the neurochemicals overwhelm our normal memory system, and as a result, people cannot remember traumatic abuse in the way we normally remember daily events.

Rather what does get stored at the time of trauma is a non-conscious type of memory which operates in a different part of the brain which isn't made dysfunctional by the trauma. So the memories are laid down in this alternative memory system, and the memories there are raw perceptual sensory bodily sensations and emotions. They are not conscious memories - ie. I went to the store, then I did this, then I did that. You might remember for example, when you went to the store the fumes of the diesel bus that had just gone by but you would remember those fumes out of context, with no cognitive framework to embed it in.

That's how we think memory is laid down at the time of trauma - in this bodily and sensory form. That's actually what we have seen survivors tell us - that when they recover their memories they don't come back the normal way like we talk about memory. The memories will come sort of willy-nilly, out of the blue and the person will feel like they are literally re-living some part of that event. They have a smell, an image, a sensation or an emotional experience that comes back and it doesn't make sense in the current-day context. But what it is - is these fragments of sensory and emotional memory that are flashing back into the present.

Wayne Morris:

Now, of course, this debate around recovered memory is being hotly debated in North America. There are some groups out there that have been very active in pursuing lawsuits against therapists and survivors that are coming forward. I am thinking particularly of the FMSF. What has your experience been with that group?

Connie Kristiansen:

I know that some of my academic colleagues who would advocate in favour of False Memory Syndrome have tried to bring me up on ethical charges. I hear that is something common by FMSF advocates - trying to get the researchers on ethics. So far they haven't been successful. Other experiences I have had with them? They will write to me sometimes - with little bits of information, sarcastic humour, nothing too nasty.

Wayne Morris:

Are you aware of other therapists being intimidated by this group?

Connie Kristiansen:

Laura Brown - who is an active psychologist who worked on the review of the recovered memory issue in the American Psychological Association. Laura Brown's office has been picketed on a regular basis, she has been perpetually harassed. So I know there is a lot of harassment going on out there especially in the States. Here in Canada I think we are a little more mellow. Give us 10 years. Maybe we will be on par.

Wayne Morris:

How do you think this environment has changed the resources available for people who may suspect they have been victims of child abuse?

Connie Kristiansen:

I gather that it hasn't been beneficial. Well, it's a knife that cuts both ways actually. In one sense the publicity given to child abuse has made a lot of therapists and people who acknowledge the validity of the research findings on which the information is based. People are learning about child abuse and they are now taking it more seriously, so maybe it means better treatment, better resources to some extent. One good consequence of the recovered memory controversy is that more money is being funded into research on both sides of the camp. So we are going to learn more about traumatic memory one way or the other. That can't be bad. Ultimately, hopefully, it will help survivors.

On the other hand I think it had a really bad impact on survivors in several ways. One is you hear the Criminal Compensation Board being suspect about any claims based on recovered memory, so survivors are having a rougher time getting some financial compensation because of this date. The Ottawa survivors' study assessed how this debate was affecting these women and not surprisingly these women said this debate was having an adverse effect on all the areas of their lives that had been previously affected by the trauma. In other words this debate is revictimizing some of the survivors and making them experience more of those symptoms again. So it is having a detrimental effect.

On the other hand a small minority said it has made them as mad as hell and they are getting out there to do something about it. So I can see it is activating some women in a really positive way.

Wayne Morris:

You mentioned the FMSF using other people to attack therapists on the grounds of ethics. What other kinds of arguments are they using? Are there indeed other organizations like FMSF that exist and have been actively intimidating people?

Connie Kristiansen:

I don't know about any other organizations but what they are seeing is that some therapists are doing what they call "voodoo therapy". In fact the FMSF has called me a "voodoo scientist". They are claiming that some therapists are actually causing the creation of false memories. In the cases where they are picketing and so on, I am pretty convinced that this isn't going on. A lot of psychologists know what they are doing, they are doing good work with their clients, they are not suggesting things to their clients. And I think some of the better work is probably being done by the feminists because they have a sort of non-authoritarian style. They are not inclined to tell clients what they think happened or what caused their state of being this way. Whereas more traditional psychiatric approaches tend to have an idea of what the person is like before they have even met the person, more judgemental, they impose their own reality on the client. So I think the feminists have a good approach in terms of working with recovered memory simply because they try to empower the client to take better care of themselves, rather than the therapist looking after the client and telling them what her reality is.

Wayne Morris:

What kind of approaches do therapists take with clients in order to avoid being accused of implanting memories, and has this changed because of the rise of the FMSF?

Connie Kristiansen:

I know some therapist have actually refused to take on clients who might take their alleged perpetrators to court on the basis of recovered memory. Other therapists have stopped treating survivors altogether. Others are being especially careful to monitor their behaviour, to make sure they are not suggestive, particularly when any abuse stuff comes up.

So people are using different approaches I think - depending on how confident they feel in themselves, and I don't mean in terms of their ability - but how they could deal with a potential lawsuit and whether they really want to face that possibility.

Wayne Morris:

Do people have ways of documenting - like taping the sessions, things like that?

Connie Kristiansen:

I think a lot of therapists are learning that if they are going to use techniques like hypnosis they should ideally have an audiovisual session, because in that way there is clear evidence exactly how suggestive was the process. So that's highly recommended that you tape everything when it comes to be about sort of abuse issues.

Wayne Morris:

Some of the arguments in this debate are ie. children just making up stories just to get back at their parents for whatever reason. How difficult is it do you think to tell whether somebody is actually just making up a story or there is real signs of abuse there?

Connie Kristiansen:

I imagine it would probably be pretty difficult. One of the things we did in the Ottawa survivors study was look to see if we could identify anybody who had this unrecognized identity called 'false memory syndrome'. What we did is we developed a list of the symptoms of FMS based on the writings of the FMSF and Advisory Board members and we went out and documented how many women with recovered memories satisfied these criteria. And the rate was very, very low - a few percent of the women with recovered memory could potentially be classified as having FMS. The rate was just as high though with the women who had never forgotten their abuse and had continuous memory. So those criteria don't seem to differentiate continuous from recovered memories.

Moreover some of the criteria are downright silly. One of them was you should suspect a claim of abuse if it is denied by the alleged perpetrator. Well, I would expect that many perpetrators would deny abuse had actually occurred. I am not surprised that the criteria didn't differentiate. Another criteria said these children were blissfully happy as young children and teenagers and they were doing very well in life until they met the therapist who implanted the memories. When we looked at the data, we found that the women with recovered memories reported as much as symptomatology in childhood and teen years as the women with continuous memories reported. So their symptom levels are basically the same which was contrary to what the FMSF was claiming.

Wayne Morris:

Well, thank you very much Connie for joining us on CKLN. I wish you all the best in your work.

Connie Kristiansen:

Thank you.