Survivor Mary Knight: Abused In Rituals By My Parents (Exclusive Documentary)

this film is not suitable for children it contains verbal descriptions of extreme cruelty including ritualistic abuse body mutilation child pornography and incest [Music] he [Music] was i abused when i was a kid if someone had asked me that before i was 37 years old i would have said no mary knight was a social worker herself and she's telling her story to try and break the abuse cycle for others oh we have family of deer that started living here before we did beautiful surroundings the one thing her life now and her life then have in common my sister and i would go just exploring through the woods and that was kind of our getaway otherwise this oregon city filmmaker's early life was something out of a horror film i had extremely abusive childhood i was prostituted as a child my parents produced child pornography and used me as in it mary and i didn't even remember that abuse until she was in her 30s what was your first reaction to finding out i was doing this project i thought who the heck is she that would do something like this um did it make me not trust me it did because i thought well what if you were going to what if you'd already made your decision that what you'd recovered were false memories so i thought you were a false memory person and i was very very careful about you just in simple terms what do you think recovered memory is a recovery memory is a child undergoes trauma they're at risk if they tell anyone so they must find a way to forget it so they do and they forget it until the time is safe for them to recall it who is dr elizabeth loftis well she's always introduced by the media as a world renowned memory work researcher she's a professor of psych cognitive psychology she's also associated with the law department at uc irvine these claims about repression um are claims that uh you know horrible brutalization is banished into the unconscious by some process that's beyond and remembering and then you know years later you according to the theory go through some kind of therapy that uh lifts this veil of repression and makes you aware of the experiences and it's that kind of claim that i just haven't seen any real credible scientific support for it's a kind of a strange experience for me because you know often it the individuals who think they were abused or think they have repressed memories of abuse um they don't particularly want to talk to me and and they don't want to have their memories questioned and they are typically you know angry at people this is a new experience yeah for both of us yeah for both of us if i'm willing to do a documentary entitled am i crazy my journey to determine if my memories are true then one thing i have to do is truly question my memories i have to commit to myself i'm gonna question it and to me the best way to do it is to talk to people who don't believe memories like mine exist i don't know anything about your situation i i'm a survivor of extreme abuse of ritualistic abuse ritualistic child abuse may include desecration of something sacred group settings torture ritualistic abusers sometimes hide their crimes within cults churches child pornography networks and other organizations i was molested by a number of family member and non-family members and you know i i told you i may make cookies for you with my mom's recipe but um she she sexually abused me your mother so how old were you um it was through a long period of my childhood but like what to what i mean starting what age young to through teenage years yeah so it was for a long time yeah and then what happened then i my um i had relatives who remembered and i went to counseling and um i remembered so then how old were you roughly then about 37. and how do you know it really happened the real reason i know is that i just have a really spiritual connection and i that's just what i know to be true in my deepest self but then also i do have five relatives with similar memories i had hoped they would be interviewed for the documentary it looks like none of them will be but i'm still hopeful about one but um really in a way it's okay that they don't because most survivors don't have that kind of external corroboration and i i want this documentary to say to survivors you're okay and you don't need something external because i mean that's really part of the abuse was that your thoughts and your feelings and your perceptions are not enough and so then if in therapy or in recovery we say well you need external corroboration what does that what message is that my cousin lisa if you say something you don't want to use that's i'm just so glad you're willing to do it at all and really the first thing i mean the answer to this question um i mean basically you're my cousin yes we're cousins so i'm wondering if we have memories in common and i was i was raped by our grandfather do you have a memory like that yes yes i do i believe we came from a family that engaged in generational abuse and that i was abused by multiple family members my father do you think he was my father abused me my father abused me by being allowed me to abuse be abused by other people yes did that happen yes i mean he was he was not someone who physically touched me but almost coaching others somehow taking pictures as well so this would be child pornography i have no idea what he was doing with what he was taking but um yes yes encouraging others to be involved in sexual acts with me and filming them so yeah okay that definitely happened to me lisa allowed me to use her exact words but her voice was replaced by that of an actor so now i basically i have five minutes of your story and your well i don't i hope this won't be offensive but your your claims about what other people said but i haven't heard those claims from them and so i don't know so i can't be sure if it when you tell me and you know and i have an aunt she says she was abused or you know did the aunt really say that and did they really mean that and or did the aunt really mean something else like emotional abuse rather than sexual or ritual abuse so without having so little data it's really hard for me to know what to to think but if they did say that i mean i i know that they did yeah you know i mean you don't know it i understand that but i know that they did so you're asking like why do i believe it well that's one of the reasons and so then after i would remember something i'd call one of them and they'd you know have a similar memory to a lot of my memories your investigation about your memories was all on camera and you did not know how it was going to turn out yeah you know i think that's why i did it i really now think that i did it because i knew i needed to challenge myself that much and now i realize i did this project as my way to confront my parents who are deceased it was my way to sit across from my parents and say why did you do what you did and why aren't you now treating me good i traveled to florida to interview eleanor goldstein the author of three books disputing recovered memories my husband jerry came with me as my camera person eleanor is about the same age my mother would have been she invited us to stay with her and i thought about doing it instead we went to the hotel and figured out how to use sound equipment so why don't you tell me how beautiful i am or something so i can see how the cameraman sounds in it don't push your luck okay that's a wonderful response confabulation is a mixture of fact and fantasy to create a new memory we do that every day we we mix our memories up with other people's memories so we've learned that memory is very very fl pliable and you can get people to believe anything that you want them to believe if you use the right techniques how did you get your memories back did you get it back spontaneously did you get it back with the aid of a therapist who used some suggestibility that was my greatest fear and going was oh i was like they'll ask me some question that i've never thought of before and then i'll go maybe my memories aren't true the questions they asked i'd already asked myself i was an investigator when i remembered my abuse i'd been um i had been well i'd done at that point two or three hundred custody evaluations i placed 100 kids in adoptive homes and you always of course you investigate those homes very carefully and i know how to do investigations and so then when i remembered my my own abuse i treated it like i mean i could let myself just go if i were the investigator on this case what questions would i ask and i asked myself all those questions i was seeing a counselor and i did have i had five hypnosis sessions i have i don't have those with me but i have uh well actually i have how do you know for sure that these memories are true if you had five hypnosis sessions i asked for hypnotherapy and i asked for it because i had young kids and i had reasons to suspect relatives and i needed to know i need to know who i who to protect my kids from oh sure i transcribed the hypnosis tapes but listening to those and transcribing them that was an excellent psychologist she did not ask any leading questions i think that survivors and i tried to do this like i didn't i wouldn't go on antidepressants for a long time because it's like oh my parents are more likely to believe my memories are true and then they'll go get treatment if i don't you know do anything wrong no that's not why they don't believe you no it's not like why do you believe me because i know you when did you start believing me next several months after i left him and what made the difference i didn't disbelieve you in the beginning i just had to get to know you better what made the difference with believing [Music] nothing in particular i just got to know you memories that come back like that out of the blue i would i spoke in canada at um simon fraser university dentist and all of a sudden 20 years later some patient comes and says i remember 20 years ago you abused me when i was in the dental chair but i forgot about it until i went to therapy now i remember i was wondering why you interviewed her i know she's written a couple of books she's written three books she's written three books but she's not a memory expert she's not you know she's not a mental health expert but i interviewed her because i was told that there was someone who had first-hand information that marilyn's memories were not true and now miss america of 1958 [Music] from atlantic city new jersey [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it would not be possible to know or understand me unless you knew about the unending sexual violations i endured as a child and as a teenager the trauma was so severe i did what many children do in order to survive i split or to use the psychiatric word i dissociated i split into what i call a day child and a night child as difficult as this is for most people to believe or understand until i was 24 i the day child had no conscious knowledge of the night child all i'm saying is i knew this very beautiful intact happy ghost and how well did you know her well not very well except that i was in a class with her every single day but i had been told that she had firsthand information that marilyn's memories weren't true and so i had questions like um [Music] i had questions for like well tell me about the time she confided in you they took a class together in college she has no other information about her did she tell you that marilyn's memories were false or was that oh she did well she told me that they were very you know that questionable questionable she will allow me to use some footage but footage of marilyn uh from a talk she gave mm-hmm yeah interesting i don't know she doesn't want to be confronted she has a she has a prepared speech and that's what she's willing to acknowledge but she doesn't want to be confronted apparently i really get to talk to her i'm nervous and excited hello hi marilyn it's mary knight it's nice to hear your voice it's good to hear your voice i am oh i just i just have so much respect for you i remembered in my abuse in 93 and it was in like a year later my counselor gave me this video of a presentation you did and so i took it home i was sitting in my living room listening to your presentation and of course when you say you know if you're comfortable if you're a survivor and you're comfortable standing you may do so now i stood up in my living room oh i love that and i i thought you know someday i want to do what maryland's doing for insta survivors i want to do for survivors of ritual abuse and that's what you're doing it is i ask survivors to stand for several reasons one is because i'm always hoping there are some of you here today who are as empowered as i finally am it took me 53 years to get rid of shame but i don't have an ounce of shame today i'm so very proud of who i am and i hope that there are others of you here today who have also worked through the shame do you think survivors need to go public in order to heal from the shame oh as long as survivors work through the shame if the reason they don't stand is because of shame then that's a problem for me did you know eleanor goldstein in college i did not know eleanor goldstein in college i wanted to go back to school i wanted to go back to college and people would say to me do you really think you can go back and just be a junior in college that wasn't the problem the problem was how people reacted to me i went to the football game and people were lining up for my autograph the miss america pageant atlantic city new jersey let's join miss colorado marilyn van durber at the hammond organ at that time miss america was very very highly regarded i am old so i can remember when the miss america pageant was the most popular tv show yeah yeah that was before the super bowl what about um the former miss america marilyn vande beer she went through a tremendous amount of all kinds of different therapy before highly suggestive therapy before she told the story of abuse so that's not what it was reported in people magazine did is there some other way you have yeah i've watched lectures that she's given and and in lecture she said she's talked about the massive amount of therapy but that was not that was after remember i'm not sure of that no what she's yeah she has said publicly that she remembered i mean it's well i have the people magazine here yeah but i i've read a whole bunch more than just people magazine about that case it's a it's it's a very suspicious case and tell me more why i just i just believe that she had lots and lots of uh of different kinds of therapy and so we can't know whether what what she ultimately came up with is an actual memory or is it is a product of suggestive therapy we just don't know how old were you when you first had therapy my memories came up when i was 24 i did not start therapy until i was 39. you think she's not telling the truth i i don't know i don't know but i've heard about a whole bunch of other therapy and afterwards no i'm not sure of that i'm not sure of that so you think so your concern is what therapy she had before 19 i i just don't know that those memories are real uh-huh and then her sister of course always remembered sexual abuse we don't know exactly what her sister remembered though i've never read exactly you know what the sister remember the sisters supposedly um felt there was some kind of abuse but i don't know what it is sexual abuse that the sister was remembering so i just don't know so that could be a corroborated case if the sister has continuous memory of the memory that marilyn has well i don't know that yeah well we'd have to know a whole lot more and i just i only i only get to know in depth about the cases that i work on you know the rest of them it's kind of newspaper knowledge so i had a press conference and the next day it was on the page front page of the rocky mountain news and the denver post i got a phone call they're calling your sisters i called my sister gwen in san francisco and i said if you want to go public with this do it in california because we're never going to get off the front pages in denver the next morning the third day it was on the front page of the paper again with my sister's story and my picture i waited until our daughter awakened she had just come home from her sophomore year in college she woke up and i said to larry and jennifer i have to get out of here i have to go so we put on our sweats and we went to the high school track we were jogging around the track and the woman with her two dogs came we always said hello she stopped me and she said marilyn we're so proud of what you're doing and i'm so grateful your sister came forward this morning i had been upset about that and i said really why and she said because yesterday on our most popular radio talk show people were calling in and saying why should we believe her now that your sister has come forward they will have to believe you i was stunned i looked at her and i said if people are not going to believe 53 year old me then who is going to believe a child why didn't you tell anyone about the abuse i i mean i get asked like why didn't you tell someone when you were talking i know i did tell someone when i was about six who did you tell who who was it i don't remember but the story got back to one of my two parents and they realized that they would have to do something to silence me dad made me he made me do something he made me eat something that i thought was poisonous and i thought he would i thought he was killing me i thought my father was killing me and your father's a physician right yeah so he would know whether or not that would kill you yeah he would but at age six i didn't know you thought it was gonna kill you i did and i was awfully surprised to wake up in the morning because i thought he was going to die but i woke up but i was unsure that i thought i might die the next day it took me a couple days before i realized that i was going to live yeah and it did silence you and was that when you started was what was that when you started hiding those that knowledge of it from yourself yeah that is because i could never talk about it again i could never think about it so anytime i thought about it i would have to push it away i would just say forget it have you read this book no i haven't i recommend it okay it's good it talks about the connection between mind and body and yeah i've heard good things about it yeah yeah i'd heard things about it and then i read it and i thought this is who i want to interview and then i found out he was doing a conference in portland what does it mean the body keeps score we are our bodies our head is only one-seventh of our whole organism and our frontal lobe where we have any thoughts is only one quarter of that the function of the brain is to take care of the body and so when you get traumatized everything in your survival brain which is like about half of your brain gets set to be worried about survival and that's all expressed in bodily sensations then the next part of your brain is involved in creating a map of the world and so as your brain forms you don't know anything about going out there and that part of the brain which we call the limbic system called any number of things it creates a map of what's going on out there and how i do react to and it tells you what is safe what's dangerous who am i in relationship to my surroundings where do i go to get the good stuff what do i avoid to get the bad stuff and so that is a hardwired map of your brain your early experiences determine that map of your brain so if people beat you up and tell you that you're a rotten kid that map of the world is i'm a rotten person i'm a terrible person and the world is unsafe place extremely difficult to change it's a hardwired part of the brain and our job of my profession is to find out how we can rewire these very primitive maps so it's very core of trauma is the whole notion our brain scan showed it is the the verbal language center of the brain gets knocked out when people become extremely upset from the very first moment i started to see traumatized people the issue of people not remembering or just seeing images just having feelings was very prominent i wrote about it the moment i started to write about vietnam veterans that these memories were really very different from the memories of the movie you saw yesterday and that's what's really fascinating is that the language center the brain shuts down all that memory stuff becomes complicated and um and that memory of trauma is different and what became very clear is that if you're not allowed to talk about the drama or you're not allowed to help for people to help to make sense out of being dumbfounded or shakespeare says struck with speechless terror then the memories of goes away but your body keeps reacting because your body knows in some ways and this is the very first thing that got me interested in drama is that i wrote a whole bunch of case histories of people who were in the coconut got fire in 1943 who couldn't remember what happened but on the anniversary of the fire they would run out in the street and scream fire fire and try to hurt people together and vietnam veterans would reenact her drama but wouldn't remember what happened there were a few things that i have always remembered that i think were not right i remember my dad saying that he was sexually attracted to me i think that's how old were you when he said that you know i don't think it matters how old someone is it's just wrong oh yeah you know some things you just take this as a joke people say stupid things that's not something i think a father would usually joke about that he's sexually attracted to his dog were you you don't remember yeah i do i remember i was about 13. you said that email and said this is eleanor's daughter a survivor and she's a survivor i'm like wow i think it's pretty courageous of her after so many oh i know so you're sure you're a survivor of abuse oh yeah as sure as i can be without having you know footage of it yes and i have to trust that otherwise where does it leave me do you remember actually telling your parents about it yeah because i didn't know they had anything to do with it the first memory that came up i just remembered babysitters how did your interest in the subject begin i was doing all this research and my function was to find out information and i was sitting at my desk one day and there was an article and it said parents claim to be falsely accused so that was a lie absolutely the deeper truth is that she had a daughter who me who was having memories we have to help each other and forgive and understand and have empathy and not carry grudges forever and every generation one generation after the other hates hates hates he touched me oh my god he touched me and therefore he touched me and he's dead he's dead so even if there was the incestuous touch you think the family i don't know what again consensus the touch is i mean of course if someone comes into your bedroom and forces himself on you that's one thing if you apply the what if what if what i had an uncle my sister says used to uh fondle her yeah you know the newspaper like this and he'd follow her okay he's dead don't ever speak to him again he's dead he made it terrible so even fondling you think say get out of here uncle irving leave me alone and walk so i think the little kid should be responsible i think in a certain point if he's uncomfortable he should speak up for themselves and be responsible themselves i carry a grudge from centuries do you think the family should still stay together of course even if there was absolutely yes i don't think that i don't think sexual touch is the horror of all horrors i don't think so i think we make a big to-do about nothing how did the child sexual abuse affect you i don't know i mean i'm i'm i don't pin anything on it you don't know of any way it affected you i don't nope at age six she was fondled i read you told you were afraid you were pregnant that's just because i didn't know i didn't i didn't i was like naive and oh did you not know how sex no i didn't no oh so i just thought maybe you know he left some sperm somewhere and or whatever and maybe then when you turn 13 that's when it kicks in and makes you pregnant yeah she testified for my father in the lawsuit in which i sued my parents and won daughter wins sex abuse case against parents the judge believed me and the case was corroborated i had a sister who always remembered and i had a father who said it's not sexual abuse if a father makes his daughter touch his penis well actually it is it's a crime yeah and he he said that in a deposition yeah he did in the case lynn crook the part that mcnally includes is that she testified that her father said keep your legs together but the full quote is keep your legs together or i'll think you want me which is i consider extremely inappropriate but he only quoted that first part of it making it seem like there was no evidence but you know if a father really does say that to a daughter to me that is evidence that he is not appropriate sexually well i don't know whether it means he did anything but as far as the accusations of lynn crook i think they're extremely dubious how do you feel about dr loftis oh i think that um i think she designed a defense for people who were facing civil charges they needed a defense back in 1991 she discovered one she created for them she created the research to back it up and that's where she is and she gets paid a ton of money to do it and no one checks anything she says yeah and she's very very good with the media do you ever get mad at her oh i think i used to especially after she followed my followed by falsified my case to the media yeah yeah that that shocked me after you take your case to court and you say all this personal stuff about yourself you win the case and someone lies about your case to the media i mean that's just it's just dumb yeah really she thought she could do that to me yeah and so i that's why i filed the ethics complete really you can't do that dr loftus resigned from the american psychological association one month after lynn crook filed an ethics complaint against her i mean you can't you can't you can't lie you can't lie yeah you tell about a study you did of 105 women in drug treatment that about 50 were sexually abused um that was a study of women who were in outpatient treatment for substance abuse and it was being done by a psychiatrist so i talked her into putting some memory questions into her survey with these women we asked them to tell us you know the status of their memory would they which of these statements is closest to you i always remembered even if i didn't talk about it uh i remembered parts of the abuse but maybe not all of it uh i forgot for a period of time and then then the memory came back and they were like nine percent it was something like eight 17 or 18 depending on whether or not count missing data or not who said i forgot for a period of time and then the memory came back um but we don't know what you know in the end we don't know what they meant by that you know i'm sure there's plenty of genuine abuse right and abused by priests and people who don't think about it for a long time and then they'd get reminded of it and what about ross giant do you know about i mean he says that he um i don't know that he would say he repressed his memory yes dr ross chait lists 110 corroborated recovered memory cases on his website his own case is number 26. i mean because he does he seems to have found corroboration some corroboration but but we don't know that he repressed it dr cheit is an attorney author and brown university professor he calls his website recovered memory archives i think in general people who are abused as children either heal from it or they use set ex or that experience propels them to hurt other people and with dr loptis what i think the most reasonable explanation for an intelligent woman ignoring not only the neuroscientific research that's out now but her own survey study that showed that 18 percent um of people of child sexual abuse survivors had in the study had delayed recall the explanation i can find is she was affected by her own childhood herd and unlike my parents she doesn't hurt children but she has made life hell for a lot of survivors of childhood sexual abuse dr loftus has testified on behalf of hundreds of accused parents she was hired as a consultant by bill cosby's defense team dr loftus testified for galen maxwell harvey weinstein michael jackson ted bundy i'm not interested in dr loftus in her research i'm a trauma specialist she's a laboratory specialist who looked shows people's movies about what they just saw that has no emotional valence she doesn't inform the work of child abuse priest abuse and childhood trauma because that's not her area of expertise so as a scientist the only people whose work is interesting to me are people who can clarify how people process the memory of extreme experiences she happens to be not bothering them you cannot study people being vaped in a laboratory because we cannot trade people in laboratory so we're really talking about apples and oranges it's boring to talk about orange growth maybe other people talk about apples a whole group of people study the british army after the evacuation of dunkirk in 1940 and they find what that one-third of the people block out their memories and are in the days and they invited up in medical journals and that is like everybody knows that and then when incest survivors say this happened to me too people say no it happens to soldiers it doesn't happen to you do you think that the people just don't want to look at something that bad is insane no it's not that it's a certain people don't want to look at that the army didn't want to look at the memory lost in the first world war and so in 1917 on july june 16th the british general staff says you're not allowed to use the word shell shock anymore because it will undermine the morale of the war and people will no longer want to fight so if it's not politically convenient people are not allowed to talk about it and so it's fine for incest victims to talk about the trauma as long as i'm not the perpetrator of the incest in 1991 people magazine did three cover stories on recovered memory by then you had 24 states had allowed victims to sue on based on recovered memories it was there were there were probably thousands of people in in the us who were concerned about a defense for this lawsuit and so loftus was out there tossing out ideas to the media was this were these uh sexual fantasies daughters were dreaming about fantasizing about their husbands their fathers their fathers about their fathers what were all these um what were all these things about certainly they couldn't be about sexual abuse so finally she came up with a story well it must be a therapist implanting suggesting ideas to their clients and that became the defense it first made a headline in august 1991 in the washington post that became their defense before then they had nothing you know they love people who have a real serious take in the science of what's going on here they're an advocacy group for people who for reasons of their own you figure out what it is need to deny that incest is real they have a problem i was a speaker at the virtual global summit to end sexual exploitation that's how i met fellow speaker and fellow child abuse survivor crystal denise garcia crystal it's great to see you you are such a good pandemic friend oh yes i love our friendship and i can't wait to meet up someday me too something you and i have in common is recovered memories of child abuse please tell about yours yeah so the first recovery memory i had was when i was pregnant i got my recovered memory from of child abuse and i never knew that i i had been abused i i had parts of my life that were blacked out but i thought it was just maybe i was too young to remember it i realized that it was blacked out because of trauma and so when i was pregnant that recovered memory came back i had no clue that i had suffered that and when i told the the nurse she said oh yeah that's normal that happens to pregnant women all the time i recently uncovered another another memory and it was from even earlier uh in my in my childhood and that was very intense it was very intense i i could barely get through it and so i went seeking support i went to therapist and i told her what happened i told her what i was dealing with i told her what i was trying to work through that was very very difficult for me and she said okay well maybe that happened but who can verify that for you and i was just really blown away because i was like what do you mean maybe it happened i just told you it happened and why are you seeking verification outside of me when i'm here in front of you telling you why is someone else's voice more valid than mine so i felt shut down i felt degraded and who would i verify that with who would i verify my personal experiences that i survived with and i it's not like i would have anyone to ask for verification and i mean it's i was in such dangerous situations as a child but i ended up in foster care i am so sorry that happened to you there's actually an organization that recommends counselors do just what your counselor did that's that's horrifying i don't even understand why an organization like that would exist it it's called the false memory syndrome foundation wow just the name alone is is pretty cringy i mean that's pretty disturbing i mean it's that sounds like just complete gaslighting you know just shutting survivors down that's it's made up of it's made up of parents accused parents people who own children consider them rapists wow and nobody has a problem with this they don't realize that the people who are being like who who are being said that they are predators are now running an organization that's a good that's really alarming it was started by the parents of dr jennifer fry just a year after she recovered memories of incest by her father dr jennifer fryde is a researcher professor author and expert on the psychology of sexual trauma she wrote a book on betrayal trauma theory stating that if children are sexually abused by a caregiver they might forget the abuse in order to maintain the relationship with the person they depend on for survival it makes sense humans have a very well developed attachment system the attachment system works in both the dependent person and in the caregiver we've got a reciprocal relationship in the sense that both the caregiver and the infant are giving each other reinforcement for this relationship and the infant has to do that because this is an extremely resource expensive relationship for the caregiver so imagine that baby detecting some mistreatment and trying to respond in the way an empowered person would that baby's probably risking his or her life because the caregiver might withdraw the first interview for this film was in philadelphia [Music] it was with dr jennifer fryde's mother pam fried i was so nervous meeting the founder of the false memory syndrome foundation was my first step in an on-camera confrontation with the deepest and most vulnerable part of myself [Music] hi well something's gotten me questioning and you really are yeah yeah yeah and i appreciate oh thank you i just was really surprised i picked up the phone and call and i didn't expect to actually you answer your phone and then i'm like can i come and you're like that's okay and i mean it's the name i've always associated with you know false memories syndrome foundation um you and your husband founders right yeah when i decided to do this the film am i crazy um i decided to really truly honestly explore could my memories not be true and as you know i mean i've had them it was it's been 20 or 21 years since i remembered so but i wanted to talk to the best people about it and i i thought yeah that's you and then whoever you recommend i have another question yes your aunt my father's sister did say some things that sowed some really serious doubts and great concerns yes and you wanted to be sure your children were safe oh absolutely i didn't want to break contact unnecessarily but i didn't want my children to be at risk your aunt seems to have been influential in your life she seems to have played a really strong role in your beliefs no i mean i just didn't know her i just hadn't been around her for you know some time my father's sister hadn't wanted to see him for years and i didn't know why and she lived not far from where i lived and i mean i lived in the dallas texas area and so my parents came to see me and they saw my aunt on that same visit and i said well what did she say you know because i mean she hadn't talked to you for years what's going on they told me that she thought she was abused and i said well what are you gonna do you know well we just won't see her anymore and i said well i mean you're just never gonna see her again oh yeah she's she's crazy we won't see her anymore they both said that then i called my aunt and i said would you meet with me and she said yes i will i had the sense it was true and i i didn't have any memories but i went to a counselor at that point so what happened after you you recovered these memories and well my first memory was just it didn't come under hypnosis it was a flashback as i was my counselor had me write down what i do remember anything i do remember from my childhood just anything no matter how benign and during that period of time i remembered i had this flash i had a flash of a man grabbing a dog roughly and so then i had my first hypnosis and under hypnosis um she wanted to go up the sleeve to see who the man was and that tape is still gun-ridging for me to hear because it's just like i just was sobbing because it was my dad called my dad at that point i called him at work because i thought if i talked to him directly he would get into counseling too and then we could both determine what was going on here and i could still have a relationship with my parents so i called him and he said i have a very good memory and i know that didn't happen and um he said i i suppose we won't have any contact with you anymore so i i never said that i it's not my intent of the phone call i did tell him my children wouldn't be visiting that summer um but i never said that i wouldn't have contact with him and he uh he said is this going to lead you to believe that you were sexually abused by me i said well i i don't think so you know i mean i so anyway that that um that was the change in [Music] my relationship with my parents and this was all in texas i lived in texas and they lived in denver what was the year i think it was 1992. tell about when did your organization start and we started in 1992. we're a bunch of families that got together we were one of them because um our daughter recovered memories and that was how the foundation started we were trying to figure out what was going on and we found other families and we found some professionals and now dr on underwater underway or whatever um [Music] with who was he one of the professionals that helped with it he was one of the first people we called he helped um you know he had taken a phone number so that people could call to request information this was before the foundation was actually formed so did he give you some phone numbers he had or something well he had been doing that all along and he said he would speak with families so um yes we had contact with him when we first formed the foundation we thought he might be good to be on the advisory board we had no idea whatsoever about um the interview he's had in the netherlands pideka describes itself as a pro-pedophile publication in a 1991 interview dr underwagger was asked is choosing pedophilia a responsible choice he replied certainly it is responsible pedophiles can boldly and courageously affirm what they choose they can say i believe this is in fact part of god's will that really has nothing to do with recovered memories that has to do with some opinions on on pedophilia and child abuse yeah pedophilia and whether it's child abuse but was isn't dr wakefield still on your board or she was quoted she's still on the board well she she was she was in the interview too they wrote papers together they wrote a book together and she's asked doesn't your book accusations of child sexual abuse suggest that all sexual relationships between adults and children in the united states are abusive relationships and she says no she said something like there should the only way we could know if pedophilia was harmful is to do research with um you know with children like nine ten eleven-year-old children and seeing how how a long-term loving relationship sexual relationship between them an adult would affect them if i understood that right did i understand it wrong i would have to go and check the years that she's talking about but she was talking about another country wakefield said it would be nice if someone could get some kind of big research grant to do a longitudinal study of let's say a hundred twelve-year-old boys in relationships with loving pedophiles this is impossible in the united states right now in terms of the issue of you know if somebody's memories are true that's not that's not a helpful thing since you had hypnosis i would like to give you two or three oh i mean general articles and then you can read them yeah and you can make your own decisions in terms of what you think about the reliability most of my memories were not under hypnosis at some point if physical evidence is lacking if there is no physical evidence for something at some point many people want to just step back and say whoa i think i need to rethink this i think your idea of doing a transcript of my hypnosis tapes is great that's the most objective i thought about that well i'm happy to speak to anybody who is really searching to find out oh that's so good what happened i have another question yes if i were to send you or to give you some materials would you be willing to read them yeah i'd be glad to read them and you're open to reading skeptical absolutely and i've read a lot actually yeah and i'll read more yeah i'll read whatever you recommend i read well thank you for making the trip thank you for being open to questioning pam fry suggested i interview fmsf board member dr lauren pancras i lived in portland at the time which is where he lives all i'm suggesting is maybe your memories are correct maybe your memories are wrong but if they're wrong it will take you a while to undo them to begin to unravel them and to say maybe they weren't quite right maybe these were memories they're actually not true there were things that happened to me in my mind more than it happened to me in my body so all i'm asking is keep that idea open yeah i ha and one thing i did was the whole month of december i read only literature that was uh with the false memory syndrome foundation i could see that i was getting less defensive but that's why you're making this movie yeah but but one thing when i was reading that i wanted to ask you some of that some of the what i was reading one thing was saying like a young child who's under age 2 or under age 3 will never remember any abuse and if they are abused won't be affected by it is that what you think a child in her too really doesn't have memories of anything that happened anything that doesn't that isn't painful the child it wouldn't it wouldn't hurt the child i mean it may be morally wrong to touch a child who's under two it may be obnoxious it may be that's a terrible thing to do and society says no but if you think about it it doesn't it doesn't damage the child it's it's wrong but the child is not damaged by it unless it's physically hurt physically injured or injured or hurt well what if cries if the child cries then would that affect the child later so far as we know uh children who have been who've been physically abused anyway abused they don't remember that and it doesn't seem to have any later effect on them so that's kind of good news for people my sons wanting to find babysitters for their kids because their kids their oldest is two and so even if their kids are beat up a little bit at the babysitter it's not going to affect them and unless there's an injury and moreover we know that most abuse of children under two most real sexual abuse that occurs has to do with touching usually not penetration it's usually not very violent it's not violent at all it's usually more curiosity exploration you think a reason someone would fondle a one-year-old is curiosity i think that's usually what people think so someone who would want to touch a one-year-old's vagina does that for curiosity that would be one motivation and what would they be curious about what would an adult be curious about about a one year i don't get it that's that's why it's deviant yeah but you think it wouldn't hurt them uh stroking the vagina of a two-year-old child an unrelated male stroking child for curiosity for any other reason for sexual reasons and having an orgasm when the child's there would not affect the child that child wouldn't remember that for example if the child saw if a two-year-old child saw their parents murdered they wouldn't remember that that would be a terrible thing to observe for a two-year-old child but they wouldn't remember it and therefore wouldn't be affected by it most mental health professionals do not agree with dr pancras i went to a child abuse conference in salt lake city that's where i met dr susie wyatt a well-respected child psychiatrist i was told that no matter how much a child under the age of three is abused it won't affect him because he won't remember well i have to say i'm aghast hearing that do we have specific proof about memory for any of us even good memory no we don't have any specific proof but again as a child psychiatrist and what i have observed clinically working even with really young kids is how how devastated they are at an emotional level when they have been exposed to any kinds of significant trauma there's something called non-declarative memory and non-declarative memory is the memory we don't have words for but at an a deep um rudimentary guttural level we have memory and i would put forth that it's those people who have been so traumatized have been so emotionally damaged at a young age who are at the most risk i think part of what the concern is is if perpetrators hear people say doesn't necessarily hurt the kid well obviously there'll be more perpetrators using that as an excuse things like that should never happen to anyone um but i've heard some pretty horrific things that humans have done to each other which again just really saddens my heart but what what i know to be true and what i've seen so consistently is when people can start owning those memories and especially that emotional content around it and they are finally able to start mastering their emotions around it that i know that freedom is around the corner for them and it so i guess if there wasn't that freedom i think it would be really overwhelming and i don't think i could do the work that i do but it's it's that joy in knowing okay now now they know what's going on i love what she said she's nothing like the counselor who tried to tell me to go find proof she doesn't ask her clients for proof the false memory syndrome foundation recommends suing counselors like her who would sue a counselor who's actually doing their job correctly laura passley says her counselor convinced her of memories that weren't true she sued her counselor and received a settlement i read what you had posted on bad therapy it was when you were 39 yes okay do you mind saying how old you are now 60 and i'm 58 so we're about the same age laura was 39 when she wrote at my first counseling session steve which is what she calls her counselor asked if i'd ever been sexually abused i told him i had when i was nine the biggest trauma was that i couldn't tell anyone i didn't feel comfortable i was ashamed so i told that to steve right up front but it didn't matter to him because i had always remembered i had been sexually molested at swimming school yeah i told him that yeah i said i remember being abused by a total stranger and he just totally discounted that he said do we have to go deeper that's not it that's not what's the problem so you know when you were abused when you were you know by the stranger age nine then did you tell your parents about it no and so you don't know i didn't tell anybody so who was the first person you told my daughter's father uh-huh and then that would have been in about 19 oh 81 i guess and then i didn't bring it again until counseling session that the only other person oh so he was the second person you ever told yeah i had got mentalized it and then one night we were in a hotel and i was with my doctor you know my boyfriend my daughter's father and it just came flushing back all of a sudden and you know and i told him let's be still my family counselor said that wasn't that wasn't it it wasn't it wasn't deep enough but so that's a recovered memory if it was compartment mentalized and you didn't remember it isn't that just it didn't constantly come to mind i had you know i hadn't thought about it in years but i could tell it actually changed some of my behavior but it did you know it just kind of flushed out of me that time but during like when you were a teenager and you were like talking to a girlfriend about you know all your secrets it but did you remember it like other people would tell their secrets or whatever and you would remember it and just not tell or did you just not remember it didn't remember it didn't you know it wasn't on my forefront of my mind there again i did you know when i was counseling i tried to tell him that that happened yeah and but that's actually a recovered memory why did she sue if she knows her recovered memory is true well there's two different recovered memories laura says the memory she recovered in counseling or false but she has a memory she considers true she doesn't refer to it as a recovered memory but that's what it is she told dr loftus about it dr loftus was on the board of the false memory syndrome foundation and yet be arranged for laura to appear on talk shows and say that all recovered memories are false does she know that you that you were abused when you were nine and you forgot it for like our story i stepped out the next month on the media tour that was just unbelievable for about two and a half years wow at the false memory syndrome foundation i would do all of that to get the word out pam fryed from the false memory syndrome foundation is the one who told me about laura then i went back to see her a second time and i thought oh i did all the things she said to do i did all the research so i went back like okay i've done this all now and it felt like she had no more use for me i think she did my first interview because she thought she could convince me my memories weren't true and that didn't happen so she was ready for me just to leave it is relatively easy for us to absorb certain things that we've either read or that we've seen and to incorporate them into our own stories to make them our own and it it's possible and if there is a lack of concrete evidence at some point many people some people would either have to say well maybe it didn't happen or i'm going to have to live with the ambiguity of never knowing and it seems to me that maybe that's what you'll need to do is to just have an ambiguity that you won't find a final 100 answer yeah i i have i've i i believe i found my answer yeah i i um i hadn't when i'd come before but then i i talked to you and the questions you asked were not that different than questions i'd already asked myself i transcribed all the hypnosis tapes did you find with those there weren't leading questions it sounds to me like you're quite convinced and i don't know why you're continuing you've found your answer you're sure you know i think why i did i realized what it was was that this whole journey had to do with my mother did your mother know yes i was older than 10 because it was in our new house my mother always dressed elegantly for bed and she wore shoes that are called mules they have a hard heel my father was in my room it was 9 30 or 10 o'clock at night and we didn't hear her coming down the long hallway but when she started down the linoleum steps i had the maids quarters and there were three linoleum steps first she very slowly went down on the first step and then very slowly the second step everything stopped and then the third step all she had to do was take six more steps to be at my bedroom door i knew finally finally it would be over and we heard her step again only she was going back up the steps and i knew she would never walk through that door did my mother know 13 years my mother knew can i ask you i mean because you believe your daughter wasn't molested can you tell me what process you went to determine that that was not true oh my goodness one is so overwhelmed when an accusation like that comes and a very credible person that i've always believed so i withheld judgment and started to do research and in honesty the most in our particular case the most telling issue was the fact that she refused to talk she refused to meet she refused to communicate to discuss things as as people do that's a lie she didn't refuse to talk no she they talked for a long time and then it got to the point where after pamela sent the jane doe article to everyone at the university of oregon that's when jennifer stopped talking to her mother dr jennifer fryde chose to quit communicating with her parents after her mother pam fried sent a defamatory article to jennifer's colleagues and the jane doe article was really about jennifer dr jennifer fry but it was framed as a fictional article but it was very clearly about her and it had all this false information she wrote a couple of crazy things i thought the craziest thing she wrote was when she said oh when my friend suggested that i think my daughter may be jealous of me and that's why she accused her father of incest that is so illogical it is but what was really horrible is she sent it pam fried sent this partially fabricated story but with enough truth that you would believe the whole thing to everyone on dr jennifer fry's tenure board when she's about to be tenured the result though was that dr jennifer fryde is in fact a tenured professor at the university of oregon darvo is an acronym it stands for deny attack and reverse victim and offender deny attack reverse victim and offender darvo describes a perpetrator strategy in darvo what happens is there is an aggressive denial followed with an attack on the credibility of the person making the claim it might take the form of questioning their mental abilities or their motivations saying you're a liar or you have you're crazy and then reverse victim and offender is when the person who's being held accountable assumes the victim role and says i'm the victim here and in our more recently we've been researching this systematically in the laboratory and we have found that unfortunately darvo seems to work and it's you could say it's like a perpetrator strategy and the ways we've so far found it works is it's associated with victim self-blame so if people get darbode they're more likely to blame themselves and it's also associated with third-party judgments so third parties who are exposed to darvo responses versus non-darvo responses are more likely to doubt the victim and assume the perpetrator must have some some basis for making the claims the the good news is preliminary research in our lab also suggests that education about darvo helps mitigate a bit that people who learn about darvo are less likely to to stop believing the victim after over 30 years dr jennifer fryde retired from the university of oregon she is now at stanford dr jennifer fry's sister has also disclosed child sexual abuse by their father if a corroborated case is a sibling who's always remembered i mean how could i get cooperation if marilyn has what's your evidence that the sister always remembered do you have corroboration i do as soon as my memories came up i was 24. one of the first things i did was to get on planes and go talk to my sisters my eldest sister gwen who lived in kansas city when she knew what i was going to say she just turned ghost white and she said i thought i was the only one i never should have left you it's my fault that would be corroborated if you say so i'll take your word for it i'm quite hesitant because in my working with children i have had children who were abused in class and to have an honest student who was who under who experienced what marilyn claimed that she had experienced night after night and to still be so successful in school is difficult but maybe she did i think any honor students are incest survivors yes but not night after night do you think the only honor students are incest survivors for only i don't want to try to talk about this anymore since i wasn't there and by and large i don't know whether somebody experienced things or not if i have read or have reason to believe that there's an alternative explanation then i tend to go in that direction i wrote a book miss america by day 11 years after a newspaper reporter in denver learned that my father had come into my room from the time i was five until i was 18. it was a secret so traumatic that i had blocked it from myself that's very difficult for people to understand that you can repress 13 years of the nights of your life but how could i remember how could i get up and go to school every day and get a's and be in the choir and be on the ski team if i knew what i was going home to at night and there was no one to help me and there was no way to get out of there i had to block it which i did your daughter jennifer has said publicly that about the new dancing in front of your husband she and another little girl and i think last time i was here you were saying it was when she was about nine or so do you think your husband has sexual feelings toward her yeah why why he's somebody that i've lived with for ever so many years i knew him growing up um i never saw any indication but even the new dancing i mean [Music] he didn't ask to have that that was something that they decided to do he didn't want them to feel traumatized by coming down too hard on them but just to say you know go into your room or i mean did you talk to her about it later when you knew that had happened i didn't even know about it for quite a while oh she he didn't tell you for a while after that well i was working the false memory syndrome foundation closed its doors in 2019 what's the importance of the mother's reaction in our midlife we need to go back and heal the past and i was 48 when i went to talk to my mother and i was just sobbing uncontrollably and when she finally knew what i was saying and my father had been dead for a year she said i don't believe you it's in your fantasy and i thought if my mother won't believe me when i'm 48 i certainly knew as a child she would never have stood up never she won't even stand up for me now with my father dead what chance would i have had as a child i knew as a child how do you know that you just know it you know that it's not it's not safe there's no one to tell as we begin to talk more publicly about it as we get to discuss it more it's one of the reasons i wrote miss america by day is to educate so that people have a better understanding so that someone won't say to a 35 year old who's just beginning to have to go back and remember what happened to her get over it it happened why are you bringing it up now this happened 30 years ago this is textbook almost all of us are between 35 and 50 when we have to go back and do the healing work and once we understand that once we know that that's normal i didn't know that that was normal i didn't know that anybody ever got through i checked myself into a psychiatric ward i just thought does anyone ever get through this i couldn't find any woman who did and it's one of the reasons i stepped forward it's one of the reasons i wrote a book is because yes you can come through it i needed my mother i needed my mother at age 48 to say i am so sorry to her death at age 88. she just did not choose that path i went to my childhood home it was brand new when we moved in i was in first grade my sister ruth was in third we thought it was huge we played hide and seek here we'd always been close [Music] ruth was the only one from my childhood i could trust this was the last home she ever lived in ruth died of brain cancer at age 11. i was 9 years old [Music] ruth ramsey dies after illness this is the first time i've seen this obituary i was disinherited but i should still get to see things like this as is usual the funeral home employee picked up ruth's body at the hospital but instead of taking it to the funeral home he took it to our childhood church outside the church before the sun came up my parents made me watch as they cut ruth's body with a knife later that day i went to my sister's closed casket funeral there was a ritual outside the church where they made me hold a knife where they cut it cut her body as a part of ritualistic abuse a child may be told she is an abuser not a victim a child may be put in a coffin just relax let it come it wasn't like repulsed by her body [Laughter] i put my fingers on her hair and what i remember is touching her hair because she was still my sister so why did your parents do that to your sister's body there's never a way for someone who's not evil to explain an evil person's mind but what was similar that had happened before is this is before i started kindergarten my dad killed our dog it is not unusual for an abuser to kill a child's pet he made me and my sister watch while he killed our dog with a knife and he said that if you tell about the abuse the same thing will happen to you yes so then my sister dies of an illness but she dies and afterwards they cut her body with a knife and i think it was to threaten me because i know what i know happened after that was my dad started coming into my room a lot more often why did my parents do do this to me i'm supposed to have an answer it's hard to believe someone would do that to anybody you know their child or anybody i've come to believe in my old age that some people just are evil just i never believed that when i was younger but i'm beginning to believe it born evil or because of how they were treated i don't know i have no idea i just can't believe people are born evil i just think there's such purity in children i decided to go to the cemetery and to the place where it happened to my sister's body i made biscuits for the crew with my mother's recipe i wrote a story about my angel connection with her a grumpy old lady dies and becomes a cute little eight-year-old angel i used to think of my father as an infant i started thinking of him as a little older four or five that's how old he was when he was raped by a female babysitter you know you can't talk to an infant but you can to a five-year-old i had some things to say to him so i called the minister at my childhood church and asked if he would be on camera i told him i was molested by a church leader in addition to my father he wanted to know the tone of the conversation and said it'd be a tone just like i'm having with you right now i mean i i'm uh i it's just a part of my healing maybe you could tell me some bible verses that come to mind and what christ thought or what christ thinks about child abuse and i'd go back and forth what christ thought what christ thinks i do consider myself a christian but my childhood church wouldn't consider me a christian because i i don't have the same beliefs i did then it was a very conservative church i was afraid when i didn't hear from him that there'd be like attorneys waiting for us they're saying you can't come on church property but i don't i i don't know how much is my fear because i mean i was abused by church leaders and and so it's the church leaders just who have the decision making on whether or not i you know can film in the church and but the church leaders who abuse me are are deceased the minister refused to be in the documentary but he did give his permission for us to film on church property i entered the place where it happened to my sister's body [Music] in this place among the same trees [Music] i was comforted you know i'm glad you were my parent because i am really glad to be alive i didn't used to be i used to be jealous of ruth because she died i know you also had to see things like what you did to my sister's body you saw things like that when you were a little boy one thing i think about making this film is people are gonna think you're a monster and so i guess that's why i wanted to bring this and show that you're also this little boy so i brought this to leave [Music] i remember when we used to play ruth it has been 50 years 50 years since you died [Music] i thought i'd be sad doing this today but i'm not [Music] you know my life turned out good and i love you but i don't spend a lot of time using you [Music] it's for you mom who wish you could've had the kind of childhood you needed to give me a good childhood i know this won't keep it but i want to leave it and i don't want it to get rained on right away everything went perfect today but it always went right by did just doesn't work i'm gonna take your picture home my dad my mom rude i'll come back to see you sometime i don't know if my parents did it to worship satan i just know what they did to me and it may have just been to make child pornography i went to a counselor long time ago and i said well but you don't believe in satan how can you believe my memories of satanic ritual of you she said i believe there are evil people who gather and and do horrible things to children and you know she didn't feel like she had to believe in satan and that that's where i'm at now people used to say uh people like dr velikov are able to implant complex memories of satanic virtual abuse in people's minds i go like wow i wish i could do that i'm still struggling with the notion that it can implode implant a notion in my patient mind that i'm safe that i'm to be trusted and i won't rape them and that takes me about three years to get them to be there for this implantation of false memories it's all nonsense so do you think satanic virtual abuse happens to children sadly it does certainly does i know they had cameras my dad had excellent camera equipment especially considering that we didn't live in that nice of a house when i was real little he used a closet as a dark room he had professional lights it's just so cruel and horrible i mean that really would be considered ritualistic what they did to my sister's body they made me take off my panties and put hers on that were on her deceased body i think people think that child pornography is not that you know people don't know what child porn really is i mean they think of it like you have this child who's otherwise treated well and just asked to take their clothes off and you snap a picture that's there's a lot more i mean that is child pornography absolutely that's child pornography but it can get a lot more involved than that a lot of my patients even though everything in their rational mindset yeah this happened to me at core at the core belief i was an evil child for believing i was abused yeah and to to really come to terms with i was this little vulnerable killed are there who people did this awful stuff to which happens all the time in our society and i was one of them is a very hard thing to accept it is if you work with traumatized people you deal with these complex issues of memory yes that is our field we do that all the time it's our bread and butter it is what you deal with of people who suddenly retrieve a little bit and they say no i must be crazy to remember this because nobody wants to remember this nobody wants to think that somebody who they loved did this to them so people say no i'm crazy this didn't happen to me and more and more stuff comes to mind says i remember that i said no i'm crazy it's wrong with me let me cut myself in order to forget you know that's what happens all the time and so when you're a clinician who does this work that's the work you do and so you help people to feel safe enough to allow themselves to know what they know yes and that's what clinical work is about that's a good way to say it feel safe enough to allow them to know what they know but nobody wants to know the issue with trauma is that nobody wants to know yeah because a victim doesn't want to know that's right and i want to know that their own father raped them they don't want to know that the neighbor blesses them particularly when your little kid because a little kid is by definition egocentric and no kid can say oh that's just a horrible person who's doing something bad to me because the way the child minds works is like this is happening to me because i'm a horrible person and so no no kid can tolerate really putting in perspective but they know and every child who gets attacked molested hit feels like i am a bad person for this happening to me and so it becomes a shameful secret from yourself anybody who knows anything about trauma knows that i had a patient who knew that her father when asked her as a kid and then she's a babysitter and she was so eager to believe that her father loved her and that she had a false memory that she had her father babysits her kids and her father molested her kids even though she had told me that the father would listen to kids we are programmed to love our parents see that's a thing that this whole false memory stuff doesn't get my kids loved me not because i was the greatest dad in the world they just loved me because i'm their dad you know we get this love undeservedly we get it because of that's how we're formed and what i see in my traumatized patients they love their parents despite the fact that they did terrible things to them they still want to love their parents and so when people actually come to the conclusion my parents aren't safe and my parents are going to hurt my kids that takes an enormous amount of courage and persistence to overcome our natural tendency to go like the world's a wonderful place and my parents really love me oh yeah and that struggle of really oh my patients are just really always struggling with it of uh i want to go home for christmas i want to be with the family i want to be for thanksgiving i want to be normal no it didn't really happen what happened during that interview was totally unexpected because he could tell that he could tell something i couldn't tell about why i was doing this project he said to me you know why is it that you're going around talking to these people and i said well oh it's for my project no it's but he's like he could tell there was a deeper psychological thing and he was right to my mind i don't mean to be over interpretive how about this notion of trying to find authority to validate your internal experience it's like oh yeah we need to deal with that because by now you need to believe in our own truth it was after my interview with him that i thought why have i been doing this and that i thought you know no one knows that i mean i'm an authority on my life and you know that has changed my relationship with jerry because before it would be so upsetting to me if he disagreed with me about something and it would be upsetting because i didn't believe me enough yes i can actually carry on a conversation with you and say i disagree and you don't either start screaming or crying i think it was my not believing myself that kept me connected to my father and i needed some connection i needed some kind of connection i am so glad to be done with the pretense of having you as a father i just have such a good life without you and it's always been a life without you but i just haven't admitted it and now i am [Music] when i first remembered my abuse i questioned my memories because i didn't want them to be real i re-examined my memories because i didn't want to spend the rest of my life believing something that was false am i crazy no i'm not are my memories true yes i am certain of it have i changed you're more confident you're you don't get sad as much yeah more healthy people have been traumatized live on average 10 years shorter than other people they tend to have multiple illnesses why is that because the stress hormones that have to do with the trauma get stuck and your whole body stays in this defensive mode fighting an unseen enemy while you your mind is fighting like crazy to say no you're crazy this didn't happen to you but your primitive part of your brain is not capable of these complex manipulations of your mind and so your body feels in danger and causes all these illnesses so every piece of research on chronically traumatized people shows that they all have physical problems they all have major problems with hormones because the denial of what happens keeps that whole stress hormonal system running and it's not until people can say this is what happened to me oh my god it is over this it was real it happened to me when i was that old and you can say but today i'm a grown-up person and today i'm safe and you really in every fiber of your being know the difference between that kid was abused back then and who you are right now the distressed hormones come to rest yeah and you stop protecting your body yes trauma 101. my chronic pain was so bad that some days i just wished i wouldn't have a long life i mean really you know i never thought about suicide but i it was hard for me to think of living to an old age and now i want to live to be about a hundred years old so me as a doctor that's a bigger story than the false memories yeah i can say the fact that you became the owner of your body yes and that you regain the sense of power and agency in your body i go like yeah i'm just not as afraid did you notice me being afraid a lot early on yes i think you were afraid of me you were you weren't sure of me but i think you're becoming more sure of me just because i'm still here seven years later love does heal it does you know and if you can open your heart to a new person say oh this is what it's like to be loved and somebody who's cast mark my safety that's also the miracle of life and people can find their way out it's an enormously expensive and arduous journey it is but i know many people like you who have made that journey yeah and come out on the other side when i went and interviewed her her story was so incredibly moving and all the other details of the story that i did not know that reached far back into her childhood was so overwhelming to me that i almost could not receive it and i told her that and i gave her so much credit because she has so much courage and that woman is mary knight this word means so much to me when i was a kid my abuser said if you tell horrible things will happen to you i told and i'm getting this awesome award in front of a room full of people [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: REALWOMEN/REALSTORIES

Views: 775,044

Keywords: Real Women Real Stories, Abused, Satanic Ritual Abuse, SRA, SRA Survivor, Mary Knight, mary knight, mary knight documentary, abusive parents, abusive parent, Narcissist dad, narcissist father, narcissist dad, Trafficked By My Family, Child Abuse Survivor, abusive parents trafficking, sold for sex, satanic ritual abuse, satanic rituals, Ritual survivor, Satanic ritual survivor, satanic ritual, child sexual abuse, child abuse, child abuser, child predator, False Memory, sra

Id: 0-lxkORy6kE

Length: 103min 47sec (6227 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 24 2022