Buried Memories Key to Sexual Abuse Cases

By Ellen Meder
SCNow
September 9, 2012

http://www2.scnow.com/news/2012/sep/08/buried-memories-key-sexual-abuse-cases-ar-4508050/

When the movie “The Prince of Tides” debuted in the early 1990s, Dr. Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea’s phone started ringing off the hook.

Frawley-O’Dea is a licensed psychologist, psychoanalyst and trauma specialist who serves as counseling director at the Presbyterian Samaritan Center in Charlotte, N.C. “The Prince of Tides” is the Hollywood version of Pat Conroy’s best selling novel about a dysfunctional South Carolina family with a dark secret to hide.

The connection?

Frawley-O’Dea’s practice deals primarily with patients who suffer from long-repressed memories, so a movie about someone revealing their buried secrets unleashed a flood of memories in Frawley-O’Dea’s patients.

It sounds a little strange but the human mind is a strange place. Frawley-O’Dea said a variety of sensory experiences can trigger memories of childhood trauma that the brain didn’t record normally, and she has seen them come into play many times. In her work with victims of clergy sexual abuse, the smell of incense, the sight of candles at the altar or the sounds of organ music have triggered painful memories of assault.

The concept of repressed traumatic memories has been coming back into the psychoanalytic lexicon during the past two decades, and since 2000 more scientific research has appeared supporting the theories behind it. But the concept remains a source of debate.

That debate will no doubt be at the forefront of the sexual abuse civil lawsuit filed in Chesterfield County recently. In the suit, two currently anonymous, adult, male plaintiffs allege that between 1975 and 1980 former Fourth Circuit Solicitor Jay Hodge and the now deceased William C. Hebard sexually abused them while serving as Boy Scout leaders of Troop 663, sponsored by the First Presbyterian Church of Cheraw. The case is currently just a civil matter, but current Fourth Circuit Solicitor Will Rogers sent the case to the South Carolina Attorney General for consideration late last week.

The civil case will almost certainly hinge on the plaintiffs’ argument that prior to 2011 they could not have reasonably discovered the causal relationship between the abuses and their psychological damages. That’s important, because while there is no statute of limitations on criminal charges of child sexual abuse in South Carolina, civil suits are limited to six years after the victim turns 21 or three years after the memories are discovered.

The plaintiffs’ attorney, Trey Cockrell, said that the case was filed 32 years after the fact because, until recently, the specific memories of the incidents were suppressed. That’s true, Cockrell said, even though symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder — including depression, suicide attempts and sexual dysfunction — were ever-present in the men’s lives.

One exhibit filed with the suit is a 30-page psychological evaluation of one of the plaintiffs conducted by Frawley-O’Dea in February. The report includes a narrative of the abuses and details that this plaintiff always remembered Hebard’s abuses, but it wasn’t until 2010 that he began to recall Hodge’s abuses after being exposed to pornographic images on Hodge’s computer during a work-related investigation.

Though Frawley-O’Dea cannot discuss the actual case, she is an expert in the field of treating adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse and has been doing so for 30 years.

She says that the term “memory repression” is actually a misnomer because the human mind is not just split by a line into above or below consciousness — there are different states of consciousness. She said it is actually disassociation, a phenomenon that many are familiar with in common situations, such as when someone drives along a highway for 10 miles and suddenly “comes to” with no recollection of what happened or where they’ve been. Researchers say this happens because the brain has two different memory coding and retrieval systems.

“The pathways are similar for both except that traumatic memories do not engage the frontal cortex because it’s more expedient and more efficient to leave that pathway out,” Frawley-O’Dea said. “So the memories or experiences are encoded in the limbic system and they’re not encoded with words often or even pictures as much as they are encoded with feelings, moods, senses of self and other sensory details.”

In other words, because a person’s brain is severely over-stimulated during trauma, the brain processes the memory more quickly and skips some normal steps. Researchers like Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk of the Trauma Center in Massachusetts have shown in PET scan research the the frontal cortex has been left out of particularly horrible memories.

Frawley-O’Dea said this is basically a defense mechanism because the events are so horrifying people essentially do not want to remember them.

Meg Temple is the clinical director at the Durant Children’s Center in Florence and treats children who have been abused. She said that reactions can vary greatly in individual children and the disassociation can hinge on whether a child has the appropriate mental skills yet to deal with the trauma. Some will remember sexual abuse incidents forever while some will immediately disassociate it until a trigger brings the memories back.

According to Frawley-O’Dea, disassociation can happen more often when a trauma involves extreme betrayal by someone the victim trusts, be it a woman raped by a loved one or child fondled by a priest, because the actions are in such conflict with how the victim perceives their abuser.

There is no hard rule as to how often child sexual abuse victims disassociate their memories, if they disassociate at all.

Most widely cited is a 1994 study by Linda Meyer Williams, a Massachusetts-based sociologist and criminologist, which looked at 129 women who were treated for sexual assault at a Philadelphia hospital in the 1970s. When interviewed 17 years later, 38 percent of the women did not mention the documented incidents when asked about being sexually abused as children. Williams argued that most of them would have disclosed the incidents if they remembered them because they often detailed other sensitive, traumatic experiences.

Of course there have been methodological rebuttals that some of the incidents were not very impactful and were simply forgotten or that the interviewers did not make reference to the specific incidents. Others say the number could be low because the abuses were actually reported, while there is perhaps more disassociation when children are pressured by their abusers not to tell.

Frawley-O’Dea said by the time she is treating a patient, they usually have some concept that they were abused as children and have sought her help to begin the healing process. However, some patients find their way to her with seemingly disconnected symptoms like anxiety, depression, sexual dysfunction, nightmares, regression and anger issues, and then work through the symptoms and vague feelings to uncover the source of the problems.

She’s aware that when victims of childhood sexual abuse come forward with “discovered memories,” there are some people who write it off as a witch hunt. And there’s still some lingering doubts about the theory from the early 90s because the technique itself was abused. Untrained therapists would provide rape as an answer to a psychological symptom instead of allowing patients to devise their own answers with their own memories.

“Someone would have a dream about rape and be cutting themselves and a bad therapist would tell them they must have been raped,” Frawley-O’Dea said. “The implanting of memories is abuse in and of itself, and it never works out. The suggestions never stand the test of time.”

Frawley-O’Dea has served as an expert witness in several cases were plaintiffs were sexually abused by teachers and priests. She said though she cannot say definitively whether a patient was molested as a child, she can carefully study someone’s symptoms, memories, nightmares and ways of recounting incidents and professionally say in a deposition that it is “more likely than not” that a person was abused.

In civil court, where the allegations of sexual assault are being leveled against Hodge and the late Hebard, the standard of proof is only “more likely than not.”

Hodge has denounced the allegations as “lies,” and said the case is a personal vendetta based on past and current legal entanglements with one of the plaintiffs. The defendants in the case – Hodge, Hebard’s estate, the Pee Dee Area Boy Scout Council, the Boy Scouts of America and the First Presbyterian Church of Cheraw – have less than 30 days to respond to the allegations.