A long post that (thankfully) nobody will read.

[Bozvotros]

35. Freud couldn't believe how many of his hysterical patients remembered being sexually abused.

And it didn't make him very popular among the Victorian psychologists. He eventually recanted and decided it was mostly fantasy and repressed wishes. Couldn't be that many child rapists and molestors out there..... could there? So Little Jane or Jimmy must have wanted to have Daddy's penis and Father Jim's too and Uncle Ernie etc so they invented the abuse and their guilt gave them the vapors or hysterical paralysis and blindness. But now we know different. The Catholic church hasn't been giving away billions in reparations to adults having repressed wishes and fantasies.

I have been a therapist for 30 years and I know that memories are not a recording of an event. Even very vivid traumatic memories can be deeply distorted by and altered by a child's mind. Even an adult mind can be tricked into believing things that aren't true. Tea Party =Exhibit A-Z.

But kids are very egocentric and tend to think that whatever happens to them is something they wanted or brought about. Hard for a child to believe how very little power they really have and they can't even conceive what is happening to them when they are being raped. I had an adult tell me her father put a knife into her vagina. When I asked if she was scarred she said no and could not figure out why because she remembered a lot of blood. She was terrified of men her whole life, saw them as brutes, deceivers and just waiting to hurt her. Every penis was a torture instrument. Even after she realized the sad truth of her tininess against her father's size and weight she still thought of sex as knives going into her.

I also worked with perps who told me how they groomed and manipulated their victims until the child was so confused about everything they believed they were fully responsible for what had happened. As adults their victims have to challenge their self blaming memories with rational thinking and compassion because they had been deceiving themselves with their child version their whole life.

Just know that there is a whole lot of real sexual abuse to children happening out there. And every uncaught perp does a little happy dance when he hears the McMartin story get a new readership and the False Memory folks get a little time on talk radio. Makes everything much easier to explain to the kids....and the jury.