Matthew and Julian sit down for the first of a two-part examination of the 1988 bestseller at the heart of the recovered memory movement—which played a central role in validating Satanic Panic testimonials. This is episode 9 of the Swan Song Series 9.The basic premise of The Courage to Heal, by creative writing instructors Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, is that memories of childhood abuse, especially child sexual abuse, can be recovered and articulated by survivors who are given the proper space, tools, and validation. The book explores how this be facilitated within the context of journaling, writing poetry, and writing memoir, and what the therapeutic benefits of full confessional articulation can be.While countless people affirm that this book was a lifeline during a time in which recovery resources for child abuse survivors were rare, there are substantial problems with the book's method, claims about memory, dodgy sources, and endorsement of outright Satanic Panic propaganda.
Show NotesControversy Behind the False Memory Syndrome FoundationThe Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual AbuseTruth and reconciliationCases That Have Resulted in ConvictionsWhy The Courage to Heal Isn't on My Recommended Reading ListCreating Hysteria25 Years of Trauma Treatment Networker 2014
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Hey everyone, Derek from Conspirituality here, speaking for Matthew and Julian.
We all hope you're having a great holiday break, no matter what you celebrate or believe in.
We are taking some time this week with our families, as well as doing the final edits on our book, Conspirituality, which is out in June.
The pre-order link is in the show notes here, as well as all of our social media links and our Patreon link, where today's episode originated.
It is The Courage to Heal Part 1, which was part of our Early Access series.
We'll be dropping Courage to Heal Part 2 on Saturday to complete out the year.
So again, thank you for all of your support, for your feedback, for listening.
We hope you have a great New Year, and we'll see you with all new content here on the main feed and on Patreon in 2023.
Welcome to an episode of a Conspiratuality Podcast bonus collection, the Swan Song series, a tour through the paradoxes of Teal Swan, an influencer who embodies the tangled history and whiplash contradictions of our beat.
This collection will be accessible first through our Patreon feed, but we will release each episode to the public over time in our regular feed in addition to our Thursday episodes.
Topics will revolve around the method, the myth, the impacts and implications of one of the most unsettling conspirituality figures alive.
Content warnings always apply for this material.
Themes include suicide and child sexual abuse.
To our Patreon subscribers, thank you for helping keep our platform ad-free and editorially independent.
And to everyone else, thanks for listening, including followers of Teal Swan.
We hope this is all useful to you as you consider your relationship to Teal's story and influence.
Welcome, everybody, to Swan Song series number nine, The Courage to Heal, part one.
Julian, we're back singing the Swan Song, getting close to the end here.
We have had a lot of appreciative comments on this series, and then one or two saying, I'm getting some teal swan fatigue, which I think is totally understandable.
So, how are you holding up?
Just in general with everything we cover, it does happen that every four or five months I just get leveled by the stuff that definitely happened toward the end of last week.
It can be emotionally exhausting and mentally preoccupying.
When I notice that's happening and I realize it, if I rest and change gears for a while, my appetite predictably returns.
I'm really quite proud of what we've done with this series, mapping out the historical and perhaps cultural and literary and cinematic features of this time period that gives rise to Teal Swan and other influential figures of her generation.
It's like we're in the We're exploring the roots of spiritual influence or culture and how that sort of turns into conspirituality.
So, yeah, I would say, I'm not sure if someone's feeling fatigue with it, I respect that and I understand it.
I'm just not so much about Teal Swan because we've been excavating so many of the underlying tunnels.
Yeah, and turning now today, we are going to cover the form, the content, and the impact of an extremely influential book in this zone that was first published in 1988.
I don't have sales numbers for it.
I have a source who wasn't able to track them down as of the time of recording, but I'll post them to the show notes when I get them.
I can say that in the There's a buzz around the work that people will say that hundreds of thousands of lives have been changed.
One of the authors in her preface to the fourth edition released in 2008.
She says that this has changed millions of lives, so it has sold in a big way, which it would have to for four editions, including a much revised 20th anniversary edition in 2008.
You have to wonder what the percentages would be on those unknown numbers, right?
So that if it's changing millions of lives, What percentage of the people who read it had their lives changed?
And then what does that translate into?
Does that mean tens of millions of copies have sold?
Oh, right.
Supposedly, yeah.
Unless everyone who reads it has their life changed by it.
Yes, for good or ill, right?
Yeah.
As we'll see.
As we'll see.
So we should say off the top that all of the standard trigger warnings are on high alert for this episode because we'll be talking about some very difficult things because we're reporting on a very difficult book.
Now the authors are Ellen Bass and Laura Davis.
Now, The Courage to Heal was not a standalone text.
In 1990, Davis also published The Courage to Heal workbook, which provides step-by-step guidance in memory mining and disclosure of experiences of child sexual assault.
Both authors were at the time of publication creative writing instructors.
Both authors still work as creative writing instructors.
The basic premise of The Courage to Heal is that memories of childhood abuse, especially child sexual abuse, can be recovered and articulated by survivors who are given the proper space, tools, community, and validation.
And the book explores how this can happen and be facilitated within the context of journaling, writing poetry, and writing memoir, and what the therapeutic benefits of full confessional articulation might be.
In the words of one reviewer of both books, writing in the American Psychological Association Journal in 1991, quote, as the Bible for many recovering alcoholics is one day at a time, I believe that one or both of these books will become the Bible for recovering child sexual abuse survivors.
Perhaps the book already has.
Let me just underline this.
You're saying the Courage to Heal proposes that creative writing is a reliable method for uncovering repressed child sexual abuse memories.
That's big on the face of it.
I want to also make sure we clarify here, when you said step-by-step guidance in memory mining, that's your phrase, not It is.
It is.
Mining is my phrase.
I mean, the practice or the discipline that emerges in relation to books like this is called recovered memory, right?
I want to tread really carefully with this episode because at least two things are disturbingly true at the same time when we're talking about this book.
So, number one, without a doubt, countless people, mostly women, describe this book as having powerful positive impacts on their lives.
They describe finding it at a time in which they were trying to make sense of the shameful and traumatized after-effects of familial abuse.
They describe it relieving loneliness, providing validation, and holding out the promise of a community and eventually a society in which the internal and external taboos against speaking the truth of one's condition seem to finally lift.
I've got one anonymous reflection from a colleague I'm going to get to at the end of part two, where what they say is that, quote, I think this book saved lives, unquote, because it was a lifeline for those who believed they were alone, and because it dropped into their lives at a vulnerable time when no other resources were available or even conceivable.
And in the case of this colleague, it dropped into their lives at a transitional moment before they were able to access licensed therapy.
Now, here's the second thing that's true about this book.
Bass and Davis created a doorway between the needed and legitimate psychotherapy of recovery and the stressful and feverish realm of exaggeration that can lead to moral panics.
They are writing instructors, let me underline that, not mental health practitioners or forensic psychologists.
And if you are looking for the most impactful story or poetry because that's your job as an instructor to help people develop such things, you may find yourself promoting versions of events that reflect your desires more than they reflect reality.
And acting out of the rigid ideological assumption that the memories of their students and mentees must be accurate, Bass and Davis fated their book to equalize all stories and relativize all evidence.
And the result is the simultaneous promotion of resources that present wildly different standards of integrity, including the braiding together of New Age and Buddhist self-help literature with books like Suffer the Children by Judith Spencer, which is firmly in the category of Michelle Remembers.
Unfortunately, when criticized for their inclusion of satanic ritual abuse as a category they were helping people remember truly in detail, they kind of doubled down, but not with any evidence that ritual abuse or satanic ritual abuse was real, but with the insinuation that those who asked for evidence may themselves be attempting to cover up the reality of satanic ritual abuse.
Oh wow, well this is where we see how, even with the best of intentions, one can, through a sort of flawed epistemology and identification with a message that you're spreading, sort of lean into that telltale cultic and conspiracist style of arguing, right Matthew?
It's kind of that Kafka trap where If someone questions the evidence for a core belief that you're promoting, then that's actually evidence that the belief is true and that perhaps the person asking really has, you know, loyalties to sort of keeping the lid on this, keeping the cover up in place, which is really disturbing and wild.
You know, I had not remembered this, that there's a legitimizing and a kind of I don't know, sort of sharing of some kind of legitimacy or mainstream sense of holistic or integrative mental health by being associated with Buddhist texts and self-help texts and that whole field where you have people like Jack Kornfield, for example, becoming quite popular.
Well, as we'll see, I don't know if this is in part one or part two, but Jack Kornfield is actually listed as a resource in this book opposite a page that lists a bunch of satanic panic resources.
So things get very, very tangled.
The book is almost a bookstore in itself, in which you can access Satanic Panic materials, and then you can access Pema Chodron.
Oh gosh, I mean, it's not a kind joke to make, but it's a little bit like choose your own adventure, right?
Whatever material is coming up for you in this creative process, we'll hear the different types of books that might support you.
Exactly, yeah.
So between these two realities, so this book has many people who say that it saved their lives, it helped them enormously, and we also have a lot of evidence that it ripped people to shreds because it pushed them into Assuming the reality of memories that may not have been accurate, I think we have something familiar with regard to many of the materials that we've looked at in the Swan Song series.
We have an extremely provocative piece of media that can veer in unexpected directions.
And with Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, we're also talking about a discipline of self-awareness and self-discovery.
We're talking about writing, which, like yoga or Buddhism or meditation or wellness practices, can be both deeply fulfilling and sufficiently rudderless that the passions it arouses can be harnessed for very different purposes.
And in the process, a lot of political and cultural divisions can get scrambled.
For instance, the entire vibe given off by Bass and Davis is progressive, urban, feminist, intersectional, but also a little aspirational middle class when you really get into Bass's poetry sites or Davis's Tuscany writing retreats.
Both authors are lesbian.
They have both clearly poured themselves into the project of platforming the voices of women.
And then we have to ask, what happens when some of those voices become tape loop memes for a deeply reactionary movement soaked in Catholic revanchism?
Like, what happens when very good intentions help to fuel a moral panic?
So, that's a little bit of an opening framework and a couple of tough questions that we have ahead of us.
Any thoughts, Julian, before we go ahead?
Yeah, I mean, as you say, historically we're in this strange period during which recovered memories and hypnotherapy, multiple personalities, alien abductions, satanic ritual abuse, these are all kind of swirling in an odd melange of like Pop psychology and, you know, horror movie themes and the willingness that a lot of people have to believe that there are supernatural explanations for certain things or that, you know, the mind is really much stranger than we can imagine and so this, you know, you have Sybil with her multiple personalities being a huge, having a huge impact culturally.
And these things then gaining a foothold in mainstream psychology, these claims about what's going on and in federal law enforcement as we've seen.
So I'm wondering here if there's like a bleeding over from Lawrence Pazdur's monetizing of his quote-unquote therapy with Michelle from Michelle Remembers, Michelle Smith.
He was, at the time, sometimes with his new wife and, as we've covered, former terrorized patient by his side, making TV appearances, giving professional workshops.
There's a sort of crossing over into, it's related to what we see now, right, where if you get a certain media profile, then there's a realization that, oh, this opens the door for me to now Perhaps give public workshops and trainings and take people on retreats and how can I sort of synthesize that with so there's professional trainings and then there's the like unregulated realm that we might dip into.
And also we can say that the potential market for trauma recovery especially from familial abuse has got to be much larger than the aspirational market for creative writing.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
So, Courage to Heal certainly is a guidebook into how questionable self-help psychotherapy seems to leak and then flood into civilian public settings and then, you know, in some cases we would imagine and we might find in our stories that we'll look at in a moment, the kind of out-to-sea, at-home application.
You know, do try this at home and then you're just on your own with whatever comes up.
It's not a huge leap to see people like Teal Swan.
becoming the next digital avatar for the phase that would come of this unqualified alternative
heroic excavation of fantastical horrors after you've clicked on a YouTube thumbnail, right?
Now of course, none of this is to say that a good percentage of the readership of Courage
to Heal were not actual abuse survivors.
Absolutely.
But rather, what I'm saying is that this was likely quite dangerous for them as well.
And the sincerity of the authors, you know, doesn't really change those potential outcomes.
Yeah, quite dangerous for them in terms of perhaps encouraging the potential of premature confrontation or a concretization of hunches that seem to lead to memories.
Yeah, I mean, it's a situation that can really set people up, as we'll see, for making quite strong claims about things that are actually quite difficult to understand.
And then, if you stand by those claims as you must, if you believe them to be true, the consequences are enormous.
So, yeah.
I have two more notes before we really get rolling.
The first is that this is one of a number of books that is at the center of the controversy over false memory syndrome.
That phrase, that concept is incredibly complex, all the more so because you can't really understand false memory syndrome unless you understand the tragic interpersonal dynamics at play in the phenomenon's first family, the phrase.
And I'm going to include a link to the best investigative piece on that from Katie Heaney, who's writing in The Cut about how The false memory syndrome foundation actually or one of the main organizations that begins to study this as a phenomenon comes out of the family accusation that psychologist Jennifer Freed makes.
So, I would say it's beyond our scope to litigate the neurology of memory.
So, I want to leave the reality factor of memories to the side and instead look at the broad strokes of the plausible or common child sexual abuse and the implausible satanic ritual abuse.
I think it's enough to say two things.
That the consensus on memory is that it's just not as robust as we imagine.
It's very hard to be accurate when it comes to memory, and secondly, it's very easy for bad actors to use the vulnerabilities of memory to invalidate entire experiences, especially when retelling stories in high-stress environments like court.
So, I'm not into making declarations about whether Bass and Davis and their subjects are remembering things clearly.
What I mainly want to do is examine how they make their case with what arguments and evidence and how those details connect with our broader themes.
And secondly, most importantly, I want to be clear, you've already mentioned it, Julian, that nothing in this episode or our exploration of this text is meant to question or minimize the reality, severity, and rates of child abuse and child sexual abuse.
The numbers as we have them are real, they speak to the urgent necessity for transparent, robust education in sexuality and consent.
As well as the dismantling of reporting and legal obstacles that obscure and maintain the reality on the ground, as in the morbid gap between reports of sexual assault and rape and eventual convictions.
Now, I have some background in activist reporting on these matters through my pieces on sex abusers in yoga cults.
I'm not taking some kind of reactionary turn here.
I'm not questioning the axiom of believe women, which statistically is the prudent thing to do when it comes to the self-reporting on assault.
But I am looking at what in particular gets believed and why, and how misguided beliefs can actually harm the projects of gender equality and safety.
Because, as our guest Regan Williams on episode 12 told us, the double victims of moral panics are the very people they are meant to help.
You know, she described how the children that she worked with often coming from abuse backgrounds, were actually galvanized.
They were inspired by QAnon in the summer of 2020. And we know that the Save the Children
movement diverted resources and attention away from legit child welfare organizations. We also know
that QAnon-inspired violence has killed children under the guise of saving them from something.
And we know that Teal Swan was very likely abused by a man who she says was prominent in two Utah satanic cults.
And, not the fact that she was abused, but that he was a cult member has given her loads of capital as a pseudo-therapist, when the truth is something more mundane and therefore disturbing, that the guy was just a friend of the family.
That's enough preamble.
Julian, I think we can start with you being somewhat of a primary source that we can question here, because as you related in the first episode of this series, The Courage to Heal was a semi-required text in the YTT that you did with Anna Forrest.
So can we start there?
Yeah, I mean this was all so long ago, we're talking about 1994 through 1998 when I was really getting deeply involved in that community and taking that training.
There were so many books, actually it was one of the first trainings that she had done and so we had these massive binders that had photocopied between 10 and 30 pages from different books all together in this big fat thick binder.
Part of the culture, as I've touched on before.
Was that Anna Forrest held at the time this belief that she would talk about openly that Forrest Yoga Circle attracted people and this would mostly be women with sexual abuse histories even if they did not know that that was why they were walking through the door.
And therefore that her workshops and her trainings were a way of uncovering and healing these memories through the body so as to become spiritual warriors who then could help others is sort of the narrative that leads into teacher training and I think a sincerely held one based on this faulty premise that That these memories are buried, they're repressed, you can access them through X, Y, or Z process, and that far, far more people than anyone could ever imagine actually have these deep repressed memories.
And that was certainly something I believed in at that time as a result of being in that community.
There were several authors in this general field that we started to map out who did come and give workshops.
Maybe not several, but a few.
I can't remember who they are because I didn't really know them at that time.
I know that Bass and Davis did not.
Oddly, something I just remembered, speaking of memory, is that Anna would also talk sometimes about having alters.
Which was just so far out to me that I didn't really take it seriously and it just went over my head but now I'm remembering that and she actually had someone she was dating for a while who...
There was talk of him having these alters which is what within that community people would refer to their multiple personalities.
So there's overlap here with this notion too that the traumatic memories you're recovering can be held by different aspects of self that have split off and in certain states you can speak as that self and maybe your body language changes, your voice changes and you have access to memories that your everyday self would not have.
And your disciplines in the yoga studio or in breathwork or in bodywork or something like that might give you different types of access to different altars.
That's part of the idea, yeah?
Yeah.
I mean, Anna didn't employ breathwork or bodywork techniques, but yeah.
Maybe a Native American ceremony of the sort that she practiced.
Which I don't think she really facilitated.
There was a sense she had of being a student in that domain.
Courage to Heal was definitely in the mix.
I wouldn't say it was a required text for the training, but I did have a copy of the workbook myself.
It was a text that was talked about within the community, a very small, tight-knit community.
I do remember writing responses in the designated areas of the book in pen.
It had little blank squares where you could write your answers to the exercises.
The thing about all of this for me, I mean there's two things.
One, you were talking about it earlier, the dangers, right?
You were saying coming too soon to some kind of conclusion in terms of what you think a memory might mean and confronting family members.
Certainly I did both of those things.
Even more than that is the hell that I remember being thrust into where there's something about this kind of epistemology that creates, it's very destabilizing.
What is real?
What really happened?
What's the true story about my family?
What's the true story about my life?
Is my doubt that this is really true just my denial and my resistance?
Is the thing that's going to help me to be to really lean into this and believe it fully and talk to other people who reinforce that?
When a therapist says, hmm, maybe this didn't really happen.
Well, you know, does that mean this is the wrong therapist?
So it's just such murky is like a massive understatement for what happens in that territory at least in my experience and from talking to other people as well.
And then this was also really complicated for me by the fact that child sexual abuse does happen and there were people I was very close with who Remembered actual, I mean, they'd never forgotten.
They had actual.
Right.
Yeah.
Everyday stories of like terrible, incestuous, damaging things that happened in their families.
And so I was, I was young and I was very, you know, raw and open and impacted by those stories as well.
And the empathy I felt, uh, for those, uh, there were women in this case.
So yeah, it's, it's such tangled territory.
You know, the co-optation of doubt, the amplification of doubt that you're describing being tortured by, we're going to see a lot of that as we quote from the book so I'll warn you when that comes up because it might be very disturbing for you to see that play out because it's a huge factor in how this book rolls.
So, let's just take a look at just how diverse the reception to this book has been.
I've got here the very first two reviews on Goodreads.
The first one is the positive review, the second one is the standard critical review, The first one, it also will serve as a reasonable outline of the text, so you all know, you know, what it basically contains.
And I would say that it represents the mainstream positive reception.
Julian, want to read that?
The Courage to Heal is an incredible book in its own way.
It focuses on women survivors of child sexual abuse.
What it does first of all is give these survivors a voice.
Without falling into the trap of abstract academic language, it also is full of ways that can help healing.
In the chapters, the authors give information and suggestions through the different stages, from trauma to healing.
Part 1, Taking Stock, Taking Care, deals primarily with recognizing the damage and using survivor skills to make it through the day.
In Part 2 of the book, you find detailed information about the different stages of the healing process.
Part 3, called Changing Patterns, is all about building the survivor back up into a much more complete woman who might experience the whole emotional spectrum and be able to live a better life again.
In Part 4, you can find information for supporters.
Part 5 tells the stories of survivors.
The last sections include poetry and a vast number of bibliographical entries covering books, videos, online resources, and organizations.
What makes this book so incredible is the vast amount of information combined with the tragic stories of survivors of child sexual abuse.
Whether you're looking for a self-assessment, advice on how to talk and how not to talk to a traumatized girl or woman, Advice on healing, advice for family members and those willing to support survivors, or something else.
You'll probably find something to work with in The Courage to Heal.
The topic of child sexual abuse is shocking, and the authors Ellen Bass and Laura Davis managed to express support and be real about the topic without sugarcoating any of what is happening.
Survivors sooner or later need a clear language to help them how to tackle trauma.
And at the same time they need validation and support.
Bass and Davis manage both.
Thank you for this book.
The very next review gives the common criticisms.
It says, this book is notorious for having helped to launch the recovered memory therapy craze which played into the spate of alleged incidents of satanic ritual abuse of the late 80s and early 90s.
Neither author has credentials or expertise relevant to psychology, therapy, or sexual abuse.
The book was not based on any solid experimental evidence or psychological studies.
Some of the case studies included have been discredited, such as the one taken from Michelle Remembers, Memory psychologists such as Elizabeth F. Loftus and Carol Tavris have refuted the notion of repressed memories.
Though memories may be recovered, there is no special mechanism that keeps them repressed or any way of determining their validity without corroborating evidence.
RMT, Recovered Memory Therapy, is currently considered patent quackery in the psychological disciplines this book has caused irreparable damage to many people's lives.
You know, just hearing some of those criticisms, on the one hand it really makes me realize, like, this is not that far afield from Freud.
You know, this is in the lineage of the Freudian notion that there is a deep unconscious in which repressed memories and emotions that we don't know how to deal with are stored because they tell us a story about our family that we don't want to accept.
And at the heart of that story are these complexes, the Oedipal and Electrocomplexes that he describes that are really the source of all human neuroses.
And it just strikes me that even when we get into Jung, there's this Mysteriousness about the idea of the unconscious as being, you know, it's almost has a supernatural quality where it's like you can't really ever say anything about it.
All things could be true in the unconscious.
Whatever comes up through your dreams or your active imagination or your writing exercises or your experiential therapeutic process has to be taken seriously.
And as you said earlier, it's all sort of on a relativist flatland of equal plausibility.
You know, seeing these two reviews, one after another, also gave me this thought.
I didn't put it into our notes, so I'm just sort of off script here a little bit, but I was thinking that there seems to be a category of book in the landscape that we study that is particularly prone to echo chambering.
Um, because I don't understand, it's actually quite shocking that such a popular book can have night and day reviews, one and two, on Goodreads.
And what it says to me, and the thing is, is that I don't have the dates for those reviews, but that night and day response to this book was in evidence from the beginning.
The backlash to this text from the actually trained psychological community was immediate.
So was praise for the book.
And so I'm wondering what it is about that particular piece of media that can survive such choppy waters, you know?
Like I'm thinking about how You know, is it Jared Diamond, whose books, vast historical books like Guns, Germs, and Steel and stuff like that, they've gone out of fashion, I think they've been criticized from a number of different angles, but people will still be enthusiastic about a book like that, or books like that, and yet it will kind of fall into history, right?
In the midst of criticism that receives it into its appropriate landscape.
But books like this seem to be able to carve out their own media domain.
They seem to erect their own kind of walls of interpretation and praise and validation.
That, you know, and as we see how Bass and Davis respond to the criticism, we'll see a little bit from the author's perspective how that happens.
But it reminds me of Light on Yoga by BKS Iyengar, which goes through umpteen editions while making wild medical claims about the values of certain postures.
And to this day, I believe the latest edition of Light on Yoga still does not feature a medical disclaimer on the front page of the book.
Because the publishers maybe are saying like, what the fuck?
Who cares?
We don't need to really own up to the fact that he's making medical claims on every
page because the popularity of the book is established. It's found its audience and its audience
doesn't actually have to be warned off of pseudoscience because they've already made a choice. And
so, do you know what I'm saying?
Oh yeah, you're hitting something so important here.
Yeah, I don't, we need a name for pieces of media like this that are, that are,
They almost come into the world with a protective shield around them that then grows to encapsulate their reading audience, and that shield is very, very difficult to penetrate.
So, yeah.
Yeah, well, two things.
I mean, one is that It's intensely polarizing and in a way it sort of prefigures where we're at in the world right now and why this podcast exists, right?
Is that if a set of claims is polarizing enough that it evokes intense loyalty and excitement and investment from people who get hooked by it, and that the intensity of that belief in it is it crosses some kind of threshold where no matter what
the criticisms are from people who have a different perspective on it,
they won't get through it's very different than you know than a book where where people you know like like we were
just reading the dawn of everything right and we got very excited about it and then there were several different
scholars who came out like with a book like that.
Scholars come out and they make an argument well you know it's this perspective maybe slightly skewed and some of
these facts are maybe being being fashioned into an argument through some cherry picking.
And so we're not entirely sure that you should be as excited about this because you are.
And that there's that conversation, even though there may be strongly held beliefs, the content It doesn't have this urgency about it, it doesn't have the messianic quality, it doesn't have the promises of intense transformation, it doesn't have the deep, it doesn't capture the kind of emotional mythic imagination in the same way that intense conspiracy theories, intense religious beliefs and phenomena like this might do.
Yeah, I think that the David Graeber WinGrow book is a really good example.
There's a big splash upon publication, it stimulates a lot of conversation, and it stimulates reasonable responses from equally intelligent researchers who Who want to ask them to hedge or who question some premises and the buzz kind of settles into the constructiveness of ongoing discourse and everybody realizes, no, they didn't solve the problems of the world with this book.
They didn't come to some sort of final answer, but I'll tell you the author that is putting out, and this is why I think I'm describing maybe simply pieces of media that are artifacts of the bodies of charismatics.
They're like amulets or they're relics, actually.
Yeah, fetishes I think is also the term, yeah.
Yeah, so Twelve Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson is exactly this type of book where everybody who loves it will not be exposed to its criticisms somehow.
It will remain a sort of parasocial, charismatic experience, communal experience that they have with the ghostly body of Jordan Peterson.
Yeah, that's well said.
The thing that I left out in what I was just saying is that what ends up happening, and you don't see this as much in terms of academic work or work that is grounded in something more methodological, what happens is that the passion of the people who are in a conversion experience with this new piece of media, and this is the case with Teal Swan as well.
Totally.
The charismatic conversion experience means that then any criticism No matter how soundly reasoned, and in fact, the more soundly reasoned it is, the more it sounds the alarm of like, oh my God, this actually could be incredibly toxic and dangerous for people.
The more the retort, just like you noted earlier, is you're only saying that because you want to cover up the truth.
And there's a piece of this as well that has to do with the flawed epistemology that creeps in when you start making claims that are unfalsifiable, right?
You're just a scientific materialist.
You just believe life has no purpose.
You refuse to believe that childhood sexual abuse happens because you're in denial.
You refuse to believe the claims that Teal Swan is making about channeling aliens or having all of these abilities because you're just, you're actually, if you would do some work on yourself and get past how defended you are around being open to your intuition, then you'd see that we've really awakened.
It's that dynamic that's only present with certain subject matter.
I'm really glad that you brought up the power of the conversion experience, because I think that is so formational to people's identity in relation to particular pieces of media.
We see it in spirituality texts, I think that we see it in Courage to Heal, that it becomes The book itself is an object beyond the discourse of literature.
It's not, you know, is this thing to be evaluated against, you know, common forms of evidence?
Or, you know, should we ask for corroboration for these stories?
Or, if they put a terrible statistic into the first edition, and then they just disappear it from subsequent editions, should they issue a correction?
Like, all of those questions of journalistic and editorial integrity, they really are in a
different category of experience to, you know, did this change your life one glorious but
also devastating Tuesday afternoon.
Yeah, and then it then brings up the question, okay, so the publishers, you were talking
about Light on Yoga as well, is it, and we can't know for sure, but sometimes you have
to imagine the publishers are going, you know, we're not really sure about all of this, but
it's selling a lot of books, so we're just going to roll with it.
And I think in some cases, because publishing can have such a niche quality about it, publishers are probably also to some extent caught up in the conversion process of the charismatic figure or material.
And so then you just cross over into this territory and again it relates to what we're dealing with in the world right now where when you talk about misinformation, you talk about pseudoscience on social media in relation to say anti-vax claims.
It doesn't matter because the retort is, well, you're just, you know, you're just a shill for big pharma.
It doesn't matter what counter evidence.
No, I don't have to correct any of my previous misstatements on, you know, what the dangers of vaccines because I've entered into this other reality.
I've been converted into believing that any evidence to the contrary is just a conspiracy.
You know, I wanted to corroborate the Goodreads reviews with feedback from our contemporary listeners, so I reached out to our social feeds to ask for anecdotes from people who found the book impactful, so I'll just read the first one.
And we're keeping everything anonymous, and thank you everybody who wrote in.
So, I remember reading Courage to Heal from back in the late 90s, early aughts.
I interned at a women's shelter around that time, and abuse and sexualized violence was a topic in feminist circles.
I don't remember details of the book, but it was one of the staples.
I know I also recommended it.
It's funny to realize now how little I remember.
I probably still have it in a bookshelf somewhere.
I continued to volunteer in peer trauma support later on.
Around the mid-aughts, Courage to Heal recommendations were replaced with recommendations for trauma and recovery by Judith Herman, and I remember that the latter made more sense to me.
It felt more grounded and matter-of-fact-y.
But Courage to Heal opened a space for a lot of conversations here and helped women support one another through dealing with trauma—one-on-one conversation, but also in larger groups.
I also remember that it resulted in a bunch of artwork being made.
I have read Courage to Heal at least twice at various stages of healing from my own child sexual abuse.
I know it's contentious, but when I was 12 and trying to figure out what the fuck had happened to me, that was the book at the local library.
Thank you public library system that named my experience for me.
I idolized that book and I say it that way because there's emphasis placed by two stars on either side of that word.
I idolized that book when I was a teenager because I recognized that my life was really hard.
Everyone around me told me that I was a liar making it up.
That's awful.
and that false memories are not real, even when I had the scars on my body
and now I've had two surgeries to repair what happened to me
because children are small and violence can affect future growth.
That's awful.
That book honored my desperate isolation.
It is also the reason I became obsessed with the whole psychology of MKUltra,
the satanic panic and such classic antisemitism as blood libel and the protocols of the elders of Zion.
I discovered Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, and their influence.
I'm obviously still just as fascinated.
I re-read The Courage to Heal in my twenties.
It's one of two influences that encouraged me to go to therapy.
I also had sort of outgrown it and it didn't hit home the same way for me as it had a decade earlier.
Now I'm in my 30s and I'm reading it again.
I want to get through it before I hear this upcoming episode.
I'm finding that it feels a bit dated.
But it also feels good for me to revisit because it left such an impact on my younger self.
It feels like a step forward or a recognition of how far I've come.
I just want to reiterate, thank you to those of you who wrote in.
It's fascinating to hear these thoughts.
Okay, here's the next one.
Courage to Heal is still in our cellar, where I move books that will eventually be given away, but I haven't yet because I'm not sure I want it back out in the world.
It was given to me synchronistically at a vulnerable time when I was coming to terms with my own childhood abuse.
Spotty memories, self-doubt, sexuality confusion, and overwhelming shame shadowed my days.
But the book provided no relief, not like the validation I felt with Judith Herman or Bessel van der Kolk.
I found it unboundaried and voyeuristic, at least that's the impression I'm left with a decade later.
The original trauma porn, if you will, graphically detailing stories of abuse.
And what is that?
I see it so often within healing circles.
Something about the provocation and power that comes with sharing our most shameful, especially sexually charged secrets?
And then pole dancing on social media to reclaim it all?
I was also left with the aftertaste of seething hatred for men who are more often than not the abusers.
Here's another.
Courage to heal.
It was recommended to me by my therapist.
I was abused by my teacher in 10th grade, which lasted for a semester.
The incident started to give me sexual problems while in a good committed relationship.
I found it helpful in understanding my feeling and thoughts in my life.
I was surprised that the book could be problematic.
The workbook and pounding rocks into rough gravel to patch my dirt driveway got a great driveway out of it.
Another listener.
Licensed Psychotherapist here, I've used this book in helping clients work through their sexual abuse histories.
It is slow, difficult work, and so many survivors struggle with devastating feelings of shame, humiliation, self-loathing.
In particular, the anecdotal vignettes written by other survivors seem to be the most useful, as shame is so isolating.
For some, the existence of feelings and experiences people are unwilling to even allow themselves to acknowledge.
such as the way grooming makes people feel special and wanted.
These are difficult things to admit because the fear that somehow the abuse
was invited or that they liked it. Recovering from sexual abuse is painful, arduous work.
This book had been a good support for me and my clients. I had no idea it has this other side,
and I have to tell you all I'm a little afraid to hear what you're going to tell us about it,
but I'll listen. Again, thank you. Yeah. Okay. So let's take a look at the text proper.
Um...
Bass and Davis start with some opening statements.
So here's how Ellen Bass opens.
I first heard that children were being abused in 1974, when a young woman in my creative writing workshop pulled a crumpled half-sheet of paper out of her jeans pocket.
Her writing was so vague, so tentative, that I wasn't sure what she was trying to say, but I sensed that it was important.
Gently, I encouraged her to write more.
Slowly, she revealed her story, in pieces, on bits of paper.
She shared the pain of her father's assaults, and I listened.
Shortly afterward, another woman told me her story, and then another, and another.
There were no groups for survivors of child sexual abuse then.
The word survivor was not yet in our vocabulary.
But as they sensed that I could understand their stories, more and more women shared them with me.
The psychologist Carl Rogers once said that when he worked through an issue in his life, it was as if telegrams were sent to his clients informing them that they could now bring that subject to therapy.
Once I became aware of child sexual abuse, it was as if women knew that I was safe to talk to.
Okay, so I have a couple of notes here.
First of all, it's a little bit of a weird opening line.
She writes, I first heard that children were abused in 1974.
Now, Bass is born in 1947.
So as of now, she's around 75 years old.
But in 1974, she would have been 27.
So first of all, 27 is very young to be running a writing workshop, in my opinion, as somebody who has been to a lot of writing workshops.
I mean, it was back then, but in influencer culture today, you could be 22, right?
You could, yeah.
So, now, she's saying she did not know that children were being abused before this.
And so, is this really a gap?
Like, she just wasn't exposed to the fact that this happens in the world?
Is it an exaggeration?
I mean, is she trying to make the point that, like the rest of the culture, she was sheltered from this sordid fact and that she had a kind of transformative shift?
It seems implausible that you'd be 27 years old in 1974 and you would not have heard of child sexual abuse.
So that just stands out for me.
Yeah, I agree.
It's an odd sentence, and if true, it suggests someone who is profoundly psychologically incurious up to that point in their lives.
Perhaps, yeah.
Right?
I mean, to have completely like, oh, I'd never even heard of that, or thought about that, or had conversations about that.
Yeah, and that I'm writing a writer's workshop and I hadn't heard of Freud.
Yeah.
I was writing poetry and I hadn't, I mean she doesn't say what she was familiar with, but I mean like basic Greek mythology is going to give you sexual abuse and incest stories.
Well yeah, and if you're guiding people in groups into writing very personal stories It seems like you wouldn't have to do that for too long before a story popped up that had some of this content.
For sure.
Now, I want to turn, I think, this is a very small section and we're going through a very small, with a very fine comb here, but I think it's really important because they both, to their credit, they lay their cards on the table with their openings.
And I want to focus on the comment about Carl Rogers.
It's quite strange because she is not identifying as a child sexual abuse survivor.
What Rogers says is, or at least what she quotes him as saying, because she doesn't give a citation, she says that he says that when he worked through an issue in his life, it was as if telegrams were sent to his clients informing him that they could now bring that subject to therapy.
But she wasn't working through this issue in her life.
She was just hearing about it from other people.
And so there's some real merging going on here with the subject matter.
She's identifying as it she's through this analogy.
She's identifying it as being part of her own sort of background and I understand that from the perspective of creative writing.
That's like really really good skill to have to be able to merge with your subject matter, but it's exactly the wrong thing that you want to be doing or the thing that you Don't want to be unaware of if we're talking about a therapeutic context.
Well, and it's also an almost exact echo of what I described with Forest Yoga Circle.
This is a place, this is a beacon that draws in people who have sexual abuse histories, even if they don't realize it and don't realize that's why they're coming here for help with that.
There's a magical thinking here.
There's a blurring of the line between, you know, just because I've read Carl Rogers, you know, now suddenly I have...
Maybe like him, I'm in a therapeutic role, right?
But then there's also this magical thinking that says, once she's become aware of the issue, because in Roger's case, he's saying once he's worked through the issue himself, then magically, and I get this, like, I understand, there's a metaphor here that maybe explains some experience that people have in their lives, but nonetheless, it's still magical thinking, that somehow there's a message that goes out through the universe on the radio waves that then tells other people,
oh yeah, you can come in if you have this issue because this person can handle it.
But she's, as you're saying, she's not claiming she's worked through the issue, just that
once she's become familiar with it, then suddenly it's everywhere.
She's a magnet.
Yeah, and that's actually more of a description of motivated reasoning and priming and, oh,
what's it called, confirmation bias than anything else.
Now she goes on to describe in this introduction that she pivoted her writing workshop work
to form a group.
that did work under the title I Never Told Anyone.
She also says that her training, she admits that she's not a licensed counselor or psychotherapist, but she does say that she has training as a counselor that has come simply through practice, but then she also says that she's trained with other therapists that she respects.
She doesn't Give details there.
Then there's this quote, quote, but none of what is presented here is based on psychological
theories. The process described, the suggestions, the exercises, the analysis, the conclusions,
all come from the experiences of survivors. Which actually isn't true because she herself is not a
child sexual abuse survivor.
She set up a workshop.
So, unless she's completely democratic, she's letting the participants of the workshop actually come up with the exercises and the suggestions, then actually that statement is false.
It's just false.
It didn't come from the experiences of the survivors.
Yeah, and it puts her in some sort of transparent leadership role where she's just perfectly transcribing and channeling what's happening with these people.
And it also sets up the central fallacy that's so common in the circles that we've moved in, which is that there's this gap between intellectual, in this case, psychological theories And then the actual experience of being on the ground dealing with the real stuff in a way that people, you know, those ivory tower academics could never really understand because we're kind of doing the real work and we're discovering the real truths.
She ends on a metaphysical note that I think flags at something that we'll get to in part two that I find probably most disturbing, more disturbing than anything else in this book, and this is the blurring of the line between therapeutic intention and creative aspiration.
This is what she says, quote, I want to see us, through this process, all become whole and not stop there.
As we become capable of nurturing ourselves and living rich personal lives, we are enabled to act creatively in the world so that life can continue.
The eucalyptus trees, the narcissus, the sunfish, the squirrels, seals, hummingbirds, our own children."
Wow.
So, she's not a creative writing class, Julian.
It's not just that she's helping people excavate their memories of child sexual abuse.
It's that once all of that has happened, The world can be saved, including all of the sort of thousand points of light that she sees around her in the natural world.
Like, in fact, the implication is that without this world, without this work, the world is dying.
Yeah, the world can be restored.
Somehow the world of nature, as she describes, and it's interesting that she chooses the Narcissus flower, through this grandiose kind of messianic... You caught that, right?
You caught that.
You caught the flower.
Somehow in this grandiose messianic voice that The natural world in all of its wholesomeness and goodness is dependent upon us doing this deep, this underlying work that is what sustains reality itself.
Right.
Yeah, it's the mud and the lotus, right?
Okay, so turning to Davis, because her introduction follows straight on, Davis begins her story with a disclosure that she is a survivor of incest, and that speaking with Ellen Bass at a crucial moment was fundamental to her turning a mental health corner.
So they have a very, very close and, you know, I would say it looks like complex and bonded relationship.
In the conversation that she remembers having with Bass, Bass uses an expression that I think we might be familiar with.
So Davis writes, over and over Ellen repeated those simple phrases.
It wasn't your fault.
I believe you.
Healing is possible.
You're going to make it.
You're going to be okay.
I expressed every doubt I could think of.
Then I made up some new ones.
I knew other survivors didn't make up this sort of thing, but I was the exception.
I'd always been the exception, all my life.
You can fight it all you want, Laura, she said finally, but the door's been opened and you're in the healing process whether you like it or not.
There was a long silence.
Then I said, isn't there any way out?
The only way out is through, honey.
I'm sorry.
It's hard to hear the almost perfect repetition of Lawrence Pazder talking to Michelle and of Michelle saying, I don't want to do this anymore.
I had a dream.
I got in a car.
I drove the fuck away from you in this cursed project.
But no, you got to stay with it.
There's only one way through and whether you like it or not.
I mean, you know, talk about ironic and sort of Reenactment, right?
That whether you like it or not, this is what's happening.
Awful.
Yeah.
Unintentionally so, like really obliviously so.
And maybe one of the things that is saddest to me or most tragic about reading this book, especially, you know, we get to eavesdrop on this very tender conversation between friends.
And the thing is, is that once that gets crystallized, onto the page as kind of a learning moment that then is to be literally applied to the reader's life.
It all changes, because in the moment in which they're actually taking care of each other, in which Laura's going to Ellen for some help and support, it really doesn't matter what the fuck she says.
Like, she's just there and listening and she's being a good friend.
I mean, it's not that it doesn't matter entirely, but it's like there's a difference between Having a private moment with a friend about something that you're really struggling with, and then turning it into an object lesson that ends up, you know, spinning out a thousand workshops.
Well, and the similarity actually extends further than I realized until right now, which is that now these are the co-authors of the book and the co-facilitators of the workshop, and essentially There's one of the co-facilitators and authors has gone through
The exact process that is being shared and has now disclosed their own sexual abuse history, childhood sexual abuse history, under the guidance of the mentor slash therapist slash writing teacher, it's, yeah, it's a similar, we're in similar territory in terms of a somewhat exploitive Okay, now Davis goes on to say something really revealing.
She writes, I wanted to write this book for probably the same reasons you are picking it up now.
I felt a tremendous amount of pain in my life and I wanted it to stop.
Six months before I approached Ellen about collaborating, I had my first memories of being sexually abused by my grandfather when I was a child.
Since that time, my life had fallen apart.
My lover was leaving me.
I was becoming increasingly estranged from my family.
I was sure I was going crazy.
I needed to understand what was happening to me.
I needed to talk to other women who had been through it.
Out of that need, my desire to write this book was born.
So I'll return to that after I give a little bit of a rundown of the rest of her description.
She describes their process for soliciting stories.
They placed ads in newspapers, they contacted Bass's workshop participants, they listened to hundreds of stories.
In the front matter, they describe receiving 250 stories and working with about 100.
But let me come back to Davis's needs in writing this book, because this is how she ends her preface, and there's a lot here.
It's been my experience that every time the subject of incest comes up in any kind of personal way, I re-experience the terror I felt as a child being abused.
It's the same terror I saw in the faces of the women I interviewed when we finally sat down, small talk and tea finished, and I nudged them, my voice gentle, what happened to you?
It's the fear I've seen flash across the faces of other women who ask what my work is, and who cannot bear to speak to me once they've heard the answer.
It's the terror that has silenced us.
This book has been a way for me to break silence.
But it has been more than that.
It has been a steady source of inspiration and amazement for the past two and a half years.
It has taught me that it is possible to take something that hurt me so deeply and turn it around.
I hope it teaches you the same.
Okay, so Julian, what comes to mind here?
What are your first thoughts?
I mean, it's obviously very, it comes across as very earnest.
The fact that they're soliciting all of these stories, they're taking them from their workshop participants, they're putting Ads in the newspaper, none of it is, you know, there's absolutely no process of corroborating or anything like that.
That would probably be seen as... Disbelief.
Yeah, as something inappropriate to do.
Well, and it's inappropriate in the sense that they're not trained as journalists either, Well yeah, yeah.
I'm curious about your thoughts about the way she describes the dynamic of bringing up the topic and what happens in the faces of people when you bring up the topic.
Yeah, I mean, what I read here is a reasonable, earnest, layperson's guess at how this all should go.
You have a personal experience that is deeply painful and meaningful to you, you go through a recovery process, and part of how that is facilitated through time is by connecting with others who have shared something similar.
And I think Laura Davis is to be commended for being absolutely transparent about how personal this is for her.
But I think we have to point out that she is telegraphing at a thousand decibels counter-transference into her work and data, and that she is coming with no tools for mitigating its effect on the moment in which she is listening.
She is saying, when I hear about this material, I am struck with terror.
I feel it fully.
Neither of them have given any indication that they'd had any training or education in how to interview, take information.
It's not journalism.
As we said, we're not talking about corroboration, and as we've also said, we're not talking about therapy, so they're not talking about the ethics of bearing witness to disclosures like this.
Now, I live around psychotherapists, and my understanding of countertransference is that it happens, it is reasonable, it can be incorporated consciously into the therapeutic relationship, but only if it is recognized.
Because if it isn't, the therapy, which this isn't with the courage to heal, but it is approaching it, it's adjacent to it, but without an awareness of counter-transference, without Davis stopping herself in the middle of that conversation and saying, you know, I am feeling so overwhelmed by what you're telling me that I'm not sure I can hear it very clearly.
Without being able to do that, the encounter can usually, or it runs the risk of serving the unconscious needs of the therapist.
And I think that what I understand is that someone with training What they do when they realize that the client, the interlocutor, is speaking into a territory that charges them up, they have to notice it.
They have to notice it so that they can pull back and reassess what their own objectives are, because those objectives can easily overcome, in a very unintentionally narcissistic way, the needs of the client.
Yeah, I mean, it actually speaks to the...
The cultural stereotype that is often sort of mocked or seen as, you know, ineffective of the therapist who has an emotional distance, who maintains a sense of neutrality.
How does that make you feel?
Right?
That's sort of the joke.
Oh, how does that make you feel?
You're just going to sit there and like, you know, have this distance, have this kind of openness to just continuing to ask the question and letting it be about the patient that instead of that you have this merger you
have this intense emotional resonance and that in the moment that actually does feel
more powerful it does feel more connected but it's actually it's actually doing a disservice
and not only it would the trained therapist be able to recognize oh my counter
transference is really up right now I need to be careful and you'd be aware I need to
maintain a kind of reflective curiosity about how to not let this spill over.
But in supervision, then, there would be an opportunity to unpack that and say, wow, You really feel connected to this particular patient.
Yeah, and let's just be clear about supervision.
Supervision would be hours per week for years on end.
Uh, speaking with a senior advisor in intimate detail about how you, as the therapist, encountered a particular client, and what came up for you, what problems you had, what confusions you had, how you may not have seen them clearly or not.
Yeah, as... This is not, this is like, this is not fucking around.
Yeah, it's not screwing around, it's hours at a time of careful examination of how you're actually responding to the person you're supposed to be supporting.
And, just to underline it even further, it's the norm, it's to be expected, and it's the way that the therapist matures and grows and becomes better at their job is by recognizing that this parallel process is going on the whole time, and so let's tend to it and make it conscious.
Yeah, now listen, I do want to say that I do not know enough about the contemporary history of psychotherapy or its culture to know whether or not all, you know, what I'm describing ends up being an idealization in 1988 dollars, right?
I don't know what the rate of inflation has been with regard to, you know, psychotherapy smarts or the, you know, it's quite possible that part of the reason that this book is so successful is that You know, there's a lot of shitty psychotherapy out there still.
I mean, there still is, but certainly this is before a number of waves of regulation and licensing takes place.
That's right, and it's actually noteworthy that Ellen Bass references Carl Rogers so early because Carl Rogers is the humanistic psychologist and he's famous for the idea of unconditional positive regard and for actually starting to break some of the less warm qualities of psychoanalysis, maybe in ways that were somewhat beneficial, but maybe in other ways that opened the door to a certain amount of transference and counter-transference having less guardrails.
Right.
So, I mean, I recognize the spot they're in because I have had a version of this counter-transference problem as a journalist.
I'm a cult survivor and I start doing journalism on cults motivated by blind rage.
And so the first pieces I do are, you know, by the seat of my pants.
They're posted on that bullshit site Elephant Journal.
No editorial support.
And it takes me like, you know, a number of years to realize I have to slow down.
I have to learn how to really fact check.
I have to have my angles validated or challenged by experienced editors.
And, you know, here we are publishing a 300 page book with 500 plus footnotes and a lawyer combing through every single line, asking us very particular questions about, can you be really sure about the intentionality of so-and-so?
Do you want to hedge that a little bit?
And so the psychotherapy version of that discipline, as I've said, is hundreds of hours of practice supervision, note-taking, as you said, parallel note-taking.
You know, like on one side of the page, what did the client feel and say?
You know, safety checks, safety plans.
And then on the other side of the page, how was I feeling and managing those feelings?
So, Davis does update her foreword in 2008 for the 20th anniversary edition.
She expresses a mellowing of the passion for justice that drove her.
She explains that she doesn't primarily identify as a child sexual abuse survivor at this point.
And she implies that this is because the book, which has impacted millions, this is where I think her note on how many copies might have been sold, has helped her on her journey.
She does mention going through the book sentence by sentence, but she doesn't mention corrections or errata, and that's really important because as we'll see, there is a controversy over their inclusion of satanic ritual abuse content in the first editions.
Okay, so we've covered a lot so far, and we've hardly touched the body of the text yet.
So, let's finish this part with just the opening of Chapter 1, which provides good coverage of basic child sexual abuse statistics.
But then a standard list for identifying forms of abuse, but there's something in that list that kind of sticks out and it's important to note.
So the list says, when you were a young child or teenager, were you touched in sexual areas, shown sexual movies, or forced to listen to sexual talk?
Made to pose for seductive or sexual photographs.
Subjected to unnecessary medical treatments.
Forced to perform oral sex on an adult or sibling.
Raped or otherwise penetrated.
Fondled, kissed, or held in a way that made you uncomfortable.
Forced to take part in ritualized abuse in which you were physically or sexually tortured.
Made to watch sexual acts or look at sexual parts.
Bathed in a way that felt intrusive to you.
Objectified and ridiculed about your body.
Encouraged or goaded into sex you didn't really want.
Told all you were good for was sex.
Involved in child prostitution or pornography.
So, there's one that stands out there.
Did you spot it?
Yikes!
Just a little ritual abuse and torture right there in the midst of this list of everything else.
Right.
So, that's the first hint we get of where this book might be going in terms of what it's going to allow into the Imaginarium.
Now, at the bottom of that page, there's a very important footnote, and it might sound familiar.
So, the footnote reads, Between 500,000 and 1 million children are involved in prostitution and pornography in this country.
This would be the U.S.
A high percentage of them are victims of incest.
See Sex Work, Writings by Women in the Industry, edited by Frederic Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander, published by Kleist Press in Pittsburgh, 1987.
Okay, does that figure ring a bell for you, Julian?
Yeah, I mean it has echoes of what we were hearing during the Save the Children period in 2020.
Yeah, they used the figure 800,000, so between 500,000 and a million, we kind of, it falls right in the middle, is the figure that ended up getting boosted by the Save the Children meme by... Pastel Q. By Pastel Q, by the Underground Railroad, and the QAnon Summer of 2020.
The real number is somewhere between 15 and 50,000 women and children in the U.S.
The number 800,000 is a misinterpretation of the number of children who are reported missing if they are missing for 20 minutes because they went down the street and they didn't check in with their parents.
Now, to their credit, Bass and Davis remove this footnote and the citation from their 2008 edition.
However, no correction is offered.
It's just removed.
I mean it's like I want to just look into their eyes and say, why?
When you say something like that and then you later realize that it's not true and you take it out, is it that any admission that some aspect of what you have put in this book is not true calls everything into question and so you're too scared to do that?
That's a really important point, isn't it?
Because if your ideological premise is that we're going to believe everything that these people tell us and we're going to publish it not as if they are creative writing exercises, but as if they are memories that would be actionable, then yeah.
What would it mean to admit a mistake in your facticity?
And in this case, you'd be saying, hey, it turns out that we may have overestimated the prevalence of this thing that we're promoting.
Yeah, you can't do that though.
You can't do that.
Exactly, you can't do that.
And again, it draws the sharp distinction between in a more, in a better regulated, more kind of, how would we say it?
Science informed, open discourse, You actually gain legitimacy by correct, right?
In journalistic terms, you gain legitimacy by saying, oh, our bad.
We screwed up.
We own it.
We were wrong about this.
We need to look at how it impacts everything else that we're saying.
Exactly.
And if they actually issue a correction, pardon me, they lose legitimacy.
Yeah.
Because it's worse than that because they would be compromising the legitimacy of the people whose stories they published.
Yeah.
Which is an awful bind to be in, actually.
Right?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you can say we were off by a decimal point in terms of our speculation about how widespread this is.
That in no way impacts the veracity of the stories that we've received from all of these other people.
You know, this is their story.
Or their meanings, or their importance.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
It does seem like this satanic panic hangover of asserting inflated numbers and baseless statistics that then paints a picture of this rampant epidemic that's going on in the shadowy corners of the world, and it's really horrific, but it's also really very commonplace.
To me, it's a...
Even though the subject matter is totally different, the psychology or the style is similar to other panics, like there's commies under every bed, or how Reefer Madness is going to destroy ordinary teenagers and turn them into a life of crime overnight from just taking one puff on a joint.
It's a similar flavor to me.
Right.
Let's pause there, because I think we have a good hint of where this is going.
And when we pick it up again, we can talk about how they kind of encourage readers to monitor their feelings as they read the book.
And that becomes a very important sort of pillar in how they describe the function of recovering memory.
