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Hey {{ first_name | Reader }},
A while back, in the Freud and Adler piece, I took you down a side road and promised to come back to it. I talked about how Freud's idea of repression, the notion that the mind buries painful memories and that healing means digging them back up, fed a movement that tore real families apart. I said the recovered memory story deserved its own letter. This is the letter.
I want to start with something that happened here in Austin, a short drive from where I'm sitting and writing to you today.
In 1991, Dan and Fran Keller ran a small daycare out of their home in Oak Hill, Texas. A three-year-old in their care was seeing a therapist for behavioural problems after her parents divorced. She said the Kellers had hurt her.
Within months, that single accusation grew into something out of a horror film. Children described blood-laced Kool-Aid, dismembered pets, bodies dug up in cemeteries, a passerby shot and cut apart with a chainsaw, even flights to Mexico to be abused by soldiers, and a return to Austin in time for afternoon pick-up.
It sounds outlandish. But a jury believed it.
In 1992, the Kellers were each sentenced to 48 years in prison. The only physical evidence came from an emergency room doctor who said he found signs of abuse on the little girl. Years later, he attended a medical seminar, saw a slide of a perfectly normal child's anatomy that looked exactly like what he had described, and realised his error. Back in court, he said it plainly under oath: "I was mistaken."
In case you were wondering, the child at the centre of the case grew up and said the abuse never happened and that she had been coached to say it did. The Kellers walked free in 2013, and in 2017, Texas declared them innocent and paid them $3.4 million for the twenty-one years it took to find the truth (CBS News, 2017).
This was not a one-off event, {{ first_name | Reader }}.
The Kellers were swept into what we now call the “Satanic Panic,” a wave of accusations that ran through the 1980s and early 90s, claiming secret networks of Satanists were abusing children inside ordinary day cares.
The most famous of these, the McMartin Preschool case in California, became the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history and ended without a single conviction.
So how did sober adults, police, prosecutors and juries come to believe in chainsaw murders with no bodies?
The engine was an idea about memory
The belief running underneath all of it was that the mind can completely bury a trauma, and that the right techniques can pull it back out intact. Suggestive questioning. Hypnosis. Guided imagery. With children, repeated leading questions from trusted adults were to blame. With adults, recovered memory therapy was the culprit.
Believe it or not, the idea has serious champions.
One of the most influential was Bessel van der Kolk, the psychiatrist whose book The Body Keeps the Score has sold millions and still sits near the top of the bestseller lists. In the 1990s, he was also a leading proponent of repressed memory, and the New York Times reported that he served as an expert witness in a string of high-profile abuse cases built on memories supposedly recovered years later in therapy (Interlandi, 2014). In other words, he lent scientific weight to the mechanism that produced detailed memories of things that had never happened.
Here is the part I want to say very honestly: Real abuse is real. It is common, it is badly under-reported and it wrecks lives. Two things can be true at the same time.
You would think a scandal the size of the McMartin Preschool case would have settled it, but…
It didn't. Lawrence Patihis is a professor at Portsmouth University, whom I have personally interviewed. He and his colleagues, including the memory scientist Elizabeth Loftus, surveyed clinicians, researchers and members of the public and found a stubborn divide. Memory scientists are highly sceptical that trauma gets fully repressed and then recovered intact.
They believe the opposite. That trauma is something you cannot stop thinking about when it happens to you. Yet a large share of practitioners and the general public still believe that traumatic memories get repressed. (Patihis et al., 2014).
And in wellness culture, this belief exists in other ways. Now it turns up as your body "keeping the score," as "stored trauma" waiting to be released through hypnosis or bodywork. I work in breathwork. I think the breath does remarkable things, and I will keep saying so.
But I will not tell you that a breathing session unlocks sealed memories from your childhood, because there is no good evidence that it does.
Why? Because the last time we treated buried memories as reliable testimony, we put innocent people in prison.
Like this conversation? This is the thread running through the book I'm currently writing, ‘Cut Off’:
how good intentions and weak evidence keep rebuilding the same machine.
If you want first access when it lands:
Hold steady,
Richard
Listen to ‘The Project Possible Podcast’.
I recently sat down with Rich Leigh, host of the Project Possible podcast, to talk about my story and views on therapy culture.
Click the link if you want to hear more and join the conversation
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References
CBS News (2017) Texas couple cleared of satanic abuse claims to get $3.4 million, 23 August. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-couple-cleared-of-satanic-abuse-claims-to-get-3-4-million/ (Accessed: 18 June 2026).
Global News (2023) The DNA results are in: woman who said she was Madeleine McCann not missing girl, 6 April. Available at: https://globalnews.ca/news/9603699/madeleine-mccann-dna-test-results-polish-woman-julia-wendell/ (Accessed: 18 June 2026).
Interlandi, J. (2014) 'A revolutionary approach to treating PTSD', The New York Times Magazine, 22 May.
LBC (2025) Madeleine McCann faker Julia Wendell admits she's not Maddie, tells of regrets, 26 June. Available at: https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/julia-wendell-not-madeleine-mccann-regrets-admits-missing-schoolgirl-5Hjcd6g_2/ (Accessed: 18 June 2026).
Patihis, L., Ho, L. Y., Tingen, I. W., Lilienfeld, S. O. and Loftus, E. F. (2014) 'Are the "memory wars" over? A scientist-practitioner gap in beliefs about repressed memory', Psychological Science, 25(2), pp. 519-530. doi: 10.1177/0956797613510718.
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