How memory can be corrupted (and destroy families)

I have to be honest with you before I even start. I sat on this one for two weeks. I created a reel about what I’m about to share, and the second I posted it, my stomach turned. Because the moment you bring this topic up, you sound like you're defending abusers. And I'm not. I want to say that plainly before I say anything else.

Real childhood abuse exists. It is common. It devastates lives, and the people who survive it deserve every ounce of support we can give them. None of what I'm about to share contradicts that. Hold both things in your head at once if you can, because that's the only honest way to talk about this.

Okay. Here's what's been eating at me.

There's a researcher called Mark Pendergrast. He didn't start out studying memory. He was a journalist. Then his two adult daughters accused him of abuse, he says he didn't commit (Pendergrast, 1995). Most fathers in that position fall apart. He went and read every paper on memory science he could find, and he's been documenting what he found for thirty years.

Here's what he and his colleagues figured out about how a memory can get warped.

Memory isn't a recording. It's a reconstruction.

The instinct most of us have is that memory works like a camera. Something happens, the brain stores it on a tape somewhere and later you play the tape back. That model is wrong and has been known to be wrong since the 1930s (Bartlett, 1932). What actually happens is closer to building a Lego model from a faded photo. Every time you remember something, you're rebuilding it from fragments. And every time you rebuild it, you can quietly slip new pieces in without noticing.

The classic demonstration of this is the "Lost in the Mall" study. Loftus and Pickrell (1995) got a relative of each participant to feed them four childhood stories. Three were real. One was made up: getting lost in a shopping mall around age five, crying, and being helped by an older woman. After being asked to think about it across a few sessions, around a quarter of participants ended up remembering it. Some added details the researchers had never mentioned. The store layout. What the woman was wearing. How scared they felt. The 2023 preregistered replication pushed that number up to 35% (Murphy et al., 2023).

A childhood event that never happened. Reconstructed in vivid detail. By an ordinary brain doing what brains do.

Now layer in the techniques that make it worse.

In Pendergrast’s research, he found that certain therapy practices have independently been shown to corrupt memory in controlled studies (Patihis and Pendergrast, 2019).

These include:

"Close your eyes. Picture yourself as a small child. Where are you? Who's there with you? What do you sense?" The act of vividly imagining something blurs the brain's ability to tell later whether it really happened or you just pictured it (Garry et al., 1996).

A therapist reframes an ordinary dream as a fragment of a buried memory. The dream then gets re-experienced as evidence (Mazzoni et al., 1999).

People under hypnosis produce far more "memories", with much more confidence, and a non-trivial proportion of those memories are demonstrably wrong (Laurence and Perry, 1983).

Physical sensations like nausea, tension or panic get reinterpreted as the body remembering what the mind has forgotten. There is no mechanism in neuroscience for this. It's a metaphor that became a diagnosis.

In group settings, hearing someone else's memory measurably reshapes your own (Roediger et al., 2001). A survivors group where everyone shares stories is, mechanically, a memory-shaping environment.

Why the brain falls for it.

The technical name for what's going wrong is a source-monitoring error (Johnson et al., 1993). Your brain stores memories and imaginings and dreams and things you read in roughly the same kind of file.

What it doesn't always store reliably is where the file came from.

So an image you generated through guided imagery in a therapy session, returned to ten times, rehearsed with emotion, can over months migrate into the folder marked "things that actually happened to me". Not because anyone is lying. Because that is genuinely how human memory works.

And here's where it really tips. Once the new memory takes hold, the original innocent material gets retrospectively reframed. The stubble of a dad's goodnight hug. The back rub. The bath. Suddenly, every ordinary moment from childhood is reinterpreted as evidence of something else (Pendergrast, 2017a, 2017b).

And here's where it stops being a hunch and can turn into a population.

Patihis and Pendergrast (2019) ran a peer-reviewed survey of 2,326 American adults in Clinical Psychological Science. People whose therapists raised the possibility of repressed memories were twenty times more likely to recover memories of abuse they had never reported before.

Twenty.

That may not be therapy uncovering hidden truth. That's seems like suggestion, repeated until the suggestion becomes the memory. And once the new memory takes hold, the family on the receiving end can't argue with it. The memory feels more real than what actually happened. By the time anyone understands what's been done, the damage is permanent. In the same study, 42% of people who recovered these memories cut off contact with family members afterwards (Patihis and Pendergrast, 2019).

Now here's why I almost didn't post any of this.

The false-accusation story is one of the most human stories we have. Think about how many films sit in this exact territory. Twelve Angry Men. The Shawshank Redemption. In the Name of the Father. We line up around the block to watch a wrongly accused man fight for his life on screen. We understand instinctively that being falsely accused is its own category of devastation.

But the second you bring it into the real world, into the conversation about abuse, it feels like you're choosing a side. You're not. Victims of false accusations are victims too. They deserve support. Victims of actual abuse are victims and they deserve support. These are not in competition. They have never been in competition. We just keep talking like they are.

I think the reason this matters to so many of you, and why I keep coming back to estrangement in this newsletter, is that some of you are living inside this story right now. A child who walked into a particular kind of therapy and walked out with a new biography of their childhood. A parent on the other end with no way to defend themselves against a memory. Both of them, in their own way, are casualties of the same thing.

If that's you, on either side, you're not alone. And there is now a real body of research that helps explain what may have happened.

If you would like to learn more about family estrangement and therapy culture, sign up for my book’s wait list here.

— Richard

P.S.

If you have experienced estrangement, a research study is looking for participants who are willing to be interviewed about their story. Reply to this email, and I will send you more details.

P.P.S

So what happened to Prendergrast?

No one ever charged him. There was no trial, nothing for a court to weigh. Neither of his daughters ever went to the police. But both his daughters cut him off and never retracted their accusations.

He spent decades after building a career on one argument: that memories like his daughters' get manufactured inside therapy rooms.

So which is it? A father wrongly cut off over accusations he was never allowed to see. Or a man accused by both his own children who then spent his life making the case for why no one should believe accusations like theirs.

I can't tell you. They can't prove it. He can't disprove it. We treat estrangement like a wound waiting to be stitched. Sometimes the truth underneath it can’t be recovered by anyone, and everyone in the story spends the rest of their life seeking truth or justice.

Sit with that one.

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References

Bartlett, F.C. (1932) Remembering: a study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Garry, M., Manning, C.G., Loftus, E.F. and Sherman, S.J. (1996) 'Imagination inflation: imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred', Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 3(2), pp. 208–214.

Johnson, M.K., Hashtroudi, S. and Lindsay, D.S. (1993) 'Source monitoring', Psychological Bulletin, 114(1), pp. 3–28.

Laurence, J.R. and Perry, C. (1983) 'Hypnotically created memory among highly hypnotizable subjects', Science, 222(4623), pp. 523–524.

Loftus, E.F. and Pickrell, J.E. (1995) 'The formation of false memories', Psychiatric Annals, 25(12), pp. 720–725.

Mazzoni, G.A., Loftus, E.F., Seitz, A. and Lynn, S.J. (1999) 'Changing beliefs and memories through dream interpretation', Applied Cognitive Psychology, 13(2), pp. 125–144.

Murphy, G., Dawson, C.A., Huston, C., Ballantyne, E., Barrett, E., Cowman, C.S., Fitzsimons, C.M., Henry, T.J., Knieriemen, A., Lawlor, C.P. and Lynott, E.M. (2023) 'Lost in the mall again: a preregistered replication and extension of Loftus & Pickrell (1995)', Memory, 31(6), pp. 818–830.

Patihis, L. and Pendergrast, M.H. (2019) 'Reports of recovered memories of abuse in therapy in a large age-representative U.S. national sample: therapy type and decade comparisons', Clinical Psychological Science, 7(1), pp. 3–21. doi:10.1177/2167702618773315.

Pendergrast, M. (1995) Victims of memory: incest accusations and shattered lives. Hinesburg, VT: Upper Access.

Pendergrast, M. (2017a) Memory warp: how the myth of repressed memory arose and refuses to die. Hinesburg, VT: Upper Access Books.

Pendergrast, M. (2017b) The repressed memory epidemic: how it happened and what we need to learn from it. New York: Springer.

Roediger, H.L., Meade, M.L. and Bergman, E.T. (2001) 'Social contagion of memory', Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8(2), pp. 365–371.