Page 174 - The Social Animal

156 The Social Animal

officers have never succeeded in turning up a single skeleton—and
no coinciding kidnappings were reported that would have supported
the veracity of these accounts. 69
Many questions remain unanswered. For me, the most interest-
ing one is: What’s in it for the victim? It’s one thing to falsely re-
member something relatively trivial, like having been lost in a
shopping mall as a child, but recovering a memory of having been
sexually abused would entail a lot of pain. If these events didn’t, in
fact, take place, why would anyone be willing to believe they did? I
do not have a definitive answer to that question. I do have one case
history that may or may not be typical. This involves a close friend,
a very bright, highly sophisticated, middle-aged woman I will call
Madelaine. Here is what she wrote:

I was at a very low point in life. I was feeling terribly unhappy
and insecure. My marriage had recently fallen apart. I was hav-
ing a lot of trouble relating to men. My professional life had
taken a few terrible hits. My self-esteem was at an all-time low.
I had the strong feeling that my life was out of control—and
not what it should be. When I picked up a self-help book and
began to read about dysfunctional families—and, more specif-
ically, about characteristics of people who have been sexually
abused as children—and characteristics of families where sex-
ual abuse takes place—it was as if a flashbulb went off. In some
strange way, I actually felt a sense of relief—it was a feeling of,
“Oh, so that explains why I am so miserable!”The book told me
that, if I didn’t remember specifics, it probably meant I was re-
pressing horrible memories. I felt like a detective. The more I
began to think about my childhood, the more things began to
fall into place. For several weeks, I vacillated between all kinds
of emotions. I was feeling anger at my father, humiliation,
hurt—and also a sense of relief. I now see that the relief came
from the fact that, if I could blame my unhappiness on some-
thing terrible that was done to me when I was little, then I
wouldn’t have to take responsibility for my own failures as an
adult.
Luckily, I didn’t ever confront my parents, because I came
to realize that the memories probably weren’t reliable—I started
to have new “memories” in which the details of events were dif-
ferent. Both sets of memories couldn’t have been correct. Also,
I came to realize the events I’d “remembered” couldn’t possibly