You Can't Understand ROGD Without Understanding "Repressed Memories" 

After the McMartin preschool scandal, one of my younger sisters accused our father of sexually abusing her. This had supposedly come out in a repressed memory therapy session. No one ever believed it, but it broke our father’s heart.

I thought ROGD reminded me of what I know about the recovered memory epidemic too! I'm glad I found your channel!

We should teach the repressed memory hysteria of the 80s/90s in highschool.

I had a tense relationship with my mom in high school, but it was starting to improve as I neared the end of college (in the 90s). My senior year, I joined a book club with other girls, and we read a pop psychology book. It contained an exercise where you had to list the ways your parents had hurt you (with the intent that you would forgive them). After I made the list, I became contemptuous of my mom, blaming her for all of my faults and insecurities. The relationship went downhill, and we never really resolved it. She died 10 years ago. It’s only now that I have an trans-identified adult daughter that I understand the power of pop culture and how blindly I fell prey to it.

I lived through the repressed memory hysteria in California in my later teens and early 20s, as the landmark case of people being thrown in jail via using “repressed memories” as evidence took place not too far from me. I remember watching the news as they reported all of these “Satanic Ritual Abuse” cases with a completely straight face, and I suddenly felt like I understood how the people who lived through McCarthyism era, or even Witch Trials and the Spanish Inquisition era must have felt. It’s shocking and terrifying and it feels like they could be coming for you at any moment based on no actual evidence. So it’s a great metaphor for what’s happening in our current era. That being said, I always fear the over correction as well. I once was given rohypnol and didn’t remember a lot of things from that night until a few months later when it hit me all at once. But only the people that witnessed what happened would be able to corroborate my 3 month old memories. A similar thing happened recently when my mom was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and a lot of her lies that she’d been telling everyone came unraveled. It hit me like a ton of bricks why so many things I’d been told as a child and young adult didn’t make sense, and confused me so much. And a flood of memories came back. I do think that saying “there’s no such thing as repressed memory” can be an over correction. I just hope we as a society can always learn from our mistakes and try to be more even handed.

Thank you Sasha so much for drawing out the parallels. I have also binged the memory hole podcast and think that it’s important to elevate awareness around the greater relevance of this parallel to ROGD than other parallels that are drawn in the mainstream news media (thinking of how trans is often portrayed as the new gay, for example, a parallel that breaks down upon closer examination, whereas this one is multi-faceted and incredibly instructive). Might the podcast host be willing to join you and Stella on GWL?

I agree with the similarities between the two trends, and this is very helpful to compare. But I think it’s going beyond the evidence to suggest that traumatizing events are never encoded without explicit memory. As I understand one of the mechanisms at work in trauma is that an event can be so terrifying that high levels of cortisol shuts off the hippocampus and adrenaline increases the encoding of implicit memory, particularly if during the traumatizing event attention was diverted (dissociating attention to something else to not focus on the occurring event). In that event, even though explicit memory did not properly encode the experience it is still remembered in implicit memory, so according to Dan Siegel, Bonnie Badenoch, Bessel van der Kolk, etc., memories of traumatizing events can be absent from what can be explicitly recalled. So let’s not dismiss the notion altogether that traumatizing memories can be inaccessible and brought into explicit recall later through therapy, even if the trend in the 80’s and 90’s went too far.

Thank you for your work, Sasha! ❤

I think the key important thing is people can induce symptoms upon themselves through sheer force of their believing something/with their thoughts/by taking on beliefs & a certain perspective. Including inducing what seem to be physical/somatic symptoms that they see as out of their control/not arising from their own mind/imagination/beliefs. And how many diff kinds of symptoms are people able to induce through the power of their imagination/suggestion? There also seems to be some kind of gravitational pull towards seeing yourself as 'messed up' or 'damaged' by something dark that happened in the past - a survivor - some people seem to be very attracted to the allure of having that in their background. Tbh the people I know who went through horrible stuff (genocide survivor, Vietnam war veteran, growing up in orphanages around abuse, etc) don't seem to want to talk about it ever or make it a centerpiece component sideshow thing of their past to talk to people about. They seem to want to put it behind them & NEVER have i heard any one of these people speak of themselves as a 'survivor' or take on that kind of persona. We consume tragic stories as entertainment in this country, it becomes a spectacle.

In a similar vein, my trans identified daughter has totally reinvented some of the events of her childhood. She was a goofy, funny, imaginitive little kid, but tells stories about how dark and serious she was. When confronted, she says that she was “masking”. On one occasion she pulled her father’s army uniform out of the dirty basket and preformed a hilarious impersonation of him. This was not masking or trying to be a man. She was just being her silly little 6 year old self. But that isn’t the story she now tells herself.

I loved your last podcast with leor sapir. I am looking forward to this new podcast. I was involved with someone who was into recovered memory back in the late 90s. I always had doubts about it

oh, I am so glad I found this video! thank you! I am listening to the podcast now

Sasha, I'm an avid watcher, but ... some soft furnishings (a rug, wall hanging, cushions, furniture with soft upholstery, or a sound biard) to cancel echoes and a decent microphone would make listening a lot more comfortable.

I tend to believe that people can block out memories or misremember things. I believe it’s a protective mechanism. However, it’s not to the extent claimed in the 80s and 90s. They took something with a grain of truth to it and ran with it. If it had been done in a more controlled way, it’d make great propaganda because the best propaganda is not outright lies, but contains grains of truth. I know that one thing this stemmed from was the close examination of Multiple Personality Disorder or Dissociative Identity Disorder. The whole idea was that buried memories came out in the form of a break in the personality or identity. To be fair, many with this condition DID have fractured memories to go along with their fractured identity. I would think that abuse, especially sexual abuse, would cause this fracturing. Interestingly, we see a similar fractured identity within the trans thing. Both SA and other traumas, along with Autism / ADHD, are common in the gender referrals as well.

18:07 agreed Dakota. I want introduction to psychology and child development to be required in highschool.

Did you see that Blair White has put out a video about going to therapy to find out why Blair is trans? Blair mention at least twice about looking for "repressed memories" and refers to it as part of the process of learning more about neuroscience ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-VbV34ZjpWOE.htmlsi=qO5lMYRH2P6jucHH

Epistemology. Wokism maintains we labour under a "false consciousness" imposed by social conditioning. Accepting this idea means "standpoint epistemology" is the only valid understanding. Write a large figure 6 on a piece of paper. Lay it on the floor infront of you. Now ask someone to stand opposite you and declare what number is written on the paper. To them it will have the figure 9 written on it. Which standpoint is correct (true) ? Standpoint epistemology is almost entirely dependent on the bias of the person holding that view. Context is entirely irrelevant because context is an attempt to impose.a socially constructed perspective on the outcome. Epistemic pushback is something trans people are constantly on the lookout for.

I know you're familiar with Ethan Watters. In an early Blocked and Reported episode, Jesse Singal interviewed him and he was hesitant to say too much about the connection between repressed/recovered memory and the new wave of gender identity, but acknowledged it by saying something like "the parallels are striking". Now I see he's twitter following Genspect among other familiar names. I wonder what he'd say publicly now in 2024 that he might not have in 2020.

Your punk rock name shall be Slaysha Savage. 🤘

comment for the algorithm

There was also the "Satanic Panic" and "Facilitated Communication." The pseudoscience among psychologists and their ability to convince the credulous (even themselves) never ceases to amaze.

There was no doubt a social contagion of repressed memories. But there is such a thing. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater!

I like how it never seems to occur to people here that the parents might be the ones misremembering things