False Memories, Real Damage

What thirty years of evidence show about how suggestion in therapy creates false memories, destroys families, and causes lasting harm.

In 1974, when I was a nineteen-year-old creative writing major at Queens College, three women recruiters approached me on campus. They flirted, asked thought-provoking questions, and listened to everything I said. I had been dumped by my girlfriend the week before. The recruiters were members of the Moon organization, a destructive Korean cult I knew nothing about.

Within two weeks, I was sleep-deprived, isolated at an estate in upstate New York, and convinced that Sun Myung Moon was the Messiah on Earth. Part of the indoctrination involved my memories. The recruiters drew out a few painful childhood experiences: my dog being killed by a car, my grandmother’s death, and my relationship with my father. Once they had those raw materials, the group magnified the negatives and minimized everything else.

I came to believe my childhood had been lonely and miserable. I came to believe Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han (now running the cult from jail in South Korea) were my True Parents, and that Milton and Estelle Hassan were merely my “physical parents” and products of Satan.

The new story felt absolutely real, and I believed it. It shaped my behavior completely. I dropped out of college, donated my bank account, worked 18 to 21 hours a day, 7 days a week, for no pay, and recruited others into the same trap.

A near-fatal van crash due to sleep deprivation happened on April 23rd, 1976, and brought me back into contact with my sister, Thea. I had to reckon with the difference between what had actually happened in my life and what I had been indoctrinated to remember.

I sat down with old photographs and home movies. I talked with teachers, neighbors, friends, and family. They reminded me I had biked across America at sixteen, canoed and fished my way to Alaska, worked an archaeological dig in Israel, and gone fishing with my father on Sunday mornings.

None of those memories had been erased. Just suppressed by my Moonie, pseudo-identity. All of them had been buried under a manufactured narrative that I had a horrible childhood, was depressed, a drug addict, and my father had abused me physically.

I bring this up because undue influence techniques, unfortunately, can show up in psychotherapy offices, even among clinicians with no religious or ideological agenda whatsoever.

Years later, my sister Thea, who helped me to get out of the Moonies, called me in the 1980s about a “weird” experience she had. Her two sons had moved out and left for college, and, in my opinion, she was experiencing “empty nest syndrome.”

She located a licensed counselor, and when she went to have her first session, the counselor asked her if she had ever been sexually abused by our father. She said, “No.” Thea told me the therapist then said, “Well, you have all the symptoms of someone who has been sexually abused. Let’s use hypnosis to remember what really happened.”

My sister told me her response was, “Excuse me, but my brother is a therapist and was in the Moonies, and what you just said is wigging me out.”

Thea got up, left, and then called me. I was aghast and asked for the therapist’s name and phone number. I called the therapist and told her she was unethical and could lose her license for doing zero intake and using hypnosis with no proper training.

Wherever an authority figure tells a suffering, trusting person to look inward for a hidden cause and then guides what gets found, the same machinery is in motion. My late colleague and mentor, Alan W. Scheflin, and I described one version of this as a cult of one. The mechanism is improper use of suggestion and hypnotic techniques, which can be labeled as undue influence. The harm is real and well-documented.

This piece is my own account of what we know about recovered memory therapy in 2026, what the science says, what the legal system is missing, and what to look for if you, your client, or your loved one is caught in it.

What is “Recovered Memory Therapy?”

I want to be precise here, as childhood sexual abuse is horrifyingly common, and I have spent much of my career helping survivors. Most children remember their sexual abuse but are programmed by the pedophile to never tell anyone, told that no one would believe them, or even that they were responsible for seducing the perpetrator.

In some cases, I have worked on, the child was told terrible things would happen if they told anyone – that their dog would be killed or taken away, that another family member would be harmed.