Back in the 1990s there was a fad in a subset of American Christianity called the healing of memories movement. The idea was that there were great opportunities and great need for healing from the wounds caused by forgotten memories and that recovering the memories and praying through them and giving them to God would bring a great deal of healing. People would feel called into special ministries to deal with the healing of past wounds. Heresy hunters jumped on this movement as dangerous because it was the sort of thing where there was no need to deal with the past because in Christ we are new creations and setting aside what is behind to push forward to salvation was the goal of real Christians, not all those worldly compromisers.
Well, that response was itself problematic and distorted. It is not as though people can just shove the past into a corner and move on with their lives. There is a need for the renewal of the mind and seeing our lives in light of the story of who Christ is is necessary for spiritual growth. By spiritual growth I mean being more and more conformed to the likeness of Christ, not some self-measured nebulous measure of spiritual progressed based on what in a Boston song could be described as "more than feeling".
Now for people who are skeptical about all those sorts of things it may be easy to cite with suspicion how charismaniac preachers and teachers invoke wounds from a forgotten past. We are discovering more about how prone to suggestion people really are and that memories can at length be fabricated. It is possible with enough prodding and poking for the grand-daddy of all confirmation biases to produce memories of events that never happened. It is perilously easy for us to remember with the kind of 20/20 that is self-exonerating instead of self-implicating, or alternately to have a 20/20 that is self-implicating. As the apostle warned, their consciences sometimes accuse them and excuse them.
Even in a church setting where such mystical mumbo-jumbo would be rebuked sternly there can still be a metanarrative that sets you up for failure of the same kind. You won't even realize it. A Christian community that takes itself seriously and insists on being the hardcore of the hardcore can establish a paradigm in which a person who is zealous for the faith even in a fairly orthodox context can nevertheless see one's family as essentially adversarial. I once knew a fellow who felt that his family were not Christians at all, or not really real Christians. He leaned a lot on his church family but after he got married and enlisted, at length, his church family completely failed him and the family that he at one point lamented was not very serious about the faith turned out to be supportive.
I have wondered over that time if the kind of church he was at made it easier to believe that family was somehow inadequate to the task of helping him be the sort of man he wanted to be. There was, almost, a metanarrative of how this church was full of people who would not fail to be men and women in the way the prior generation had. Each generation is called to repent of its sins and to take a stand against the sins of the fathers. This is attested in the scriptures and throughout the generations. Yet it often seems as though rather than sifting through the good and the bad we American Christians have appointed ourselves judge and jury of everything and found everything wanting in the generation that has passed and the generation to come. The generation that preceded us was full of fathers who somehow failed us and the generation that is rising up has no fathers or vision ... even though those are theoretically or literally our children about whom this indictment has been made.
The most pernicious setting in which recovered memories has been discussed is sexual abuse. This is where even the professionals have recognized they have done irreparable harm creating memories of sexual abuse that never happened by way of old methods, empathy-building combined with leading questiosn. Mental health specialists who have toiled in this realm of treatment have begun to conclude that in most cases of allegedly recovered memories of sexual abuse the content of the fantasy is indicative of catastrophic failures in PRESENT relationships as they are perceived and not from past events. A mental health specialist once put it this way, if you were really sexually abused the event would be so horrible you would never STOP remembering it rather than repressing the memory. Increasingly mental health professionals have taken this perspective rather than supposing that memories were suppressed.
Over the years I have met some Christians who sought "Christian counseling" and confided that they sometimes felt the unavoidable conviction that the Christian counselor was steering them with questions toward a particular conclusion and over time I began to realize that that particular conclusion was some past with sexual abuse. This can be the case with men. In our time there are plenty of pastors who are upset at the war on boys and the assault on traditional masculinity as though traditional masculinity were somehow not in need of redemption!
Feminism is held up as an adversary to be vanquished more than as a response with positive and negative elements that came about in response to problems. As Fr Ernesto Obregon put it over in his blog, there are a lot of evangelicals who need to be reminded that even forty and fifty years ago preachers were publicly going on record saying that women ought not to be able to vote because they were not as rational as men and should not be guiding politics. I wonder what those sorts of conservatives would make of the candidacy of Sarah Palin.
By contrast, it can often seem as though sexual abuse of women can be ignored. A young women may be made the prey of a pastor and when the sin is made known the woman is shamed rather than any disciplinary action or legal action being taken against the man. There are churches where a man will have an affair, renounce Christ, and leave the church and then the woman is held responsible for the failure of her marriage by the church authorities on the grounds that had she been a better wife these things would not have happened and that the Lord has punished her sin of pride by letting her husband do these things. Imagine how the daughter of such a woman would grow up and what her feelings about church leaders might be? It can seem as though churches spend time suppressing wod of real sexual abuse while imagining sexual abuse incidents from the past that never actually happened as part of some kind of therapeutic deism, sometimes practiced by those very people who would most repudiate therapeutic deism given the chance.
I am an older brother and when I hear stories of Christian women who were ignored in the wake of real sexual abuse by church leaders or prominent church members I can't help but feel that chemical castration might be part of a disciplinary procedure. Since sexual abuse is more often about power rather than sex, though, such extreme measures would perhaps miss the point of the possible motives for the sin.
Meanwhile men have confided that they believe a Christian counselor is determined to see a sin he struggles with persistently as rooted in childhood sexual abuse that either didn't happen or to a degree that does not correspond to memory. It baffles me that so many in so many churches seem eager to dismiss the sexual abuse that actually happened because it would make things tough for the church as an organization (whether we're talking about the Catholic church or allegations that a Reformed pastor a bit east of us knowingly permitted a convicted sex offender manage childrens' ministries) while in other settings Christian counselors seem dead set on ferreting out the implications of sexual abuse that never actually happened at all!
I myself have been on the receiving end of such enquiries and I decided rapidly that I did not trust a Christian with a high school education and some history of drug abuse and no real knowledge of my family history to make it his business to suggest or propose at any level that I got this or that form of abuse. Even if such allegations via suggestion had any merit my skepticism is founded upon the realization that many memories we think are real are not only not real but are complete fabrications that we can spin to ourselves to convince ourselves things happened a certain way.
Paradoxically digging for repressed memories of abuse, fabricating memories of abuse that didn't happen, and suppression of word of real abuse all amount to the same thing, forcefully grasping for power. That power is often illusory and invariably destructive. Suppressing the truth about sexual abuse is destructive, wielding imagined memories is destructive, and believing that a forgotten past sexual abuse must be uncovered to make a breakthrough in a Christian counseling setting are all forceful things. When the Spirit truly speaks He speaks unbidden. We can ask Him to speak to us, through us, and for us, but the times in which the Spirit providentially illuminates our understanding often come at times that are ineffably unexpected. The times when the Lord made things painfully apparent to me it was not something possessed by someone coming to me with a confrontational chip on their shoulder or a counseling axe to grind. These things were words shared in loved by a loved one whose unobtrusive observation was convicting because the Spirit used those words to convict me of things and to persuade me.
So I am deeply skeptical about healing of memories in the charismatic sense, but also in the sense that more ostensibly evangelical Christians seem to have it. I have at rare times in my life been accused of seeing things in black and white but that is the last thing I would say is true of me. I am often paralyzed by the observation of varied hues of gray. Things like a healing of memories session where someone who just displayed the symptoms of a pyschotic break (or demon possession) may provide a panacea but the underlying problems may still remain.
Someone I knew who ended up the subject of an impromptu exorcism later turned out to be borderline schizophrenic and had to be institutionalized twice. This was not some simple, clear-cut case of someone being demon-possessed and nothing else nor someone who was mentally ill in a way that precluded the possibility of spiritual problems. To this day I hesitate to settle firmly on merely one or the other where others were confidently saying it was demons and others were confidentally saying mental illness. When the person is someone you've seen at church for a good stretch of your life you share just enough of your life with them and they with you that you begin to suspect that a lot of what passes for solutions among Christians are quick fix mentalities masquerading as discernment on either side of a person's very messy life.
I get the more I get the troubled sense that Christians frequently seem to think they know better than "worldly" studies while unwittingly and bluntly replicating some of the very techniques and metanarratives they supposedly stand against. What good does it do to reproach a healing-of-memories fraud if you still work on the assumption that the problem some young man has in his life was that he had no godly role models or that he's avoiding some repressed memory of sexual abuse? You might as well break out the books that talk about the Jezebel spirit. Doesn't that concede total defeat in practice to the so-called Freudian approach or of "pop psychology"?
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