I THINK I WAS SEXUALLY ABUSED AS A CHILD
Recently my boyfriend and I watched a movie in which the main actress was sexually abused by her father when she was a child. My reaction to this scene and the emotional hurt of the actress was so astounding that I am now afraid the story in the movie is in fact an echo of my own story.
I have been afraid of men since my teenage years, and I’ve never been able explain this to myself as I can’t remember a man ever trying to harm me. As I grew into adulthood, I enjoyed dating but always balked at any intimacy.
Although I love my boyfriend, I don’t want to have sex with him and have told him that this is because of my religious convictions but if I am honest with myself, it is more than that.
I have no conscious memory of being sexually abused. How can I nd out if this ever happened to me. I’ve read about women who have discovered through hypnotherapy that they were sexually abused as children. Is hypnosis a failsafe method to get to know what happened? Miriam, email
Hypnotherapy is one of the techniques we use to treat people who have experienced trauma in the past, but it is not a truth serum. The problem is that when hypnotising a subject one can create a false memory. Elizabeth Lous, a well-known psychologist in the United States, has done sterling work on false memory syndrome and has shown that although true experiences can be explored in hypnosis it may also cause a false memory of an experience that never happened. It is for this reason that when one uses hypnosis in a forensic seing there are some safeguards that should be applied. These safeguards were developed by American psychiatrist Martin Orne and prevent the therapist giving leading suggestions to the person in hypnosis.
Consult a psychologist well trained in hypnosis but not with the sole purpose of “finding out the truth”.
An experienced psychologist and hypnotherapist will know how to conduct the therapy for the purpose of addressing the fear you have of men and intimacy. The origin of this may be something other than sexual abuse in childhood.