False Memories -- It Seemed The Only Way To Get Better Was To Believe Things That Would Make Her Feel Worse

After Laura Deck's treatment for depression ended, she sued her therapist over `recovered memories' of ritual sexual abuse. Her case is part of national backlash against a type of treatment that gained currency in the 1970s and has since shattered the lives of hundreds of innocent people.

Laura Deck was depressed and unable to sleep, so her family doctor referred her to a mental-health counselor at his Enumclaw clinic.

During her first hour with counselor John Laughlin, the homemaker, who is now 38, revealed enough information to keep any psychologist busy: Growing up in a broken home. A family history of depression, alcoholism and suicide attempts. Depression following the birth of a third child.

But Laughlin looked past those things and vowed in written notes to use hypnosis to get at "what is really going on."

When Deck denied she'd been sexually abused as a child, Laughlin told her to read a book that includes discussion of repressed memories. Two weeks later, he was prying from her subconscious "memories" of her favorite uncle hitting her over the head with a baseball bat and raping her.

A year later, the Enumclaw Medical Center counselor was urging the troubled woman to remember her mother placing her in a satanic cult that murdered babies on altars in the forest.

Laughlin wrote that he hadn't led Deck to those images, but other sections of his clinical notes suggest otherwise: When the idea arose that cult members had cut out a baby's heart, Deck "was quite resistant to the idea that she might have been forced to also eat some of the heart," Laughlin wrote.

During 147 therapy sessions over 2 1/2 years, Laughlin's notes show Deck resisted him at least 62 times. "Basically, she wants to be who she is but doesn't want to tell the truth, doesn't want to give information, doesn't want to do things that people could be hurt about. . . ." he noted.

Over time, Deck says now, the therapy devastated her, alienating her from family and friends, endangering her uncle, and destroying her faith in religion and reality.

"I just wanted to sleep," she recalls. "I didn't want to dig up anything else."

The treatment ended in January 1993, when Laughlin left Enumclaw to take a position at a hospital in the Central Washington town of Chelan.

Deck went into treatment with other therapists, who concluded the "memories" of rape and satanic abuse had been manufactured by Laughlin.

Hurt and frustrated, Deck sued Laughlin, the clinic and two supervising physicians for malpractice - the first lawsuit of its kind in Washington state.

Last April, she received a monetary settlement from the therapist's and physicians'insurance company. She is prohibited by the settlement from saying how much she received, but public records show she paid cash for a $205,000 vacation beach house north of Bellingham afterward.

The state is investigating the actions by Laughlin, who declines to discuss details of the case, citing patient confidentiality.

Deck's settlement comes in the midst of a national debate over the legitimacy of recovered-memory therapy, a debate that has split the psychotherapy community and flooded courts around the country with lawsuits.

Deck hopes her case will serve others who have been hurt by misguided therapy.

Laughlin's supporters say the therapist was an innocent victim of his own determination to help Deck. They concede some therapists have erred but insist such cases are rare.

"A lot of people are going to get slaughtered who don't deserve it," said Steven Feldman, a Seattle mental-health counselor who says he has treated 50 people who indicate they were abused in satanic cults.

Deck's case also demonstrates how the pendulum swings in the practice of mental health, sometimes with dramatic effect on the lives of patients and family members.

Law made suing "abusers" easier

Therapists got interested in recovered memories in the early 1970s, after research into combat flashbacks of Vietnam veterans.

The theory holds that some sex-abuse victims repress memories of their experiences, recalling them only with the help of professional persuasion, hypnosis or drugs.

In 1988, as the idea became broadly accepted, Washington state law was amended to make it easier for people remembering long-forgotten abuses to sue their alleged abusers.

The most renowned repressed-memory case in this state occurred in 1989. Paul Ingram, a former Thurston County deputy, admitted under questioning by his own department and a therapist that he had raped his own children and participated in a murderous satanic cult. He pleaded guilty but later decided he had been duped to remember things that never happened. His supporters are trying to win his release from prison, and his story will be the subject of an ABC made-for-TV movie this fall.

Recently, there has been a backlash against repressed-memory theory, both in counseling offices and in the courts.

Nationwide, four patients have successfully sued therapists in cases like Deck's, including a $2.5 million judgment in July in Minnesota. Seven others have received monetary out-of-court settlements. Thirty-eight have filed suit and are awaiting trial, and 200 former patients have indicated interest in suing, said Anita Lipton of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, a nonprofit organization that opposes repressed-memory therapy.

"Proof" was in the body language

When Laura Deck was a child, she was so quiet and responsible she pilfered marshmallows from her parents' kitchen just so she would have something to tell her priest at confession.

She attended two colleges for five years without getting a diploma, then worked as a secretary in a Seattle law firm. She quit in 1984 to raise her children in Enumclaw, where she lives with her husband, a Boeing employee.

In May 1990, fighting depression, she entered therapy with Laughlin.

Early on, he told her she needed to reject the idea that she had lived a normal, happy childhood. She was vulnerable to that persuasion because of "a long pattern of passivity with authority . . . a tremendous need to please and conform," said Maurice Lustgarten, a Bellevue psychiatrist, who is now treating her.

Deck said Laughlin's methods presented her with a terrible dilemma: The only way to get better was to believe things that would make her feel worse.

"Part of me wanted to believe to get better, but I didn't really believe," she said.

Deck said she was exhausted and on anti-depressants and other drugs, and her resistance was low. Eventually, she did believe. She "remembered" she had been abused by her uncle.

As is common in this type of therapy, Laughlin sought no corroboration for Deck's stories. But he did look to her body language, noting how she jumped a bit during therapy or when examined with a bright light. Some therapists believe such involuntary "startle responses" indicate repressed memories of abuse.

Deck says now that she jumped because Laughlin made her tense.

"It's like if you came up behind a child and said, `boo,' they would jump. I was expecting to be afraid every time I went in there."

According to Laughlin's notes, the most critical startle response came in May 1991, when he was holding a telephone receiver, proposing to call Child Protective Services (CPS) to report her uncle, who works with children.

"She felt hands on her neck, and with great difficulty told me the words she heard were from her uncle saying: `If you don't commit suicide, I will kill you,' " Laughlin wrote.

Deck says that's not what happened. She was terrified by the prospect of calling CPS, and she did indicate something was grabbing her throat, but she says Laughlin filled in the blanks.

When Deck declined to report her uncle, Laughlin warned that the man might attack other children.

Black candles, human sacrifice

The therapist's notes show he was apt to use persuasion and paranoia:

"My primary approach is to attempt to decrease the resistance," Laughlin wrote after one session, "and also to empathize and validate the feelings." He wrote after another: "Spent the majority of the session working on resistance and disbelief."

In subsequent visits, Deck began to "remember" images of stone circles in the forest, black candles and human sacrifice.

Deck says that when she felt suicidal, Laughlin suggested the cult had programmed her to kill herself. When she couldn't remember things, the cult had programmed her to forget. When she imagined anything, it became fact.

"He was breaking down any sense of reality that I had left, which wasn't much to start with," Deck said.

When Laughlin observed a records clerk at the Enumclaw Medical Center watching Deck as she left his office one day, the therapist wrote that this seemed significant. The clerk "was very conspicuously staring down the stairs after Laura for whatever reason. There was nothing else she could have been looking at. Don't know what the dynamics of that were."

Deck said Laughlin told her the clerk might be a member of the cult and, just in case, he intended to keep Deck's records away from that clerk. The clerk, who no longer works at the clinic, said she knew nothing about the accusation.

Deck said Laughlin also warned her that some police officers and some members of the clergy might be involved in cults, so she should be careful about talking with them, Deck said.

Laughlin acknowledged in a deposition that he "may" have said these things to her about the clerk, the clergy and the cops.

He also cautioned her to avoid family gatherings, Deck said. After the few occasions when she saw her uncle - whom she now calls a "Norman Rockwell kind of man" - the therapist analyzed her recollection of his glances. He said they might contain a warning or evidence of how she was programmed to kill herself.

Deck finally told her mother, sister and some friends about her uncle's alleged abuse, and afterward she felt sick for accusing him. She has since told them in detail what happened to her in therapy.

Fear the state won't act

Deck had entered treatment as a mildly depressed person and came out with "the profile of a person who has experienced severe trauma," said Seattle psychologist Laura Brown, who reviewed psychological tests done before and after the therapy.

When she quit therapy, Deck was so ashamed she demanded a copy of her records from Laughlin and asked that they be kept secret. But after talking to other therapists, she felt a moral obligation to report Laughlin to state authorities. When that didn't bring immediate action, she went to court.

Though she's never gone public, Deck's lawsuit became known to others through the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

"She's quite an inspiration to quite a few people," said Pat Burgus, an Illinois woman who along with her two sons was placed in a psychiatric hospital for more than two years after supposedly recovering "memories" of life in a satanic cult.

Burgus has sued Chicago psychiatrist Bennett Braun, and her story was the subject of a recent PBS "Frontline" program. She and Deck have become friends.

Deck agreed to go public with her story because she worries the state won't halt future abuse by Laughlin or by others.

"I don't trust that they'll do anything," she said. "I know that he's practicing as a certified mental-health counselor now."

The state may not be moving quickly, but it is starting to examine cases involving recovered-memory therapy.

In what is believed to be the first such action anywhere by a government agency, the Washington state Department of Health last July issued a fine and suspended the practice of Bellevue mental-health counselor Linda Rae MacDonald. She was accused of "validating a client's memories of alleged childhood ritual and sexual abuse without either seeking to confirm by any other means or exploring alternative explanations or interpretations of memories."

Mary Ella Jansen, disciplinary program manager for the state Health Department's medical quality-assurance commission, said her agency is now investigating Laughlin's handling of Deck because the law requires a probe of any malpractice suit that results in a settlement larger than $20,000. Results are expected in about six months, Jansen said.

It's easy to become a "counselor"

Though the Health Department regulates therapists by issuing them licenses, the nature of the regulation varies. Standards applied to the 600 medical doctors who specialize in psychiatry and the 5,500 social workers, mental-health and marriage therapists who are certified by the state are starkly different from those applied to the 4,800 mental-health counselors who are simply registered by the state.

Registered counselors must only pay a $40 fee, fill out a brief questionnaire and take four hours of AIDS education, a requirement for all health workers. There are no other educational or professional requirements, as there are with doctors and certified counselors.

Laughlin is a certified counselor, but was only a registered counselor when Deck entered treatment. He was also certified as a medically trained physician's assistant.

He had all the education needed for certification, however, and became certified in November 1992, in part because of a lawsuit filed against him the year before by another Enumclaw family that claimed he failed to prevent a man's suicide.

In a letter to state regulators, Laughlin said the suicide charges were unfair, but his insurance company settled the case out of court anyway. He indicated that certification might lend more weight to his resume if there were future lawsuits.

Laughlin, 48, obtained a bachelor's degree in psychology, served as an Air Force psychiatric specialist and received a master's degree in clinical psychology from Eastern Washington University. He then acquired specialized training to get his certification as a physician's assistant.

Donna Hickenbottom, a retired scheduling clerk who worked with him, calls Laughlin "a very nice, sincere, Christian man."

Other than the suicide case and Deck's lawsuit, his record is umblemished.

Treatment defended as appropriate and normal

In an affidavit he filed in Laughlin's behalf, Seattle therapist Feldman called Laughlin's treatment of Deck appropriate and normal. But in an interview, Feldman said he hadn't really seen all the records or talked with Deck, so he couldn't be sure.

"I wouldn't render a total opinion on that case, because I'd need to see everything in order to say he didn't make any mistakes," Feldman said. Feldman and others who are generally considered to be repressed-memory or dissociative-memory experts say their techniques and beliefs are not so easy to characterize. He said when he deals with people suffering from dissociative or multi-personality disorders he is very careful not to lead them to or endorse their so-call memories, and he is skeptical of practitioners who do.

Brown, the psychologist who supported Deck in her case but who is philosophically aligned with Feldman and others who accept the idea of lost memories, said practitioners reject the term "repressed memory" because of the way opponents have treated it. They prefer the term "delayed recall of memory," she said.

Brown said therapy patients do sometimes suppress traumatic memories, remembering only a thread until they experience "delayed recall." Problems arise when a therapist insists "you must believe me," she said.

"No competent therapist, in my opinion, says: `I am sure this is what happened to you,' " Brown said.

Laughlin said he has changed his methods since treating Deck, but declined to give details except to say he is "much more careful."

"In 1990, when this occurred, nobody ever had any idea that patients could make up whole histories. . . . " Laughlin said "and that somebody could convince them to do that."

`I don't have faith . . . anymore"

Dallas attorney Skip Simpson, who handled the nation's first lawsuit against repressed-memory therapy, said these kinds of cases now account for 70 percent of his business. It's become a specialty, too, for University of Washington professor Elizabeth Loftus, who says serving as an expert in recovered-memory cases now accounts for 70 percent of her $375-an-hour consulting business.

Feldman said going to court is the wrong approach, and that the profession will correct itself as the pendulum swings. He said the "lunatics" on both sides of this argument "will cancel each other out."

Lustgarten, the psychiatrist currently treating Deck, is not so sure. He said the state and the professional organizations must take a more aggressive role.

"One of the reasons we have governments is to protect us against ourselves," he said. "The lawsuit is the ultimate way of doing it."

Lustgarten hopes that Deck will recover with time.

Maybe so, said Deck, but, "I was really traumatized. I had a very strong faith in people and religion and in life in general. I don't have faith in much at all any more.

"I want to believe in things."