Daughters Lost

As I read “Daughters Lost,” I was increasingly convinced by and sympathetic to Mark Pendergrast’s pain and horror at his daughters’ allegations of sexual abuse. Then, at the very end of the piece, he made an apparent error in interpreting King Lear that chillingly opened my mind to the possibility that Pendergrast, as sincere as he seems, may be blind to some of the realities of his family relationships.

Pendergrast seems to think that, in the scene he describes, Cordelia is apologizing to her father, and that Lear graciously replies, in effect, “Don’t worry. We both screwed up.” In fact, the breach between them came about because Lear did what Pendergrast’s daughters accuse him of doing: violating the respectful boundaries of the father-daughter relationship, putting his own needs first, demanding a love that was special and, to him, necessary. “I love your Majesty / According to my bond, no more nor less,” Cordelia tells Lear in Act I, and Lear’s response is to feel slighted and enraged, and to banish her.

Does Pendergrast distort the meaning of King Lear because he is unaware of his own Lear-like narcissism? His daughters’ “memories” of physical sexual abuse may not be accurate — but do they symbolize a psychological invasiveness that was more subtle, but equally powerful and damaging? If this is so, Pendergrast, for all his suffering as a “victim” of false accusations, has not yet experienced what Lear endured: the pain of exploded grandiosity, of realizing his foolishness and his mistakes and, finally, emerging as a man capable of genuine love and understanding.

Thank you for printing Maurean Lally’s letter. When I read it, I couldn’t help but laugh. I get similar letters from readers of my company’s magazines — letters that attack not just our editorial decisions but our underlying mission. It takes a bit of good-natured humor to smile in the face of such criticism, and a bit more to print it in your magazine.

I also want to thank you for printing Mark Pendergrast’s “Daughters Lost” [June 1995]. You took some heat for publishing it, but, from my perspective, Pendergrast’s story transcends his guilt or innocence (the issue that seems to be the source of much of the criticism). It is an archetypal tale of a father’s loss, his impotence to correct the loss, and his inability or unwillingness to resolve it — a story that should have redemption in the end, but has none. It still troubles me.

Mark Pendergrast would have us believe that therapists put memories in their clients’ heads, and that hypnotists induce “false” memories. Yet he went to a hypnotist to remember the past and came up with nothing new; he had six therapists and none of them put any “false” memories in his head. It’s only because his daughters have accused him of abuse that he vilifies therapists.

He denies that he lacked boundaries with his daughters, yet at the beginning of his essay he describes wanting to “taste” his daughter’s thumb. She didn’t want him to have it, but he kept trying to pull it out of her mouth until he succeeded, and then he stuck it in his own mouth. Her body was not hers to control, but his to “taste.” This example betrays him. He uses it to show how much “fun” he had with his little girl, but all it shows me is that he wanted to consume her.

What Mark Pendergrast doesn’t understand is that his daughters are separate from him. He says, “We seemed to remember radically different childhoods,” but it wasn’t his childhood. His was the fatherhood to remember. Only his child knows what her childhood was like. But because he has no boundaries, he can’t understand this.

One reason daughters cut off communication with their fathers is because it’s the only way they can establish their own boundaries. Late in life, Pendergrast’s daughter is finally saying to him, “It’s my thumb, and it doesn’t belong in your mouth!”

Pendergrast’s family experience reminds me a great deal of my own, though I am on the other side, being the daughter.

My family was a little different from his. My parents stayed married, though they hardly related to one another. My father was quite sexual with me. He never slept with me or made much physical contact, but his interest in me was inordinate and inappropriate. He was also alcoholic, and, as time went on, his sexual pathology increased.

I believe Pendergrast’s story; nothing he says indicates that he behaved sexually with his daughters. I can’t imagine how horrible it would be to hear such a malignant accusation from the two people I loved most. But no one is blameless. I think Pendergrast let his daughters become the primary focus of his emotional life, in place of an adult female. They were correct to feel like “surrogate wives.” To be that important to a parent is more pressure than a child can bear.

One of my several therapists had a great interest in my uncovering specific sexual memories that I did not have. Under pressure from her and in my seemingly endless anxiety and depression, I generated those memories. I now know them to be false. Obviously, I don’t know nearly as much about this therapeutic phenomenon as Pendergrast does. I wonder, though, if these memories are generated in part by a desire to express some underlying disorder. I don’t mean to trivialize concern for the truth. But perhaps a dispassionate view will make things more clear.

In my family, every one of five children broke all contact for a period of time. Some of us have come in contact again; some haven’t. My father died eleven years ago, still drinking, still oblivious. We’ve all had difficulties with our mother as well; her decision to stay with him was not necessarily in our best interests. We each had to spend time alone; we had to have distance in order to renegotiate the family contract.

The best thing my mom did for me was take care of herself. She went to twelve-step meetings, retired to a town she loved, made lots of friends, and took care of herself financially; in short, she made sure she didn’t need me. At times, when I was doing poorly, she was concerned and interested and sympathetic, but I’m sure when she got off the phone with me she had a little cry and then went on. There was great relief in knowing that I could get better without the added pressure of needing to make her feel better, too.

I think the specific horrors of his daughters’ accusations have blinded Pendergrast — understandably so — to what his daughters need from him right now: some space; respect for their needs, including the need to be separate; acceptance of them as people with their own paths, however loony those paths might seem.

It seems we are all looking for a demon. The other day I had my picture taken with mine: my horrific, loud, bellicose, abusive, patriarchal father. Rather, he is my ex-demon, for though my father represented the root of all evil in my life for a long time, it is over now. I have seen him as he is; he has stopped being God, and is now just a man with a soul.

I hold inside me two contradictory truths: that my father loved me, and that he did the inhuman to me. I was never caught in the false-memory debate; no one in my family ever suggested that my father didn’t do what he did. But, as your magazine teaches all the time, truth and love are not simple. I remember I love my father. And I remember his cruelty.

If we all need a demon, Mark Pendergrast’s is some amorphous group of therapists and authors with an agenda. What could be their motivation for ruining other people’s lives? Perhaps Pendergrast believes they were molested and now want to share the misery. Or perhaps some therapist convinced them they were sexually abused, and now they’ve become therapists to convince others. Such stories nurture the happy idea that incest isn’t endemic in this culture; that the abuse your magazine often chronicles somehow magically manages to rein itself away from the sexual sphere; that, yes, we’re heartbroken and demented as a family, a tribe, a culture, and yet we’re off the hook when it comes to incest — it’s just a bunch of therapists making up false memories. What was it Muriel Rukeyser said? “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”

I don’t suggest that Pendergrast is lying. I do think his book is a naive search for a new demon. That our culture accepts his explanation makes perfect sense: all the more reason for The Sun to think twice before printing it.

I can’t express how angered, saddened, and disappointed I am by your decision to excerpt Mark Pendergrast’s self-serving terrorist attack on his daughters, Victims of Memory.

I can, however, ask you to cancel my subscription.

I do this very reluctantly, as I usually enjoy your magazine a great deal, and I understand that Pendergrast has a right to state his side of the story. However, I believe the issue of the reliability of repressed memory is so important that one must take sides, and I cannot allow my subscription dollars to support a publication that gives its blessing to the side I believe to be absolutely, criminally wrong.

I play a game with my four-year-old niece: I kiss her on the cheek, and she rubs the spot with her hand and says, “I wiped it off.” I chase her and kiss her again. Anyone watching us (and this game is played with other adults around) can see that she is leading the game, all giggles and teasing. If I don’t chase her, she comes back, grabs my sleeve, and says, “Aunt Cathy, I wiped it off,” then runs away, looking back to make sure I’m chasing her, slowing down to wait for me if I’m not.

Until I read the replies to Mark Pendergrast’s “Daughters Lost” [Correspondence, August 1995], I had never even thought of how this game could be misinterpreted as an abusive violation of her boundaries. Are we to become afraid of our children, denying them loving touch and silly games, overanalyzing all interactions? Every child I’ve known has at some point loved a version of the “you-can’t-get-me” game. What kind of message would we be sending if we didn’t accept that invitation to chase, tickle, kiss, or engage in rough-and-tumble?

Recently, I touched this same niece’s hair — a simple affectionate gesture, I thought — and she said, “Don’t touch my hair,” in a tone that let me know this was not a game. I stopped instantly and will not do it again. It’s difficult to convey with the “bare facts,” but not at all difficult to tell in person, when something is a game and when it is a violation of boundaries.

None of this proves that Pendergrast is telling the truth, but it does point out the difficulty of judging someone else’s actions without having the whole picture. As a hypnotist, I’m aware that memories can be suggested and also created through a collaboration of client and therapist. This is a big concern. But as an aunt and soon-to-be mother, I am even more concerned about the possibility that we are creating a world in which we’re all afraid to touch and play.

I’ve just read Mark Pendergrast’s “Daughters Lost” and I must say I feel intense compassion for him. My childhood was not without its sad memories, like everyone else's, but overall I consider myself blessed to have been raised by good folks, salt-of-the-earth farmers in north central Texas.

Do we nowadays count too little on ourselves and too much on someone or something else — the government, a shrink, a lawyer, a pill — to fix our lives? Or do we truly believe that life requires tremendous courage, heart, strength, and gumption? It seems to me that the richness and joy of life come from going forward as best we can. For me, that’s meant putting the torch to some bad memories. It’s meant throwing guilt out the window and hoping that I’ve learned something. And it’s meant forgiving it all.

God damn the hurters of children; “Annie’s Hair” makes us remember that it happens. And God help those who are hurt — children and parents. With “Daughters Lost” Pendergrast steps out of the muck of confusion, rejects a great opportunity for self-pity, and works to find the truth of the situation. He has my respect.

I remain haunted by “Daughters Lost.” I’ve spent twenty years in various therapies for sundry problems — anorexia, suicide attempts, dysfunctional everything. The first year I attended Al-Anon I had my first sexual-abuse memory. A touch from my husband triggered it. At that point I’d read no literature addressing recovered memories. I was divorced the following year.

My experience differs vastly from Pendergrast’s relationship with his children. My father was an alcoholic and died of related illnesses. My mother has always been mentally ill. They beat me up once when I asked them to go to therapy with me.

Perhaps Pendergrast’s daughters read all the way through The Courage to Heal. (I only got to page fourteen.) Perhaps they did all the exercises. They might believe right now that the abuse really happened. But if they keep growing through it, they’ll have to come to their own conclusions.

During the time I was actively praying to have all my memories returned to me, I was also actively hating my parents’ guts. I had massive resentments and stayed angry for at least two years. I kept my contact with my mother to a bare minimum, and still do so. While I realize that my mother is never going to be the protective pal I craved, and my abusers will never pay for their crimes, I also know that life goes on. If I hold on to resentments, I will die from the poison. But if I keep my faith that God watches over me and take responsibility for the rest, I might have a life worthy of recounting.

Pendergrast’s daughters will mature. They will want to reconcile. They will see through some of the junk well-meaning idiots have written and think their own thoughts, have their own memories.

When my sister told me that her suicidal tendencies and multiple-personality disorder were caused by severe abuse she suffered at the hands of my long-dead father — the adult I most admired in my family — I was deeply disturbed. My friends all urged me to believe her, and I genuinely tried. But it didn’t take. I was already an adult when she was a child, and I saw nothing that I would call abuse. The longer she associated with therapists and with other abused people, the stranger her stories became. Finally, she accused both our parents of ritual satanic abuse.

I do not believe that the things she claims to remember literally happened. Like Pendergrast, I have done a lot of thinking and talking with friends. If all my friends who claim to be abused are telling the literal truth, the world we live in is even more horrible than I can imagine. Possibly some of these memories are from dreams. Or perhaps people need excuses for the small lives they lead. Having been abused is a ready-made excuse for not living a full life.

Considering how confused our cultural attitudes about sex and intrusion are, it’s no surprise people become hysterical about this subject. I do recognize that people like my sister are deeply hurt by something. And I very much hope to see her heal herself one day. Until then I will love her as much as she will allow, while maintaining my own view of reality.

I once wrote a letter to my dad asking him to confess to molesting me. Although I couldn’t (and still can’t) recall anything, I suspected that my difficulty in relationships, trouble keeping a job, poor memory, sexual dysfunction, and low self-image related to some early trauma. (I had a number of friends who had recovered memories.) But I didn’t send the letter.

Now I’m glad I didn’t. It turned out that I have attention-deficit disorder, the symptoms of which resemble those of abuse survivors. Some could argue, I suppose, that my condition results from molestation. But all the reading I’ve done indicates that it is a physiological problem caused by genetic predisposition.

Because of my experience, I read Mark Pendergrast’s “Daughters Lost” [June 1995] with great interest. I’ll bet there are some genuine molesters in the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. What better hiding place? But that doesn’t mean, as some survivors and their “helpers” seem to think, that parents who deny abusing their children are always liars.

Thanks for having Diana Maria Castro’s “Annie’s Hair” in the same issue. We need to acknowledge that molestation does happen, even if false memories muddy the water.

I was more disturbed by the responses to Mark Pendergrast’s “Daughters Lost” [Correspondence, August 1995] than by the essay itself. While I admit to thinking, “The lady doth protest too much,” when I read the essay — because it would be my nature to put it behind me, not exorcise the demon in public — no one is in a position to really know what happened or didn’t; not even the players themselves, it seems. I cannot help being reminded of my own experiences, which demonstrate how life in this century, this country, this largely faithless culture does not guarantee a one-size-fits-all explanation, though we’ve taught ourselves to expect one.

Six months after we were married, my husband was killed in an accident. We’d had a joyous sex life until the month before he died, when I was suddenly plagued with an irrational desire to hit him or scream at him whenever he expressed any physical affection. It created a huge chasm in our relationship.

A month or so after he died, I began to have memories about my next-door neighbor when I was five. I remembered him being alone with me in my house, lying on top of me on our sofa, putting his tongue in my mouth; his boozy smell, his craggy and unshaven face. I do not know if he penetrated me, I do not remember physical pain or fear, and I do not recall any threats: there is only a vague sense of impropriety and disgust.

Since these memories surfaced, I have neither had nightmares nor felt revulsion at a man’s touch. When I told my mother, she verified my memory of this man as a flaky, alcoholic, shiftless “uncle.” Upset that she had never known or suspected, she accepted — with relief, I’m sure — that I didn’t feel the need to delve deeper or force myself to recall further details. Perhaps what I remember is all that happened. If so, I cannot really claim to identify with those who were molested by their fathers or subjected to ritualized abuse. But it is also possible that some mental health professionals value pursuit of such memories at any cost to the patient’s dignity, privacy, or capacity for survival.

I have a friend whose personal life was nearly destroyed by accusations that later proved unfounded. He was accused of molesting a three-year-old by a woman in our church, based on a “vision” she’d had. The pastor believed her and set about proving the case. The police investigated and found no evidence of molestation. (It was later learned that the woman who initiated the accusation had herself been molested, along with her three children, by her own father.) The parents of the child admitted that they had not suspected my friend of the crime, and had begun to press details upon the child only at the pastor’s urging. No charges were filed, but my friend’s standing in the community was irrevocably damaged, his fiancée left him, and he nearly lost his job. Most of his friends who’d claimed to believe in his innocence could no longer bring themselves to leave him alone in a room with their children. While this is not an example of false-memory syndrome, it does demonstrate that it is possible for innocent people to be accused and nearly convicted despite evidence to the contrary.

Another friend of mine was discussing the joys of motherhood with coworkers and remarked that she loved her baby’s chubby bottom and sometimes kissed it after a bath. One woman treated her as if she were a pervert, and my friend went home feeling ashamed.

I love my children desperately at times, and keeping them safe and secure is worth any suffering. Other times it is only a few days away from them, alone on a business trip, that keeps me sane. All parents must know at the deepest level that we love our children more than any force on earth or in heaven, even God, and that is how it must be. He made us with the instinct to protect them in the face of danger, at the cost of our own lives if necessary. But sometimes we fail — just as my mother failed when she shared her intimacies with me when I was too young to hear them; just as I fail when I yell at my nine-year-old because I am exhausted or stressed by my job. And sometimes we fail when we place our children at risk of feeling responsible for our happiness. But it doesn’t automatically mean that we have abused them or neglected them, emotionally or sexually. There is a distinction.

Pointing fingers at a man who seems to be trying to understand the loss of his relationship with his beloved children is counterproductive and judgmental. At the very least, he deserves compassion for his willingness to expose his own frailties in public in an effort to help others and regain his loss. But would I leave my children in his care? Probably not — and it pains me to say so.

I am so deeply moved by Mark Pendergrast’s “Daughters Lost” [June 1995]. I find it hard to imagine a worse thing that could happen to someone. I admire enormously his courage in writing it, and I respect his honesty and integrity.

I love the stories he tells of when his children were little. It’s extraordinary that, in the midst of his pain and despair, he can describe so vividly all the happy times they had together.

I hope that he will write and let you know if (when) he finally gets his kids back.

When I was forty-one, my father died. After the funeral, I returned home, where my life exploded. My therapist never breathed the words incest, sexual abuse, or any variation thereof. Yet the dreams and flashbacks came on their own, totally consuming me and everyone in my life. I don’t read popular magazines (where incest is now a fad). I hardly ever watch television (and never during the day). There was no implantation of “false memories.” There was only a desperate search to make sense of my experience.

One of the few beacons of sanity for me then was The Sun. Here was a magazine that allowed spiritual exploration, where contributors spoke from places I recognized. The Sun became very important to me.

The September issue arrived today. I opened it eagerly, anxious to immerse myself. But after reading the Correspondence section, I felt betrayed. I can understand your allowing Mark Pendergrast’s original article [“Daughters Lost,” June 1995] to appear. I can understand letting him have one short rebuttal (considerably shorter than the one in the August issue), but there is absolutely no excuse for the second one. By giving this man an unchallenged forum, you have taken an official position. It is a position that turns my guts inside out.

In the eighteen months I have been reading The Sun, you have never permitted an author to reiterate his position with such vehemence and frequency. You have allowed Pendergrast to refute competent therapists, as if he had expertise in psychology. Pendergrast possesses no such qualifications, yet you have granted him the last word. Your editorial decision is unconscionable.

I was shocked and horrified at your insensitivity in placing “Annie’s Hair” in the same issue with “Daughters Lost,” let alone on the following page. Were the editors out to lunch?

I, too, was tempted to write after reading Mark Pendergrast’s “Daughters Lost.” He clearly expressed the pain of feeling wrongly accused, judged, and convicted. But for every father or mother falsely accused, untold numbers of children are abused.

Reading Pendergrast’s lengthy response to letters from The Sun’s readers raises the question: How is it that those letters which agreed with him he found “supportive,” yet those that didn’t support him he could immediately tell were “knee-jerk reactions”?

I was deeply distressed by Mark Pendergrast’s “Daughters Lost.” As a survivor of childhood incest and mother of a twenty-six-year-old daughter recovering from incest, I live with this issue on a daily basis.

I was struck by the enormous suffering experienced by both Pendergrast and his daughters. It is agonizing that he is still unable to respect his daughters’ boundaries, is still convinced that they must do it his way. He will say whatever he needs to manipulate them, even to the point of publishing open letters. His daughters are young women now. They have their own agonies to heal. How they do that, whom they do it with, and when is none of his business. His business is to examine why he is unable to respect their requests. Focusing on who did what to whom and joining national organizations that blame therapists are just diversions.

Sexual abuse of children is not limited to intercourse. Touching children to comfort oneself, even in a nonsexual way, can be enormously damaging to them. Pendergrast makes a point of telling how close he was with the daughter who has accused him of sexual abuse, as if that proves nothing could have happened between them. After my father molested me when I was six, I followed him everywhere for the next twenty years. I had bonded with my perpetrator and believed I was responsible for all his needs. This is common for victims of incest.

Debating about whose memories are “true” is a waste of time and energy. If Pendergrast’s child felt tortured when that hot iron touched her, it doesn’t matter what “really” happened. Proving that his daughter or her therapist is wrong, sick, or criminal will not ease the author’s suffering. The only way to do that is to focus on himself and his own healing. I wish him the courage to feel his pain and end his suffering soon. My heart goes out to all three of them. There is difficult work ahead.