When Memory Is Uncertain: What Therapists Can Learn From the “False Memory” Debate

How therapists can understand recovered memories and suggestibility, employing the clinical art of taking experience seriously without claiming certainty about the past.

Related articles: Understanding Dissociation, Trauma-Informed Practice: Fundamentals for Therapists, EMDR: Overview and Applications.

Introduction

A client sits opposite you and says something that changes the atmosphere in the room. “I’ve started having memories of my childhood that I didn’t have before. I don’t know if they’re real.”

Perhaps the memories involve sexual abuse, violence, or another frightening experience. Perhaps they have appeared as fragments: an image, a sensation, a particular room, a suddenly vivid recollection. The client may feel horrified by what is emerging. They may also be deeply uncertain about it. “What if this really happened?” they ask. And then, perhaps even more anxiously: “What if it didn’t?”

For the therapist, this is difficult territory. Empathy pulls us towards taking the client’s experience seriously. Clinical caution reminds us that taking an experience seriously is not the same as establishing its historical accuracy. Meanwhile, the consequences of getting this distinction wrong can extend far beyond the consulting room – to relationships, families, allegations, legal proceedings, and the client’s understanding of their own life.

Few areas of psychotherapy illustrate the need for epistemic humility quite so starkly.

From the “memory wars” to the therapy room

Questions about recovered and false memories became intensely controversial during the so-called memory wars of the late twentieth century. At one pole were concerns that traumatic experiences, particularly childhood sexual abuse, could be forgotten or inaccessible for long periods and later remembered. At the other were concerns that suggestive therapeutic practices could contribute to the creation of compelling memories for events that had not occurred. The resulting debate involved clinicians, memory researchers, survivors, families, lawyers, and advocacy organisations – and became extraordinarily polarised.

Australia was not immune. During the 1990s, Australian professional bodies and inquiries grappled with questions about recovered memory, therapeutic suggestion, and allegations of historical abuse. Yet the Australian experience of the controversy differed in some respects from that of the United States and United Kingdom, and subsequent guidance increasingly reflected a position more nuanced than either unquestioning acceptance or blanket scepticism (McMaugh & Middleton, 2022).

Several decades of memory research have also complicated any simple division between “true” and “false” memories. Human memory is not a literal recording of experience. It is reconstructive: susceptible to forgetting, reinterpretation, suggestion, and the incorporation of information acquired after an event. Memories can be sincerely held and nevertheless inaccurate in some details. Under experimental conditions, people can even develop memories or beliefs concerning events that did not occur (Loftus, 2005; Otgaar et al., 2019).

Yet this does not mean that memories recovered after a period of not remembering are necessarily false. There is evidence that people may fail to recall traumatic experiences for considerable periods and subsequently remember them, including in circumstances where some corroboration exists (Geraerts et al., 2007). Contemporary Australian guidance therefore reflects an uncomfortable but essential reality: both forgetting and later remembering can occur, and false memories can also occur (Phoenix Australia, n.d.).

The clinician’s task, then, is not to choose a camp in an old memory war. It is to learn how to work responsibly in the space between certainty and disbelief.

Taking the experience seriously without deciding what it proves

This distinction matters because psychotherapy has two very different questions available to it. The first is: Did this event happen exactly as it is now remembered?

Sometimes external evidence may eventually help answer that question. Often it cannot. In many therapeutic settings, the clinician is neither equipped nor appropriately positioned to conduct the kind of investigation required to establish historical fact.

But another question is firmly within the therapeutic domain: What is happening for this person now, as they encounter this memory, image, sensation, or uncertainty? That question opens a very different clinical space.

A therapist can acknowledge fear without confirming its presumed cause. We can explore a memory without treating vividness as evidence of accuracy. We can take bodily sensations seriously without declaring them proof of a particular historical event. We can recognise that a client’s distress is real while remaining appropriately uncertain about precisely what occurred decades earlier.

This is not therapeutic fence-sitting. Nor does neutrality require emotional distance. It is a disciplined form of curiosity. Indeed, one of the most important lessons to emerge from the recovered- and false-memory controversies may be that validation and verification are not the same clinical act. A client does not have to prove the historical accuracy of every recollection before their distress deserves care. Equally, a therapist’s empathic desire to believe and support a client does not confer the authority to certify an uncertain memory as fact.

The therapeutic challenge is to hold both truths at once.

In this article, we revisit what became known as the false-memory movement and the “memory wars”, with particular attention to the Australian experience. We consider what contemporary research tells us – and does not tell us – about trauma, forgetting, remembering, and suggestibility. Most importantly, we explore what these debates mean in today’s consulting room: how therapists can respond when uncertain memories emerge, which practices may inadvertently influence remembering, and how we can remain deeply compassionate without claiming certainty where certainty does not exist.

Because sometimes good therapy begins not with knowing exactly what happened, but with becoming sufficiently safe to say: “We don’t yet know. We don’t have to force an answer. We can pay careful attention to what is here.”

How did we get here? The memory wars and the Australian story

To understand why a therapist today might hesitate over how to respond to an uncertain memory, it helps to return briefly to the controversy that shaped that hesitation.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, increasing public and professional recognition of childhood sexual abuse corrected a long history in which abuse had often been minimised, concealed, or simply disbelieved. At the same time, some therapeutic approaches came to place considerable emphasis on the possibility that apparently unexplained psychological symptoms might reflect childhood trauma that had been repressed or otherwise rendered inaccessible to conscious memory.

For some clients, memories of abuse appeared during therapy. Practices intended to facilitate memory retrieval – including hypnosis, guided imagery, dream interpretation, repeated questioning, and other suggestive procedures – also became controversial. Critics argued that such practices could inadvertently shape recollection, particularly when therapists approached treatment with a prior assumption that abuse had occurred.

The controversy soon moved well beyond psychotherapy. In the United States, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was established in 1992 by families who maintained that accusations of abuse had arisen from false memories, often during psychotherapy. Researchers including Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated experimentally that memory is malleable and that suggestion and post-event information can alter recollection (Loftus, 2005). The term false memory syndrome entered popular discourse, although it was never established as a formal psychiatric diagnosis.

What followed became known as the memory wars: a deeply polarised dispute over trauma, memory, therapeutic influence, and allegations of childhood sexual abuse. At its worst, the debate seemed to demand allegiance to one of two positions. Either traumatic memories could be repressed and later accurately recovered, or recovered memories were products of suggestion and therefore unreliable. Neither position adequately captures what we now know.

The Australian experience

Australia participated in these debates, but the controversy followed a somewhat different trajectory.

False-memory organisations were established here, and Australian clinicians, researchers, journalists, and courts confronted many of the same questions being debated in the United States and United Kingdom. Yet McMaugh and Middleton (2022), in their historical examination of the Australian false-memory movement, argue that the backlash against people reporting childhood sexual abuse was notably smaller in Australia.

Several factors may have contributed. The false-memory movement arrived somewhat later here; Australian media and legal systems differed from those of the United States; and Australia experienced less intense media coverage of claims concerning satanic ritual abuse – claims that had contributed substantially to scepticism and backlash elsewhere (McMaugh & Middleton, 2022). Australia was therefore engaged in the memory wars without experiencing precisely the same battle.

Importantly, Australian professional bodies were attempting relatively early to navigate a middle course. In 1996, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists adopted guidelines concerning repressed or recovered traumatic memories. The following year, the NSW Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service – the Wood Royal Commission – (1997) devoted part of its final report to recovered memory. Drawing upon professional guidance and expert evidence, the Commission acknowledged both the reality and seriousness of childhood sexual abuse and the fallibility of human memory. It noted the susceptibility of memory to influence and revision and emphasised the importance of clinical neutrality when working with uncertain recollections (Wood, 1997).

That formulation is striking because, almost three decades later, its central principle remains recognisable. The appropriate response to uncertainty was not to presume that a recovered memory was true. Nor was it to presume that it was false. It was to avoid contaminating the process by trying to decide for the client.

From competing certainties to a more nuanced position

Contemporary Australian guidance continues this more cautious approach. The Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia’s Consensus Guidelines for Working with Recovered Memory recognise that memories of historical traumatic events may be forgotten and subsequently remembered, and that such memories may return either during therapy or independently of it. At the same time, the guidelines acknowledge that memories can be inaccurate, that false memories can be constructed, and that confidence, emotional intensity, and vividness do not establish the historical accuracy of a recollection (McDonald, 2017a).

This distinction matters. The fact that a memory emerged during therapy does not establish that therapy created it. Equally, the fact that a recollection feels vivid, emotionally overwhelming, or physically embodied does not establish that every aspect of it occurred exactly as remembered.

Current Australian trauma guidance similarly distinguishes between working therapeutically with memories of known traumatic experiences and deliberately attempting to uncover trauma that a person does not remember. Evidence-based trauma therapies – including trauma-focused cognitive behavioural approaches and EMDR – may involve engaging with memories of traumatic events as part of treatment. That is fundamentally different from beginning with current symptoms and attempting to discover a presumed hidden event that might explain them (Phoenix Australia, n.d.). That distinction may be one of the most useful legacies of the memory wars.

Trauma-informed therapy is not memory-recovery therapy

A therapist can understand dissociation, fragmentation, avoidance, intrusive recollection, and the complex effects of trauma without assuming that unexplained symptoms must indicate forgotten abuse. We can also recognise the fallibility of memory without using that fallibility to dismiss disclosures of abuse.

This becomes especially important when we remember the historical context. For much of the twentieth century, people reporting sexual abuse – particularly children and women – were frequently disbelieved. The correction for suggestive therapeutic practice cannot reasonably be a return to reflexive disbelief. Likewise, recognising the prevalence and devastating effects of childhood abuse does not justify treating a therapist’s suspicion as evidence that a particular client was abused.

Both errors replace uncertainty with certainty too soon.

Where does that leave us now?

Perhaps the most important shift since the height of the memory wars is therefore not that one side conclusively defeated the other. It is that the question itself has become more sophisticated.

Instead of asking simply, Are recovered memories real?, we can ask:

• How does autobiographical memory actually work?
• Under what circumstances can memories become inaccessible and later return?
• How might suggestion, expectation, and repeated imagination alter what is remembered?
• What can – and cannot – be inferred from the vividness, emotional force, or bodily quality of a recollection?

And, crucially for therapists: how do we respond compassionately to an uncertain memory without inadvertently helping to construct its meaning – or its history – for the person remembering it? Those questions take us out of the trenches of the memory wars and into the more useful territory of contemporary memory science.

What memory actually does: Reconstruction, forgetting, and suggestion

One reason the memory wars became so polarised may be that everyday language encourages us to think about memory in misleading ways.

We store memories. We retrieve them. We search our memories as though looking through files. We may even describe an especially vivid recollection as being “like watching a film”.

But autobiographical memory is not an archive of recordings. Remembering is reconstructive. When we recall an experience, the brain draws together elements of the original event with existing knowledge, later experiences, and information about where particular details came from. Memory can therefore preserve important aspects of an experience while changing, losing, or occasionally adding others. This flexibility is part of ordinary human memory, not evidence that something is wrong with the person remembering. It also helps explain several phenomena relevant to therapists.

Memory can be influenced by what happens after an event

Decades of misinformation research have demonstrated that exposure to misleading post-event information can alter subsequent reports of what people remember. A recent systematic review found robust evidence of the misinformation effect and concluded that, although some cognitive abilities may reduce susceptibility under particular conditions, none appears to provide complete protection from it (Brassil et al., 2024).

Suggestion can sometimes go further than altering details

Experimental researchers have induced participants to develop beliefs or recollective experiences concerning autobiographical events that did not occur. The size of this effect varies considerably according to the method used and what researchers count as a “false memory”. Importantly for clinicians, a recent meta-analysis found stronger effects when procedures involved guided imagery or pressure to respond than when instructions were non-directive (Arce et al., 2023).

This does not mean that a therapist can casually implant an elaborate false memory in anyone who walks through the door. Earlier systematic work found an important distinction between increasing someone’s belief that an event may have happened and producing a rich subjective recollection of that event; full false memories were considerably less common than more limited changes in belief or recollective experience (Brewin & Andrews, 2017).

Nor does the reconstructive nature of memory mean that delayed memories of trauma should automatically be regarded as false. People forget, avoid thinking about experiences, encounter reminders, and sometimes remember events after long intervals. The scientific caution runs in both directions.

For therapists, perhaps the most useful conclusion is simpler: A memory can be psychologically real without its historical accuracy being clinically established. Its vividness does not settle the question. Neither does the intensity of the emotion accompanying it. And although confidence can sometimes relate to accuracy under carefully controlled conditions, confidence itself cannot retrospectively verify an uncertain autobiographical memory.

This is why the therapist’s stance matters so much. Questions, interpretations, expectations, and repeated invitations to imagine possibilities all become part of the information environment in which remembering occurs. Memory science therefore does not tell therapists to distrust clients’ memories. It tells us to handle them carefully.

How therapists can inadvertently influence memory

Most therapists do not set out to influence what a client remembers. The risk arises more subtly – often from the very qualities that make us want to help.

A client presents with panic, dissociation, sexual difficulties, or an unexplained bodily response. Knowing that such experiences can occur following trauma, the therapist begins wondering whether an unremembered traumatic event might explain them.

The difficulty begins when a possibility becomes a hypothesis, and the hypothesis begins shaping the questions.

• “Do you think something might have happened to you as a child?”
• “Can you picture what might have happened in that room?”
• “What does your body remember?”

Repeated questioning, guided imagery, hypnosis, and invitations to imagine possible events can all increase the risk that inference, imagination, and memory become difficult to distinguish. Risk is particularly concerning when these techniques occur alongside an authoritative suggestion that particular symptoms indicate previously forgotten abuse (Arce et al., 2023; Otgaar et al., 2019).

The same caution applies to dreams, images, and bodily sensations. These experiences may be therapeutically meaningful. They can be explored as experiences occurring in the present. But they should not be treated as independent evidence that a particular historical event occurred.

The distinction is small in language and enormous in implication. Instead of: “Your body may be remembering something your mind has blocked out,” a therapist might say: “You’re noticing a very strong physical response when we talk about this. Let’s stay with what you’re experiencing without assuming yet what it means.”

Similarly, if a client spontaneously reports an uncertain memory, open questions minimise the therapist’s contribution to its development:

• “What do you remember?”
• “What feels clear, and what feels uncertain?”
• “What was happening when this memory first came to you?”

This is especially important if the memory could later become relevant to family confrontation, reporting, or legal proceedings. Detailed investigative questioning is not the therapist’s role, and careful contemporaneous documentation of what the client spontaneously reports – and how the therapist responds – may become important.

None of this requires therapists to become emotionally neutral. We can believe that a client is frightened, confused, or distressed without communicating certainty about why. We can provide safety without supplying a story. And we can help clients tolerate not knowing without rushing to resolve uncertainty on their behalf.

Perhaps the simplest safeguard is therefore also the hardest: Follow the client’s memory; do not lead it.

Working safely when an uncertain memory emerges

When a client spontaneously reports a previously unavailable or uncertain memory, the therapist does not need to establish what happened before useful therapeutic work can begin.

The immediate priorities remain familiar: attend to distress, assess safety, understand what the experience means to the client, and help them regulate overwhelming emotion. What changes is the degree of care required around questions of historical fact.

A useful stance is one of compassionate neutrality. This does not mean withholding empathy or responding to a disclosure with scepticism. It means avoiding conclusions that the available evidence cannot support.

The therapist might ask:

• “How is having this memory affecting you?”
• “What feels most difficult about not knowing for certain?”
• “What do you need right now?”

Such questions keep therapy focused on the client’s present experience rather than turning the session into an investigation of the past.

It can also help to distinguish carefully between what the client remembers, what they infer, and what remains unknown. If a client says, “I remember lying on the bed, but I don’t know what happened next,” there is no therapeutic requirement to fill in the blank. Indeed, helping a client tolerate that blank may be safer than trying to resolve it.

When the memory has consequences beyond therapy

The stakes change when a client is considering acting upon an uncertain memory – for example, confronting a family member, making an allegation, contacting police, or initiating legal proceedings.

Here, slowing the process may be an important therapeutic intervention. The therapist can help the client consider possible consequences without directing the decision itself. What does the client hope will happen? What responses are possible? What support might they need? Which decisions can be made now, and which can wait?

Where legal or reporting questions arise, therapists should also recognise the limits of their role and seek appropriate supervision, consultation, or jurisdiction-specific advice. Clinical exploration and forensic investigation serve different purposes, and attempting to perform both can compromise each.

Documentation matters too. Where memories are uncertain or evolving, records should distinguish the client’s own words from the therapist’s interpretations and avoid presenting unverified material as established fact (McDonald, 2017b).

Above all, therapists need not solve uncertainty in order to relieve suffering. A client may eventually find corroborating information. Their understanding of the memory may change. Some questions may remain unanswered. Therapy can still help them regulate distress, examine present-day patterns, make thoughtful choices, and develop a relationship with uncertainty that does not require either unquestioning belief or forced disbelief.

This returns us to the deceptively simple distinction at the heart of responsible practice: We can help a client understand what a memory means to them without deciding for them what the memory proves.

Conclusion: Making room for “I don’t know”

Perhaps the most enduring lesson of the memory wars is not that therapists should believe less. It is that we should claim less certainty. The client who says, “I’ve started remembering something, but I don’t know if it’s real,” does not necessarily need a therapist to answer that question. They need someone able to stay alongside them while the question remains unanswered.

That position asks something difficult of clinicians. We are trained to formulate, interpret, and make meaning. When a frightened client searches our face for confirmation, “Do you think this happened to me?”, uncertainty can feel inadequate. Yet sometimes “I don’t know” is not an absence of clinical expertise. It is an expression of it.

Memory science gives us good reason for humility. People can forget and later remember experiences. Memory can also be altered by suggestion, expectation, and information encountered after an event. Neither emotional intensity nor vividness provides a simple route to historical certainty. And none of this diminishes the reality of the distress experienced by the person sitting before us.

The false-memory controversies therefore leave contemporary therapists with something more useful than a verdict about who “won” the memory wars. They leave us with a discipline: to listen without interrogating, explore without directing, validate without verifying, and remain curious without filling the spaces in another person’s story.

Perhaps good therapy sometimes means allowing those spaces to remain. “We don’t yet know. We don’t have to force an answer. We can pay careful attention to what is here.”

That is not disbelief. It is care without certainty.

Key takeaways

• Human memory is reconstructive rather than a literal recording of experience. Memories can change, details can be influenced by later information, and false memories can sometimes develop.
• Delayed or recovered memories should not automatically be considered either accurate or false. Contemporary practice requires openness to both possibilities.
• Trauma-informed therapy is not memory-recovery therapy. Current symptoms should not be treated as evidence that an unremembered traumatic event must have occurred.
• Therapists should avoid leading questions, repeated suggestion, and techniques intended to uncover presumed hidden memories. Dreams, imagery, emotions, and bodily sensations may be therapeutically meaningful but do not independently verify historical events.
• Validation is not verification. Therapists can respond compassionately to distress while remaining appropriately uncertain about historical accuracy.
• When uncertain memories may lead to allegations, reporting, family confrontation, or legal action, therapists should recognise the limits of the clinical role, document carefully, and seek appropriate consultation.
• Perhaps the simplest clinical principle is also the most important: follow the client’s memory; do not lead it.

Questions therapists often ask

Q. Does a recovered memory necessarily indicate that abuse occurred?

A. No. A memory that becomes accessible after a period of not remembering may reflect an experience that occurred, but the fact that it has been “recovered” does not itself establish historical accuracy. Equally, delayed recollection should not automatically be regarded as false. The appropriate clinical position is to remain open to uncertainty while supporting the client’s response to the experience.

Q. If a client asks, “Do you believe me?”, what should I say?

A. It may help to distinguish belief in the client’s experience from certainty about historical events. For example: “I believe that what you’re experiencing is real and important, and I take your distress seriously. I don’t think either of us needs to decide before we have evidence exactly what this memory means historically.” The aim is neither to confirm nor invalidate the recollection.

Q. Are bodily sensations, flashbacks, or dreams evidence of forgotten trauma?

A. Not by themselves. Such experiences can be explored therapeutically and may be highly significant to the client, but they cannot establish that a particular historical event occurred. Caution is especially important when a therapist already suspects hidden trauma and begins interpreting ambiguous experiences through that lens.

Q. Should therapists ever try to help clients recover forgotten memories?

A. Deliberately attempting to uncover a presumed traumatic event is difficult to justify and may increase the risk of suggestion. This is different from evidence-based trauma therapy in which a client works with memories of events already remembered. When uncertain material emerges spontaneously, therapists can explore its present meaning without attempting to elaborate or authenticate it.

Q. What if a client wants to confront someone based on an uncertain memory?

A. The therapist can help the client slow the decision-making process and consider possible outcomes, motivations, supports, and alternatives without deciding for them whether to proceed. If police, courts, mandatory reporting, or other legal considerations become relevant, clinicians should seek appropriate jurisdiction-specific guidance and remain mindful of the distinction between therapeutic and forensic roles.

References

• Arce, R., Selaya, A., Sanmarco, J., & Fariña, F. (2023). Implanting rich autobiographical false memories: Meta–analysis for forensic practice and judicial judgment making, International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, 23(4), 100386, ISSN 1697-2600, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijchp.2023.100386         
• Brassil, M., O’Mahony, C., & Greene, C. M. (2024). Do cognitive abilities reduce eyewitness susceptibility to the misinformation effect? A systematic review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 31, 2410–2436. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02512-5      
• Brewin, C. R., & Andrews, B. (2017). Creating memories for false autobiographical events in childhood: A systematic review. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 31(1), 2–23. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3220
• Geraerts, E., Schooler, J. W., Merckelbach, H., Jelicic, M., Hauer, B. J. A., & Ambadar, Z. (2007). The reality of recovered memories: Corroborating continuous and discontinuous memories of childhood sexual abuse. Psychological Science, 18(7), 564–568. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01940.x
• Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory, 12(4), 361–366. https://doi.org/10.1101/lm.94705
• McDonald, A. (2017a). Consensus guidelines for working with recovered memory. Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia.
• McDonald, A. (2017b). Recovered memory of childhood sexual abuse: An overview of research evidence and guidelines. Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia.
• McMaugh, K., & Middleton, W. (2022). The history and politics of “false memories”: The Australian experience. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 23(2), 177–190. https://doi.org/10.1080/15299732.2022.2028223
• Otgaar, H., Howe, M. L., Patihis, L., Merckelbach, H., Lynn, S. J., Lilienfeld, S. O., & Loftus, E. F. (2019). The return of the repressed: The persistent and problematic claims of long-forgotten trauma. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(6), 1072–1095. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619862306
• Phoenix Australia. (n.d.). Australian Guidelines for the Prevention and Treatment of Acute Stress Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Complex PTSD. https://www.astss.org.au/resources/guidelines/australian-guidelines-for-the-prevention-and-treatment-of-acute-stress-disorder-posttraumatic-stress-disorder-and-complex-ptsd     
• Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service. (1997). Final report: The Paedophile Inquiry (Vol. 4). Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service.
• Wood, JRT. (1997). Final report: The Paedophile Inquiry (Vol. 4). Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service.