CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Can You Be Brainwashed Into Estrangement?

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

Estranged parents often say: “We had a perfect relationship, and then something to them. Social media. A therapist. A partner. Their other parents. They were brainwashed. In this episode, Whitney takes that fear seriously and gives it an honest, research-informed answer.This episode explores:The real history of brainwashingWhat social media can and can’t doIf therapists can implant grievances into clientsHow the brainwashing framework offers comfortSources:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M0YYHl6m_W2HeEAIa5DhM4lH6VdVmhAxTyUuEuG6qXo/edit?usp=sharingWhitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles.Have a question for Whitney? Send a voice memo or email to [e-mail] the Family Cyclebreakers Club: https://callinghome.coFollow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmftOrder Whitney's book, Toxic Positivity: https://sitwithwhit.com/toxic-positivitySign up for updates on Whitney's new book: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/PHMzjy0oThis podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One of the most common things that I hear, especially in online discussions about estrangement, is some version of this. We had a perfect relationship and then they started following those accounts, watching videos, reading posts, and then they cut me off. Sometimes it's that they started seeing a therapist or everything changed after they met or their other parent got in their ear. But the shape of the story is always the same. Something out there reached in, changed the adult's mind, and the person that they know would never have done this on their own. So something or someone must have done it to them. And usually in more inflammatory context, it said like this, my child was brainwashed.

And I want to take that fear very seriously today because it is a real fear and it deserves an actual answer. And I also want to be honest about what the research actually says about this topic. And I'm hoping that this episode is going to be very new. want, show you the different shades of gray, and not argue that, no, this is not happening in any way, shape, or form, or argue that it's happening all the time everywhere and is the only possible explanation. Welcome back to the Calling Home podcast.

I am Whitney Goodman. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, and today we are tackling one of the biggest, most painful questions that I get asked. can an adult be brainwashed into becoming estranged from their family? And not just by social media, though I think that's where a lot of people point to, but also by a therapist or a partner or the other parent or some outside force that seems to show up right before the relationship fell apart. This is how we're going to do this.

First, I want to go back and look at where the word brainwashing comes from. because it has a specific history. And then I want to be really fair about what outside influence can genuinely do to a person. And I want to walk through those three suspects that we've listed one at a time, social media, the therapist, the partner or the other parent, and ask honestly what the evidence says about each one. Real influence does exist. It would be wrong of me to argue that I do not have some level of influence on all of you when you listen to this podcast.

Coercive control exists. People can absolutely be pushed, pulled, isolated, and inflamed. But brainwashing, in the way that most people mean it, like an outside force installing a brand-new belief into a happy conflict-free mind against that person's will has almost no scientific support. Let's start with the word brainwashing. The English word was coined in 1950 by a journalist named Edward Hunter. He published it in a newspaper article and the word was his translation of a Chinese phrase which literally means to wash the brain. During the Korean War, thousands of captured American soldiers signed false confessions and peace petitions. A small group of them,

I think it was 21 of them, initially refused to come home. And back in the United States, people were horrified. They're asking, how do you get an American soldier to denounce his own country? And the answer was that his brain had been washed. But when you look at what actually, happened in those camps. There was isolation, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, forstanding, and relentless, repetitive pressure that was happening in small groups. There was control over every piece of information that reached a prisoner and a system of reward and punishment where cooperation got you better food or warmer clothing. And these people really had been tortured. They were extremely traumatized people doing what they had to do to survive.

Once those men were out of that environment, the overwhelming majority of them went right back to thinking the way that they had before. Most of those famous 21 eventually came home, and when they explained why they'd hesitated, they usually gave reasons that had nothing to do with believing communist ideology or believing what was actually being told to them while they were there. The attitude change was real while the pressure was on and it dissolved when the pressure came off. And there was some scientific study done on these prisoners as well. The first scientist was Edgar Sheen. He's an MIT social psychologist, and he looked at American civilian prisoners held by Chinese forces, and he called it coercive persuasion. His argument was that this wasn't some exotic new technique. It was just ordinary social influence that was turned up all the way by force.

And people, he said, were coerced into allowing themselves. to be persuaded. Total control of the environment was really what made that possible. Whoever was running it also owned the person's entire world where they slept, what they ate, who they talked to,

what information reached them, and whether they could leave. Sheen described this process in three stages. To destabilize someone's sense of who they are, you offer them a way out of that distress, through new beliefs, and then you reward and reinforce the new identity until it sets. But typically, if you take away the total environmental control, the beliefs collapse. The second researcher that looked at this was psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, who studied the same

phenomenon, and he called it thought reform. Lifton went further and laid out eight specific features of these high control environments. And I'll name a few of them that probably sound familiar to you, even if you don't know the name. Millew control is controlling of all communication, including in his words, a person's communication with themselves. Loading the language happens when we reduce complicated human realities to simple, repeated phrases. Lifton actually coined the term thought terminating cliche for this. Demand for purity is splitting the entire world into the absolutely good and the absolutely impure. And dispensing of existence is dividing people into those who have a right to exist in your world and those who don't.

Now, Lifton was careful and he warned that no real world group ever achieves total thought reform and that little pieces of these eight features show up in plenty of ordinary groups, families, workplace, places, churches, other religious institutions and groups. And the presence of one or two of these things does not make something a brainwashing cult. That overapplication is exactly how the concept later got abused. So I could see how even I, when looking at these things, could certainly apply them to certain components of any psychological concept and the population that might be dealing with that. I could also see how I would apply this to both sides of any of those issues. So if we're looking at estrangement, I think that many of these can be found within estranged

parent groups. I think that many of these things can be found among estranged adult children. And so we have to be very careful about how these things are actually functioning and if they are all present and present in a way that allows for that level of control. And if we are going to argue that it is happening in one group. We may have to argue that it is happening in another. And so you cannot just say, this is not happening within my group or within my church, but I think that it is happening in this group over there that has the same three things. It doesn't work like that. We have to be very cautious about how we apply these things and not only apply them to things that we do not like or do not associate with.

Now, this brainwashing idea did not stay associated with just war and prison like conditions. In the 1970s and 80s, it moved in to families. This was the era of new religious movements. And lots of young adults were leaving the religions that they had been raised in and joining unfamiliar groups. And their parents were devastated and asking, why would my child choose this? Why would they walk away from everything I gave them to something that I think is so strange or so hurtful. The most common answer that people came up with was that they didn't choose it. They were brainwashed. Some parents went so far to hire people called deprogrammers who would physically take their adult children and hold them until they renounced the group. Doing this ultimately

required believing that your adult child no longer had a working mind of their own. And in 1987, the American Psychological Association considered a report from a task force on exactly this. It was about coercive and deceptive persuasion in these groups, and the American Psychological Association declined to accept it. Their words were that the report lacked the scientific rigor and even-handed approach needed for the association's endorsement. One reviewer did write or comment that brainwashing is not a recognized scientific concept, and that it should not be used by psychologists because it doesn't actually explain anything. After that, courts started excluding brainwashing testimony because it didn't meet the standard of accepted science. And the broad consensus among sociologists and scholars of religion settled into place and it has been held since then.

The strong version of brainwashing, the idea that someone's free will can be overridden and replaced from the outside is not supported by the evidence. Now, The idea that high control groups use real tactics to retain members and raise the cost of leaving is still a live and legitimate and understood research debate. And there is a lot of evidence that those things do happen. One more piece of evidence that those scholars pointed to in debating this is that if these groups truly captured and held people's minds, you'd expect almost nobody to leave. But the reality was the opposite.

People left these groups constantly, all the time, of their own accord. The researchers who studied those families noticed that brainwashing explanation did something specific for the parents. It was, in their words, a way to conceal conflict and deflect guilt and blame for everyone involved. The alternative is to consider the adult child looked at their life and made this very confusing choice. Brainwashing moves the cause outside the family. It protects everyone. It protects the parent from asking hard questions about the relationship. And it even protects the child from being seen as someone who simply chose to leave. Now, that being said, I want to point out that this brainwashing

argument is still applied to a lot of different things that adults do that are different from their family. This is not just about estrangement. Some families report that their adult leaving the religion was because of brainwashing, that their adult joining a different religion, brainwashing, the adult marrying a partner that was outside of their race or their gender or their community or their religious background, brainwashing, their daughter or son becoming part of the LGBTQ plus community, brainwashing. We see this argument showing up in so many places, the idea that if someone's child makes any of these choices,

it's because they were indoctrinated or brainwashed. My Child was brainwashed online story or by a therapist or by a spouse, often does the same work that this cult story was doing 40 years ago. And now I want to get really concrete about this because I don't want, I don't want you all to think that I am just brushing all of this off because influence is real. And obviously, we are all influenced to some degree by the content that we consume and the way that content is delivered to us. but let's look at what the current science says it actually takes to substantially change an

adult's belief because that's often what the story is here right perfect relationship outside influence cut off okay and i want you to remember that as we read through this because from everything we've just covered the list of of what needs to happen to substantially change an adult's belief looks like this. Near total control of a person's environment and information, isolation from competing relationships and competing views, induced dependency so the person needs the controller to meet basic needs, and sustained prolonged pressure, emotional destabilization, and ongoing reinforcement because often in these studies, the moment the conditions lift, the change starts to fade.

And there's a couple of cases that come to mind for me. I watched a documentary recently about the FLDS community where there was an individual that took over after Warren Jeff's, the former leader of that small community was sent to prison. And this individual came in and took over. These girls that were living there, who continued to believe what they were being told by him, had basically no access to the outside world. They were kept away from things like the internet and phones and other members of the community that had left and had turned their back on Warren Jeff's, their former leader. They were really living on a steady information diet from this person.

They did not have money. They were not employed outside of their country. community, they did not have access to competing voices, and they were not able to create independence for themselves in any way. And when one woman came in there working on a documentary and basically under the guys that she was just trying to learn more about them, but really she was trying to set these girls free, when she got in there and started to show some of them, what was actually happening to them, and a potential other way of life, there started to be some cracks in the system. And so that, we have to look at these and be like, which one is

the indoctrination or the brainwashing? Is it the woman that came in and sort of poke some holes into what was happening to them? Or is it the original community that they were a part of? And I'm giving you some extreme examples here. But there would be people, like, probably the leader of this group that would say, oh, no, this woman came in and she brainwashed these girls when in fact, what he was doing was really a lot of influence, indoctrination, and control and coercive control over many girls who were actually underage and were children, which is a totally different story when we're talking about coercive control and indoctrination of children versus adults. Now, another story comes to mind. I was,

watching, and again, I'm not making this all about the LDS community, but this is another story, is I was watching something about Ruby Frankie and Jody Hildebrand, who was a licensed therapist at one point that went on to become a coach and the power that she was able to exert over this mother and her children. And I think we need to remember that the two of them seemed to be engaging in another relationship outside of just being therapist, impatient, highly unethical and wrong. And they ended up living together. So there is so much more control being exerted in a lot of these situations where someone was able to come in and really transform someone's belief system that doesn't really exist when we're talking about just about social media or a therapist.

So let's move into that. Psychologists have a really clear way of describing the difference between what coercion produces and what is like a true conversion of beliefs from A to B. There is compliance here versus internalization. So compliance is when you behave a certain way to get a reward or avoid a punishment. And it depends on someone watching and reinforcing this. internalization is when a belief genuinely becomes your own because it fits your actual values. And that kind of change is durable, but it's also something a person does from the inside themselves. Now, none of the conditions that really define coercive persuasion exist on a phone. So whatever is happening when someone consumes that content and something's happening there,

we'll get to it, is not brainwashing in the technical sense because the structure that brainwashing requires really isn't there. We're going to talk about Suspect One now, social media. And this is where I want to be the most fair because the honest answer about social media is really complicated. Online content does have influence. And there's a couple of ways that this plays out. Confirmation bias is one of them.

That is our tendency to seek out information that already fits what we believe. And I do see quite a bit of that in the estrangement space and in the type of content that's often created for estranged adults and for estranged parents. I see it a lot, a lot. homophilia is our tendency to cluster with people who are like us. We also see that happening on social media. And the third is, of course, the algorithm, which learns what holds your attention and feeds you more of it. And those three lock together into a loop. So you engage with something and the platform shows you more of it. And I'm sure all of us have experienced that where you look something up or you

start reading about something and then it's just all that the algorithm is giving you. You engage with something, the platform shows you more of it. You find people who agree and the shared view gets louder and louder and it starts to feel like a simple consensus. And when we're talking about estrangement, it's likely happening on both sides of the extremes here, which creates like a lot of this bias story that I see a lot of people talking about. It's also why a lot of the middle ground content doesn't get seen. And I cannot tell you how many times this has happened to me. I have shared so many things over the last eight years that I have been producing content online about reconciliation, repair, active listening accountability. There was a month,

a few months ago, where I shared about reconciliation on this podcast, on Instagram, on the calling home Instagram and within the calling home community for four weeks straight. And I will still get comments that I do not want people to reconcile and that all I want is for people to go no contact. And it's true that when I make posts that are about estrangement, they tend to get pushed further and further by the algorithm than other things that I talk about. For example, in the last week, I have produced podcast episodes about how to become a better listener, how to take accountability. I did a Q&A episode about a mother and child, adult child, who were improving and their relationship was getting better. And I will still

get told that all I try to do is estranged people. And so this is why I try to have conversations that with people offline and talk to people like, what are you seeing that I am doing? What is the content that you're interacting with? And is it only 1% of what's actually being produced? And this is why we have to dig a little bit deeper and not just see one piece and say, this is everything. And I know a lot of you think that that is what I do because you don't see everything else going on and the thousands of hours of work behind the scenes or that are behind a paywall or a community. all you're seeing is like a TikTok that I posted. And honestly, guys, like, TikTok and Instagram are at like the bottom of what I do. It is like the very tip of the iceberg. So if that's all you're seeing, yeah, I could see how sometimes it looks that way to two people because you're seeing like if I've written five articles, you're seeing like three sentences of those articles or a video, you know, TikTok is something I do like when I have random thoughts

and I just pull at my phone and record. Like I'm not a, I'm not a content creator in that way. The things that are more important to me are the podcast and the work that I do at Calling Home and the books that I write. That is like where all my work lives and where I think you have to go to get a full picture of what I think versus a TikTok video. And I think that's true for literally everything. I got to comment the other day on a podcast clip that said, This is lacking so much context. Yeah, guys, obviously. Like, it's a clip of a podcast.

There can't be context. The clip is just to engage you in the rest. And so this is like also for people who only read headlines and don't read articles. You're not going to know the full truth or what is going on because you didn't look for it. And to expect that in every single thing that you read, I think it's very infandalizing to do this to people that if I put on every single post that I did a disclaimer of like, obviously this isn't about everybody. There are exceptions to every single rule. I used to do that.

I used to do that years ago. And like, I have to trust that we are going to learn discernment and the ability to decide what's for us and what's not for us. And like, I can say it till I've done it until I'm blue in the face. And nothing ever got better. It didn't work. I still got the same comments and the same. pushback and the same criticism because people aren't looking at everything. And so that's also a big thing to think about when we're talking about algorithms and how they can influence people and how we need

to zoom out and look at the full picture, not just like what we are being served and decide what applies to us and what doesn't. And I say that for both adult children, estranged parents, regular people, like we all need to do that. It's not that it's a one side of. It's a one side of thing. In one of the largest studies of its kind, scientists analyzed more than 100 million pieces of content across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Gab. I'm not familiar with what Gab is. I'm going to put all these sources in the show notes, by the way. And they found that like-minded clustering really does dominate how information spreads. And it was the strongest on the platform whose feeds you can't adjust yourself like Facebook and Twitter. These environments are very

powerful and they can intensify a feeling, give it language, and make a person feel less alone in it. I will never deny that. And that's true for both estranged parents and estranged old children, estranged siblings, estranged grandparents, etc. There was also a recent review of 129 studies that found a clear pattern. When researchers map who talks to who, like using network data, they tend to confirm that echo chambers exist. So when they're looking at like the networks and who they're speaking to, they see these echo chambers. But when researchers actually asked individual people about their whole media diet, everything they read, watched and listened to in a day, for example, the chambers looked a lot weaker, where they disappear. Because most people

turn out to consume a wider range of sources than like these big network pictures are suggesting. And I know that's true for me. I don't watch. like network news. I don't consume any major news outlets at all. And so obviously that picture, I think, isn't going to include a lot of people, especially people probably age 35 and younger, especially are not going to fall into some of this data. And we have so many like independent journalists today that it's very difficult to assess this picture. Now, the, the phenomenon is real about echo chambers and kind of how we create these silos, but it's partly an artifact of the lens that you're using to look at this. The research also keeps finding that the disposition

comes first and the content comes second. So people who already lean a certain way are the ones who seek out, stay in, and seek deeper into content that matches that lean. And there is a large body of work on what's called selective exposure. And that's basically what people choose to read when you give them options. There was a major analysis pooling many of these studies and that gave itself a title that says everything. Feeling validated versus being correct. They measure the pool to defend a position that people already held. And it was strongest exactly when the belief was already in place and tied to something the person cared about. It was weakest when there was no prior attitude to

protect. The behavior depends on there already being something there. So let's look at like red pill content, okay, or when we're talking about like the manosphere. There are men who are drawn to that content because they already feel that they are being treated poorly. They are invisible. Women don't like them. Women have taken over their workplace. And they typically believe this because they have had one or a handful of experiences that have told them that or they have been being told that from a young age by their community. And they have grown into that belief because it is much easier to convince a child of something, of course. They are part of communities where that is widely stated. They have this existing belief. If there are men who have not experienced that in their life,

they have very positive interactions with how they've moved up in the workforce. They have good relationships with women. They don't feel like they're being taken advantage of. They have a good relationship with their mother, with their father. They saw their parents get along and have an egalitarian marriage. They're less likely to be influenced by red pill content and to see this and to feel like this is weird. This doesn't match my experience. I have found the same to be true about estrangement, content, and content about going no contact. Now, other researchers measured attitudes first and then watched later what they actually clicked on. The people with stronger, more certain views spent more time on content that matched them. The conviction came first and the

consumption followed. That's the opposite order from what the brainwashing story assumes, right? There is something being alleged that basically I can be in a perfectly happy, content, wonderful relationship with my parent, and that I can pick up this phone, look at a video, and say, now I want to cut them off because I should. And that's not what's being reflected here in the data that we have on this. On Facebook, researchers actually reduced how much like-minded content people saw for months and measured what happened to their beliefs.

And the answer was essentially nothing. Reducing the reinforcing content did not measurably move people's attitudes. There's also research showing that forcing people to see opposing views can even backfire and make them dig in harder. So the mind is not just a passive sponge. So let's say an adult finds estrangement content and they feel. seen and heard and they eventually act on that feeling. They were likely not a blank page before that moment. The content gave them words for something they already felt. And sometimes it offered permission to do a thing they'd been considering for a long time or that they didn't even know was an option.

Now, that is influence. Absolutely. It can speed up a decision that was already forming. It can reinforce a belief. But that is a very different claim from the the idea that content installed a grievance in a child or an adult who had none, the research really doesn't give us a mechanism for that. There's no way that we can see now that a video reaches into a genuinely happy conflict-free relationship between two adults and creates pain that is not there. And I think that's honestly where this like we had a perfect relationship premise really falls apart because the relationship that feels perfect from one side can feel not perfect on the other. And the content may have just given language to that experience.

Now, I do want to flag something here that most of this research was done on Facebook and Twitter because those platforms used to let scientists study them. And the platforms where much of the estrangement content actually lives and I think some of the most polarizing is is on TikTok. And Instagram tends to be like a light version of the estrangement content that I see on TikTok, particularly from estranged parents who have become large content creators in their own right on TikTok. And those are among the least studied because they're built around closed feeds that we cannot access and that researchers haven't been able to go in and do something with. So I think anyone that tells you with total confidence that TikTok is brainwashing a generation,

or that it definitely isn't is really getting ahead of the evidence, myself included. I cannot make a claim in either direction about TikTok or really about Instagram or any of the other ones. I can just tell you what has been found thus far. What we can say is that the mechanism we do understand is reinforcement of something already present. We can see that that is happening on these platforms. Now let's go to the second suspect, the therapist. The story here goes that the adult child went into therapy or the person in the family. I don't want to make this only about adult children and parents. I think this can apply to any type of family estrangement where this gets wielded. But the person went into therapy and the therapist convinced them that I was toxic, diagnosed me without ever meeting me, and talked them into going no contact. As a clinician, I take that very seriously and I have tried to investigate these claims on an anecdotal basis.

I have talked to a lot of people about this personally over the last couple of years for my book. And there's no controlled study showing that therapists cause estrangement or that they implant grievances into clients who didn't have them. even the people making this argument most forcefully tend to concede that the research on this doesn't exist yet. And so what we have is, sure, a credible concern worth airing and a causal claim that at this point is very much unproven. And this is where a lot of debates about memory come in and who should the therapist be believing, whose memories are more reliable. But we often tend to picture memory like a video footage. Something happened. It got filed away. Remembering it just requires us to like press play. And that's not how it works for any of us.

Memory is reconstructive. And there have been studies like this one that researchers showed adults a doctored photo of themselves as a child on a hot balloon, hot air balloon. And obviously that ride never happened. It was a doctored photo and then walked them through guided imagery over a few sessions. So they would tell them, you know, close your eyes, picture it, who was with you. And by the end, about half of them had built a memory of a balloon ride in their childhood that never occurred. One of them said when told the photo was fake that he had honestly started to chalk himself into believing it. And so yes, under the right conditions, a confident and detailed false memory can be created. But we need to think about how that worked. There's a trusted source, repeated suggestion,

and time. And if that is true, then the flip has to also be true that we could convince someone that something didn't happen to them if we had a trusted source, repeated suggestion, and time. Now, you've probably heard the phrase in some of these debates about false memory syndrome. This is the idea that therapists through hypnosis and guided imagery and leading questions can implant detailed memories of abuse that never happened. And in the 1990s, this became a genuine national panic of sorts. It was in textbooks, court cases on television, and people were really speaking about it at the time as if it was established science.

And the phrase was coined in 1992 by an organization called the False Memory Syndrome, that is a mouthful foundation. And that foundation was started by and largely made up of parents who had been accused by their adult children of abuse. It's explicitly stated purpose was to support accused parents. And to me, the craziest part of this whole saga is that Jennifer Freid, the psychologist who developed betrayal trauma theory that I've talked about. I have posts about it on Instagram. We've talked about it inside Calling Home last month, especially about your relationship with your father. She is the daughter of Pamela and Peter Freid,

the couple who founded the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. And the foundation grew directly out of their own family conflict. In 1990, Jennifer was already an accomplished psychologist, privately disclosed to her parents that she recalled her father abusing her during childhood. And I want to say there have never been charges and Peter has never been convicted of anything. This is still all alleged. But her parents disputed it. And in 1992, they responded by co-founding the False Memory System Foundation.

So in direct response, then, Jennifer, their daughter, developed betrayal trauma theory and laid it out in her book, betrayal trauma, the logic of forgetting childhood abuse. Her theory is essentially the intellectual opposite of her parents' foundation. It argues that when the abuser is a trusted caregiver, the victim depends on for survival, forgetting can be an adaptive response, and the child can't afford to fully register the betrayal and stay attached to the person they need so the information gets blocked. The greater the betrayal by someone you depend on, the more likely the memory gets walled off. She later extended this into what you probably know of the concept Darvo, deny attack, reverse victim, and offender to describe how accused abusers respond,

which, fairly or not, many read as the description of this foundation's own playbook, and this behavior can be seen often on social media. There were never any charges, like I mentioned, filed against her father and this claim is still alleged. But the way this publicly played out between this adult daughter and her parents is really fascinating to me. And one lens you could look at this through is that a syndrome named and promoted by the accused was developed to relocate the entire cause onto an outside person, their therapist. But what's fascinating is that Jennifer was a psychologist herself at the time.

Now, and listen to me very clearly here, I mean this. Does this mean that every parent that is accused of abuse by their child is guilty? Absolutely not. Does this mean that every therapist is good and doesn't use any suggestive techniques? Absolutely not. But we can see a historical pattern happening here. When scientists actually looked at the syndrome, it didn't hold up as a. science. 17 prominent memory researchers signed a statement, objecting to the term, calling it a

non-psychological term originated by a private foundation, and saying for the sake of intellectual honesty, like, let's leave false memory syndrome to the popular press, and it was never accepted into the diagnostic manual. It is not a recognized disorder. There's also some dispute here about the numbers. You'll often hear that this syndrome had reached epidemic proportions and that tens of thousands of families had been impacted. One advocate estimated over a million cases a year. And when researchers asked the obvious question, like, okay, how did you verify all of these cases? A lot of the foundation's documentation came from phone calls. So in many cases, people that were supposedly suffering from the false memory were never interviewed, assessed,

or even met by the people diagnosing them. And sometimes it was like the accused, calling it. And how did anyone determine that a memory was in their word objectively false? Often the rule was just circular that all recovered memories are false. That was kind of the belief. and one foundation article on how you can tell a memory is false, offered indicators like the accused parent has no history of it, and the family is willing to openly discuss it. The director of the foundation even wrote in print that you could tell her members weren't abusers

because they were a good-looking bunch of people, graying hair, well-dressed, healthy, and smiling. I'll leave that there. It's worth sitting with kind of how much damage this idea has done and how it continues to proliferate at this level because the false memory panic did not come from nowhere. You know, in the 1980s and early 90s, there was a movement inside therapy built on the belief that horrific abuse could be fully repressed for decades and then recovered intact through specific techniques. So things like hypnosis, age regression, dream work, repeated guided

imagery. You know, there was a Harvard psychologist named Richard McNally who called it the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era. So this was, you know, a big deal. There were symptom checklists, you know, that were very extensive, 60 to 70 items. People were talking about multiple personalities. You know, there was like satanic ritual abuse, panic. All of this stuff was going on

when people were trying to sort of like pull false memories out of people by using these techniques. But I think what's really important here is that the deeper lesson is not really that all therapists are dangerous, but it's about this sort of loop that can happen where healers name and validate certain symptoms. The culture then amplifies them. And people in real distress began to express their pain through this kind of template that we are offering them. And we've seen this, you know, in many ways saying that women are hysterical. And I think that recovery memory therapy was kind of that on steroids. And a lot of this may have been done in good faith. But some of the techniques that were being used were not.

verified, we're not working how they should have been working. And in good therapy, this stuff shouldn't have been happening. Now, was it happening on the levels that people said it was? Was it that all memories that came as a result of treatment with a therapist were false? Probably not, but these things were happening. Now, there's also an experiment that I talk about in my upcoming book is the Lost in the Mall study where researchers convinced adults they've been lost in a shopping mall as a child and this one was an event that never happened. And being lost in a mall is not remotely the same as adults saying I was repeatedly assaulted or raped by their parent. So when another researcher tried to implant a more genuinely

traumatic bodily false memory, like a painful childhood medical procedure, her success rate was zero. Okay. So there's kind of a catch built into this mall study that we don't really talk about that in this study that's Loftus and Picerel from 1995, the older relative in the family vouched for the event as a trusted source. in this experiment. So when the researcher was convincing this adult that they've been lost in a shopping mall, there was also an older relative that was saying like, yeah, I remember that.

And it happened. And so, of course, a suggestion from a present family member really can rewrite what a younger relative remembers. And then, like I've said throughout this episode, the knife has to cut both ways because there is also the idea that, that the person who is most able to repeat over and over that nothing happened, that that didn't happen, that you're imagining it is often the person who was there or even the person who was doing the abuse. And so if we want to argue that it can happen one way, it's very plausible that we can argue that it's happening the other way as well, which means that there are many adults who were told repeatedly that they were not abused as children when they were.

Now, I want to be fair in both directions of this claim as a therapist as part of this community that bad therapy is real. 100%. Therapy can be suggestive. It can be done in the wrong way. It cannot be evidence backed. And it can do harm. There's plenty of people out there who have been harmed by.

therapist. That's why regulatory and licensing boards and ethics codes exist. And the modern sort of evidence-based consensus is a careful middle of all this that most people who were abused, they remember it in some way. And memories can sometimes be forgotten and later recovered. And false memories to some degree can also be constructed. And you often can't tell which is which without outside corroboration. And a responsible therapist is aware of this. And not all therapists are doing great work. And I think as consumers, it's important that you are able to identify that, right?

So I want to tell you that confident, like dramatic version of this, that there's a documented epidemic of therapists implanting beliefs into blank. like happy minds is just not accurate. And the reason that I know this about estrangement is that when you talk to anyone that is estranged from a family member, and again, I have worked and spoken to and been in groups with and interviewed thousands of these people. And I've spoken to a lot of estranged parents as well. you know, if anybody ever wants and is willing to speak with me at length about their experience,

I have always taken them up on that offer. I have spoken with professionals and estranged parents that I really disagree with how they view this issue because I want to learn from them and their experiences, even if they are outliers. And I always tell you all that I speak to the people that I have experience with. I cannot make content and speak to something that is not happening around me. And so this idea that like there are therapists who are implanting things in people that had absolutely no leaning that way is not something that I have encountered even once. So I can't speak to it. It would be unethical of me to do so. I can speak to you about the patterns that I do see. And so in the vast 99.9.9% majority and even with the estranged parent that

I was having a conversation with actually today before recording this episode, I should say formerly a strange parent, they also agreed with this sentiment that estranged was not happening after one single event. It is an interpretation of an entire relationship across decades. And I have encountered very, very few, I'd say off the top of my head, I can't even think of any. I'll say less than 10, but it might be zero. Examples of cases where there is a dispute about one memory that is causing the relationship to fall apart. Actually, now that I think about that, I think that there are a couple of cases that I can think of and they are related to a major type of trauma happening in the family not being believed.

And the need for that to be believed in order to move forward and that not being believed in the face of what I would consider to be concrete evidence, not hearsay. Now, it happens, but it's not the vast majority of cases. And I think that a good therapist is helping a person put language to how the relationship actually feels to them. And a therapist can absolutely help someone name a grievance and even help them build up the courage to act on it. And of course, that is real influence.

And that deserves scrutiny. And this is, again, why we have licensing. boards and ethics and trainings and manuals and decades of research on a lot of these topics. But naming a grievance is not the same as manufacturing one. And this is exactly why I wanted to have like social media and the therapist in the same conversation because I think that when you see all these conversations about brainwashing and therapists implanting memories, you can kind of go to the internet and see the same phenomenon on face value, right? So the real honest answer here is I think that therapists and social

media are of course powerful forces. They can name a feeling. They can validate someone's story. They can even, you know, tell them this is an option that you have. But every mechanism that we actually understand from things like hysteria to repress memories to echo chambers, works by giving shape to distress that was already there. None of this paints on a blank wall. And now we're going to look at the third suspect, which is a person. We're typically hearing things like his wife turned him against us,

her father poisoned her after the divorce. And I think this one is one of the trickiest, because unlike a phone or therapy, you have a real human being with real ongoing, daily influence over your adult child's life. And I think I want to split this into two very different things that often get combined into one. Now, there's a theory that often gets shared with me that is contested within the community. And that is parental alienation syndrome. This has been proposed, you know, since the 1980s. And the claim is that one parent can program a child to reject the

other parent for no legitimate reason. And this has been rejected as a formal medical syndrome. It's not in the DSM. The World Health Organization declined to include it, calling it not a health care term. And a recent United Nations report went further warning that the concept usually gets used in custody courts to discredit genuine reports of abuse and that it's applied in a heavily gendered way, mostly against mothers, as in fathers accusing mothers of alienating them from their children. Now, in fairness, plenty of clinicians argue that even if the formal syndrome is not verifiable science, that the underlying behavior is real and that one parent badmouthing the other, pressuring a child to take sides does happen, especially in custody battles or in high

conflict divorces. And few people deny that it can happen. I have seen it happen. Now, the genuine hard disagreement is whether you can reliably tell the difference between a child who was turned against their parent and a child who pulled away because of real and justified reasons of their own. And I think almost all of that research is about young children in custody fights, not adults. And for a grown adult child, the evidence is probably somewhere in the middle. I think that there's a larger body of research that finds that estrangement is usually the adult's own decision for their own reasons. But there is another pathway here, which is coercive control.

And I don't want to minimize this that usually an abusive partner is engaging in coercive control. And this is a recognized documented pattern where an abuser, an abuser, an abuser, systematically dominates their partner and isolates them from their family and friends. That is one of their core deliberate tactics. And it's up there, you know, with the standard way that domestic abuse gets sort of employed within a family. And several countries have even made coercive control a criminal offense. And the laws specifically name isolating someone from their friends and family as part of the crime. So a person can genuinely be cut off from their family by an outside party against their own interest. And that is real. It's happening. It's serious.

Now, I do want to highlight here, though, that coercive control isolates a victim against their own will. And the entire reason that we care about coercive control is to protect the adult's safety, freedom, and independence. And that doesn't come out by saying, like, my kid was brainwashed and so they cut me off and this is why I'm the victim. I think that when parents are speaking about this, it can sound very different, right? When you really feel like your adult child is genuinely being controlled and isolated by a dangerous partner against their will, it's not about your hurt feelings. it's a safety situation and it's about your child's well-being, not your access to them. And so the other side of this is that an adult sometimes chooses a partner that their family

doesn't like and is setting boundaries that the family doesn't agree with. And the brainwashing word is so dangerous here because it puts those two different scenarios into one and stops us from actually looking at what is going on here. Is my child in danger? Are they being coerced and abused? Or have I displayed behavior with their partner that has caused them to pull away from me? And sometimes it can be both or one or the other. I think that this is the way that I would like to frame this argument to wrap up is that in all of these cases where there is truly a partner, a therapist, or a social media algorithm that has had this influence. There can be a real but unspoken grievance that the adult hasn't put into words yet,

a heavy and increasingly exclusive consumption of one kind of content, an algorithm that narrows the field until competing viewpoints are mostly eliminated, and a community. and a community that is online, a therapist or a partner that is offering both an interpretation and the social permission to act. Let's say we have all of those things and they perfectly line up with one another. I think that the research would still call that reinforcement and reframing of material that was already there, not creation of a belief from nothing. Because the first thing, on that list is an unspoken grievance. And the entire chain here kind of only works if there was something there to reinforce. So every mechanism that we genuinely understand confirmation bias,

echo chambers, persuasion, even like the heavy repeated kind of media exposure that slowly shapes how someone sees the world, every one of them needs to have. happen on like prepared ground on a foundation that is waiting for something like that. They work on something that is already present. And none of them really like plant a forest in an empty fields. And so this is where I think the like perfect relationship and then estrangement because of a nefarious third party argument sort of falls apart. And I'm not saying this to dismiss the parents who feel this way or even the adults who feel this way about their siblings or an aunt or an uncle or anyone who has cut them off.

Not all of you are coming into this as estranged parents or estranged adult children. The loss is still very real. And I think it is still very jarring to feel like you had a very good relationship and then, see that this person maybe started going to therapy or met this person and then all of a sudden the relationship ended. What I want us to take away from this more is that this brainwashing framework, no matter how much comfort it gives us in the short term, it keeps people stuck. It keeps people from repairing and moving forward. Because as long as the cause lives entirely, you know, inside of a phone or therapist office or in your son-in-law, as long as it lives anywhere outside of what

was happening in that relationship, then there's nothing for you to do. There's nothing for you to understand, reckon with, or nothing for you to do but wait until they like break out of the spell. And for some of these people, it's not going to break because they are not being brainwashed. And so I think we have to ask ourselves, you know, anybody that's in this position, why was the grievance there to begin with? Why did this person relate to this content? Why did they feel like they wanted to go to therapy and talk about our relationship? Why does their partner not want to come around us? Or why did their partner find something that seemed like they wanted to stand up for that person? What was being given a name in this dynamic?

And what has our relationship been like for any of this? And honestly, guys, a lot of people that I interviewed, especially for my book, I was surprised by this, I think, because many of them were older and, you know, didn't come from this demographic of like viewing all of this on social media or maybe even going to therapy until after they were estranged. They did not even have TikTok or they didn't. view estrangement content or they maybe even didn't go to therapy before they became estranged. So while this could be true for some, it is not true for all.

And I think that we need to be really asking the painful questions of like, what is this brainwashing story protecting me from? And what might I find no matter how painful it is on the other side of like letting go? of this theory. If this episode brought up something for you or helped you in any way, this is the exact kind of work that we do inside Calling Home. I really like to incorporate research findings, my own experiences from working with these populations, what the community is telling us, and also the historical context of a lot of these issues, because I think it tells us a lot about where we are today. You can join the Family Cycle Breakers Club at

callinghome.co. And I am going to include all of the references for this episode in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for listening. Please don't forget to like, subscribe, leave us a review or comment, especially on YouTube or Spotify. That really helps keep the show going and helps it get in front of more eyes and ears. Thank you all so much. I'll be back on Thursday for another Q&A episode. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice,

or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Colin Holm or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Collingholm's terms of service linked in the show notes below.