1316: A Cautionary Tale of Repressed Memory Therapy Pt. 3

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 5.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2020

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today on Mormon Stories Podcast we continue our series on the history of Repressed Memory Therapy and claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse within Utah Mormonism.

Today’s interview is with “Kim,” who tells her experiences of being subjected to techniques of hypnosis and repressed/recovered memory in Provo/Orem Utah between 1988 and 1992. In the interview Kim discusses her traumatic childhood - which led to her conversion to Mormonism, and left her vulnerable to Repressed/Recovered Memory techniques in adulthood while she was attempting to recover from childhood PTSD.

While living in Provo/Orem, UT and struggling in her early marriage, Kim was referred to Mormon therapists Rex Kocherhans and Ruth Kilpack - both of whom were practitioners of Repressed/Recovered Memory therapy. Interestingly, Ruth Killpack was referred to Kim by her LDS bishop, and was also a therapist to Martha Beck, who controversially claimed that her late father, Mormon scholar and apologist Hugh Nibley, sexually abused her. Martha Beck has acknowledged that her memories of abuse were recovered through these same Repressed/Recovered Memory techniques.

As Ruth engaged in therapy with Mormon therapists Rex Kocherhans and Ruth Kilpack, Ruth was pressured in therapy using hypnosis to “remember” being sexually abused during her childhood, which resulted in her accusing several family members of sexual abuse - even though she was never convinced that the “memories” produced under hypnosis were real. As these accusations left Kim increasingly paranoid, ostracized from her family, and ultimately re-traumatized - and as Kim grew increasingly uncomfortable with her therapists’ lack of appropriate boundaries and unethical therapeutic ethics -- Kim determined that her “memories” of family abuse were in fact implanted or manipulated by her therapists.

“Kim” was later directly interviewed by Mormon General Authority Glenn Pace as a part of his investigation into Satanic Ritual within Mormonism, and eventually Kim spoke out as an advocate against “”Repressed or Recovered Memory” Techniques in newspapers, and on TV.

This is Kim’s story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	One, two, three.
0:03.0	Come, come, you saints, no toil nor labor thing.
0:28.0	But with joy, when you're way.
0:35.0	So hello, Kim, and welcome back to our interview on your experiences with repressed memory.
0:45.0	And we've spent two hours now talking about your background, your joining the Mormon church,
0:51.0	your having a history of trauma which made you vulnerable and in needing therapy.
0:58.0	And we've talked about your really unfortunate experiences with Rex Cokerhahn's Improvo,
1:06.0	where he crossed all sorts of boundaries, apparently by your report, and violated all sorts of ethical laws using hypnosis and recovered memory techniques.
1:17.0	So you say at some point, you and your husband stopped that therapeutic relationship with Rex.
1:22.0	You said you had a baby, is that right?
1:24.0	That's right.
1:25.0	What I'm dying to know is how in the world could you then get back into therapy with Ruth Kielpak,
1:30.0	where more hypnosis techniques are used after you had just been through a bunch of kind of abusive, inappropriate therapeutic techniques.
1:38.0	So tell us how, and of course, for those who are tuning in now, this is significant and going to be interesting to the Mormon audience,
1:45.0	because as we've already said, we're all familiar, many of us are familiar with Martha Beck,
1:50.0	National Author, who made claims in her book, leaving the saints that her father,
1:59.0	Hugh Nibbly, respected Mormon scholar and apologist by some, you know, we all are aware of Martha Beck's claims that Hugh Nibbly sexually abused her in the book that she came out with.
2:11.0	There are many that jumped on and said, yes, Hugh Nibbly's an abuser.
2:15.0	There are others who came to Hugh Nibbly's defense and said, no, these claims that Martha Beck made were made using these hypnosis and recovered memory techniques.
2:26.0	And this man is being falsely accused, including members of Hugh Nibbly's own family.
2:31.0	And we all, the many of us are aware of, Boyd Peterson, who wrote a book, a memoir of Hugh Nibbly,
2:38.0	and he, along with other daughters and maybe even sons of Hugh Nibbly, condemned their sisters accusations of sexual abuse and again saying it was recovered memory.
	...

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