When one of my children disappeared from my life by one-sidedly distancing herself, I lived through every parent’s worst nightmare. I was given no hints or advance warning, but until I personally experienced parental estrangement, I was only vaguely aware of its insidious existence.
Our family had always enjoyed a happy and close dynamic. I have a wonderful wife and five adult children, and we spent time together on vacations, during Yomim Tovim and on school breaks. I felt very blessed. Friends of ours often commented on how special it was that we really enjoyed each other’s company. We were also close to our extended families on both sides.
And then, totally out of the blue, something terrible and completely unexpected shattered our equanimity. Our daughter Esther* is a schoolteacher in her mid-30s with a supportive husband and seven children, ka”k. She had always been a type-A personality had suffered on and off from low level anxiety over the years, but with a good marriage and a strong family unit, she was doing well. Highly intelligent and sensitive toothers, she was well-liked by friends, family and coworkers.
It was approximately six months into COVID when it occurred to us that Esther was starting to withdraw from the family. She was visiting and calling less often, and in general she was not involving me or other family members in her life as much as she used to. It was such a slow change that we hardly noticed it until it became more striking. We were accustomed to being in constant contact: chatting about this and that, babysitting, my wife going shopping with her and buying her kids clothing and toys. At first, we attributed it to the pandemic, since our son-in-law was vigilant about all the social distancing and masking. We also blamed it on the fact that their new baby had been born a month early, so there was a lot of stress. We gave Esther the space that we thought she needed, providing her with emotional support in the few conversations we had with her. We also helped her financially. We privately worried that perhaps there was a health issue going on that they didn’t want to burden us with.
As the months passed, I realized that there was definitely a new coolness and distance to our relationship. Whenever I called her and asked how she was doing, she brushed me off and assured me that everything was fine, ending our conversations quickly and firmly.
Soon Pesach was approaching, a Yom Tov that we had always spent together. Esther began dodging my wife’s questions relating to her plans. Two weeks before Pesach, she stopped taking any of our calls. Confused and deeply worried, we reached out to our son-in-law, who also ignored our calls. We didn’t know what to think when this continued. Then, to our utter shock and dismay, they both blocked us on their phones. We didn’t know where to turn.
It was inexplicable. There hadn’t even been any arguments or disagreements, nothing that could help us understand their behavior. Time was passing, and we were cut off from our beloved grandchildren as well. We were sick with worry. We spent many gut-wrenching hours and sleepless nights discussing and dissecting everything that had transpired, trying to make sense out of this bizarre and frightening situation.
Our oldest son was finally successful in reaching out to Esther, and after pleading with her to explain her sudden cold behavior, she agreed to a meeting. It began with Esther angrily spilling out a litany of shocking complaints about how we had mistreated her throughout her life. The things she was saying were so strange and ludicrous that we couldn’t make sense of them at all. It was also the first time we had an inkling that she held such grievances. She confided in her brother that she had been going through a rough period in her life and was in therapy, which she said was tremendously helpful, although she didn’t disclose any specifics.
Our son reported that their conversation had been very stilted and that she didn’t sound like her regular self. She was using a lot of “psychobabble,” and he got the feeling that she was parroting words and ideas she had learned in the course of her therapy.
Then things went from bad to worse. By the time the new school year came around, Esther had disappeared completely from our lives. We found ourselves having to dodge questions from our siblings and friends, who began to take notice of her absence.
A few months later, we decided that the time had come for desperate measures. We had two of our children visit Esther late one evening, after her kids were asleep. After much prodding, she finally confided in her siblings that she had been undergoing a kind of therapy called EMDR, which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. As a result of the therapeutic sessions, she had recovered repressed memories of being abused by me, her father, as a young child of three or four.
She went on to describe how images of that were flooding her thoughts, and she was now in the process of dealing with the intense trauma they were causing. She told them that my wife bad been aware of the abuse and had covered up for me over the years. Needless to say, Esther’s siblings reeled in horror. How could someone who had a perfectly normal and healthy childhood and relationship with her father suddenly have such preposterous “memories”? Esther stubbornly refused to hear any words of doubt or protest, repeatedly, saying that she was sure the events had really happened. As her therapist bad explained, she had repressed these memories because they were horrific.
When I heard what my daughter had said, I felt faint and couldn’t breathe. The room began to spin, and I had to grasp the arms of my chair. My wife’s face was pale and she looked terror-stricken. The very idea that my child, whom I loved dearly and had certainly, never abused, could accuse me of such a heinous crime was surreal. And the notion that my wife had been an “accomplice” was equally grotesque.
After a night of crying and talking it over, we decided to reach out to a close relative, who connected us with a rebbetzin who had been involved in familiar counseling for several decades. Having been sought out by so many ehrliche people for guidance, we trusted her completely with our story.
After tearfully recounting what had happened to us, we told her that the only possible explanation we bad come up with was that our daughter was suffering from some form of mental illness, perhaps schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or some other form of psychosis or delusional behavior. However, when we mentioned that our daughter had been undergoing EMDR therapy, the rebbetzin took a deep breath and said that mental illness might not be to blame. She then asked us if EMDR had supposedly “awakened these ‘memories.’” When we answered in the affirmative, she told us that EMDR has recently become very popular in our circles, and that the therapy itself is extremely controversial. She then began to explain what EMDR does and how it works. Without knowing us personally, she obviously couldn’t be sure of our innocence, but it was clear from our initial meeting that she trusted that we were probably telling the truth based on similar cases.
We learned that EMDR is a type of therapy that uses eye movements, taps and noises or lights to help patients recover from various kinds of trauma as well as other negative experiences. It was introduced by a psychologist named Dr. Francine Shapiro in 1989 for treatment of traumatic memories, and it has since been used for anxiety, PTSD, many kinds of phobias and panic disorders. The goal of this therapy is to process memories in a different way that makes them less painful and less triggering. It is done one-on-one with a trained EMDR therapist and is administered once or twice a week for a period of six to 12 weeks on average.
Most importantly, Dr. Shapiro had specifically warned against using this therapy in conjunction with other treatments, like hypnosis, which may create false memories, and she warned that the technique should not be used to recover suppressed memories, noting that memory itself is frail and imperfect. If a patient does experience “awakened memories,” she noted that they shouldn’t be taken literally. In fact, she had cautioned therapists against assuming that they are true, since they typically include figurative components that mix accurate and inaccurate elements. The point of EMDR was to deal with the emotional effects of trauma, not to investigate memories.
There isn’t clear evidence whether EMDR on its own can induce false memories, with some studies suggesting yes and some no. However, the practices that therapists use along with EMDR and the suggestions they may make during EMDR therapy can definitely induce false memories. In 2021, an Italian court sentenced a psychologist to four years in prison for inducing false memories of abuse in a patient during EMDR sessions.
The rebbetzin also explained that when therapists use EMDR in this way, they are undermining the real victims of abuse who have conscious memories of actual events. Furthermore, awakened memories of such abuse at such a young age isn’t congruent with the research data on children’s memory retention, which is typically very vague and based on the individual’s child’s level of processing, which is minimal at best.
If used correctly, EMDR can be lifesaving, but as we unfortunately learned from personal experience, if it isn’t, it has the potential to cause devastation. Ours was the third case the rebbetzin had seen in which parents or other relatives had been falsely accused of abuse after an adult child had gone for EMDR therapy. She offered to reach out to our daughter and her husband, and we planned to meet again to discuss what further steps we should take.
We also spoke to one of the directors of a frum mental health referral service about his experiences with this therapy without revealing any details of our personal story. He told us that even though EMDR has brought tremendous benefit to many trauma patients in our community, it comes with real risks and dangers. Sending someone for this kind of therapy is not always appropriate, and rabbanim are often consulted before the decision is made. It is also necessary to know which EMDR therapists can be trusted not to lead their clients down this destructive path. Unfortunately, many therapists themselves don’t understand the purpose of EMDR. And he told us all this without even knowing our story!
I wish I could say that there is a happy ending to this tale. Over the past three years, we have made some progress thanks to numerous family therapy sessions with a psychologist who is familiar with the dangers of EMDR, and Esther now concedes that her memories might be false. Although we have been irrevocably damaged by what happened, we are grateful she is back in our lives to the extent that she is. I have since spoken to many other frum parents and grandparents whose sons or daughters stopped talking to them, and it broke my heart to know how common parental estrangement is in our community. It is a phenomenon that can be caused by bad therapy, and when the accusations against the parents are false, the estrangement is particularly gut-wrenching.
I can tell you that our experience has been hurtful in a way that words cannot convey, and the fact that this tragedy was abetted by a therapist makes that person an accomplice. If even one family will be saved by hearing my story, it will have been worth all of the anguish of telling it.
*Names have been changed for privacy.