Hi Carrie, I read your rebuttal and I'm hoping you can help me make sense of something that I've had a lot of trouble reconciling in my life. First, let me just state that I'm a huge fan of your podcast. I've listened to hundreds of hours of backlog, and consider myself a skeptic. I've also listened to a lot of You're Wrong About, where Sarah Marshall has roughly the same viewpoint of you when debunking Michelle Remembers, other Satanic Panic testimony, etc.

And yet, this is the one viewpoint that doesn't track at all with my lived experience. Two of my best friends have recovered memories of childhood abuse, and I don't see what circumstances could have led to them making it up. Neither has done hypnotherapy. Neither went to therapy looking for answers, or even recovered these memories with the help of therapists. And both of them are what I would describe as fairly skeptical, rational people. I've have spent hours in conversation with both of them being worried that they were making them up, worried that they were just looking for answers where there weren't any, in tears - but nothing else made sense. They are also both people who have dealt with intense trauma triggers their entire life and other mental health issues that track with childhood abuse, despite not having any memories of the actual abuse until later in life. If that abuse were made up or implanted, I don't know how else to explain why otherwise mundane things would have been deeply traumatic to them for years before that revelation. It's the only puzzle piece that fits.

I definitely believe that many recovered memories, especially via hypnotherapy, can be made up, and I definitely believe it's possible for some mental health professionals to implant memories, either accidentally or on purpose. But I see no reason why traumatized people looking for answers would make up really mundane incidents of sexual abuse on their own, only to have to spend years untangling them? Especially if those memories instantly cause such distress that they lead to suicidal ideation and sheer panic, emotions that shouldn't be present if a story was just being made up out of whole cloth. It just doesn't make any sense to me. I don't know how to square my belief in rationality and science with my lived experience here, and I've yet to find a plausible alternative. Do you think I'm just being naive by trusting my friends?