The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 14

Sunday, April 4, 1993 SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER A section of the San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle BURIED MEMORIES BROKEN More than 3,000 families have documented similar stories with the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Some 450 of them have been sued or threatened with lawsuits by their children. NORRIS from A-1 Daughter's claims of abuse disputed the allegations are preposterous. Like thousands of other families in North America, the Norrises believe that they and Anne are the victims of a "cultural hysteria" caused by a psychotherapy theory and process recovered memory therapy gone out of control. Somewhere in therapy or a support group, these families are convinced, their once-loving but troubled adult children were led to embrace a false diagnosis for all their problems: repressed memories of childhood sexual or ritual abuse that never happened.

More than 3,000 families have documented remarkably similar stories with a year-old, national parents' group, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation of Philadelphia. Some 450 of these families have been sued or threatened with suits by their children. Judy and Al Norris have been unable to talk to or visit their daughter since autumn 1988, when she severed communication. They now depend on insurance forms and legal documents to tell them what is happening to her. Through those papers the Norrises have learned of self-mutilation incidents one requiring some 80 stitches in Anne's arm and a relationship with Sawin that has produced more than 400 personal letters from Anne to her therapist.

To read and listen to Anne Norris' account of her childhood and to hear her family's account is to experience two stories at polar opposites. The family's account, supported by medical and school records, is of an imperfect but normal upbringing in Stockton and Orinda, and of a bright, pretty young woman who graduated with honors from Miramonte High School and UC-Irvine's music school. The other account, Anne Norris' and Sawin's, is a litany of unspeakable crimes: violent rape and sodomy, beatings, physical torture with electrodes and brooms and forced cannibalism at the hands of unidentified cult members. Among other horrors, Anne Norris has said that she was not even born of her mother but of baby breeders who provided infants to a satanic cult. 'Face the memories or die' "It doesn't matter that we have records of her birth from St.

John's Hospital in Santa Monica," said Judy Norris in a tired, thin voice. "None of the facts matters." Judy Norris has more than a birth certificate to counter her daughter's accusations. Many of the incidents alleged by Anne Norris relayed through one of her multiple personalities to Sawin involve physical abuses so severe that 1 most medical experts say they would involve a string of hospitalizations, scars and suspected battery reports from school officials. But there are none. During a telephone interviewing with The Examiner, Anne Norris said she had been "in total denial for 23 years" before she began to have memories during her therapy with Sawin.

"I didn't want these memories," she said. "I had to face the memories or die." Asked how a grammar schoolage child could function, attend class and make good grades while enduring such crippling abuse, Anne Norris said, "I was just a high achiever. Part of my denial was keeping up a facade to be a good student, going out I was driven. I spent a lot of my school years totally dissociating." Dissociation is a psychiatric term for a process of marked emotional detachment that can occur during trauma. Norris said her lack of scars could be attributed to the torture expertise of cult members and to ho: quickly her body heals.

In a sworn deposition, Sawin said his client was able to function RADDATZ At left are Judy Norris and son Jon, who with other family members insist the alleged abuses never despite the abuse because, "They used drugs so she could stay awake in school." He also said she lacked scars because, "They did things in orifices, and usually in the soft tissue. They heal very quickly." Sawin stated that he himself was ritually abused as a child but repressed all memory of it until his late 40s about the time he left 20 years of developmental psychology for clinical psychology and took on Anne Norris as a client. He said he has diagnosed himself as a multiple personality and that Anne Norris also has numerous alter personalities. "He said that Anne's father and I have multiple personality disorder, too," said Judy Norris. "But he hasn't even met us or asked us about our family history." Parents' memories repressed? In a telephone conversation with The Examiner, Sawin said he was "not at liberty to talk about any client I am seeing or have seen," but he did discuss his views on repression, multiple personality disorder, ritual abuse and false memories.

Parents who claim they have been falsely accused of incest, he said, "are pretty frightened individuals" who, "I believe, do not have any conscious memories of these acts, and they are rightly bewildered and believe they did not do it." Probably the victims of similar, repressed abuse themselves, Sawin theorized, these parents' conscious or "moral minds" cannot handle such an abhorrent reality. "I've never met a perpetrator who was not a victim," he said. "That's one of the reasons why a perpetrator has repressed memories: They've been victimized by the same thing. The sheer horror of them engaging in (abuse) is just more than the psyche can handle." For Judy and her estranged husband Al Norris, an East Bay attorney who talked with The Examiner but did not want to be quoted, Sawin and his theories are the source of a seemingly endless but escalatnightmare that began in the summer of 1988. They knew Anne had begun therapy but gathered from her twice-weekly phone calls it was because of stress related to her academic life.

But Judy Norris was especially concerned when Anne stopped telephoning in August 1988. En route by car to Los Angeles to enroll her middle daughter at USC, Judy Norris finally tracked down Anne by phone. She was stunned to hear Anne call herself an alcoholic. "I was shocked, but the robotic quality of her voice gave me a worse feeling," said Judy Norris. "Her voice had an odd, different sound.

Very clear and calm but detached. She said her therapist said she needed to take a off from drinking, go to AA and avoid all relationships. She alluded to some frightening incident at a party." The next week, the Norrises kept phoning Anne, feeling uneasy. Once, Al Norris asked if Anne had CHRIS MARTINEZ occurred. At right is Douglas Sawin, Anne Norris' therapist, who supports her claims.

been sexually assaulted at the party. Her reply: "Well, eventually it amounted to that." Worried, Judy Norris asked to see Anne but was told, "I'm meeting my own needs." After several attempts, Judy Norris reached Sawin. When she asked if Anne was getting rape crisis counseling or had seen a gynecologist, Sawin asked Norris to trust him. "Then," said Norris, "there was this big pause and he said, 'I am very, very good at what I The Norrises spent the next 90 days frustrated and worried, trying to reach Anne by phone, rarely succeeding. Judy wrote her.

On business in Los Angeles in early October, Al dropped by Anne's workplace with a teddy bear for her birthday. He was met with ice. Then, on Oct. 14, Sawin phoned. to see if the Norrises' insurance would cover hospitalization for Anne.

She was "feeling unsafe with herself," he said, and had been admitted to a hospital. Judy Norris called the hospital and was told her daughter wanted no contact with anyone. The next day, the nightmare exploded. Sawin phoned the Norrises and, during the conversation, told Al Norris, "You know what caused this problem. It's because you incested your daughter." Four years later, Al Norris breaks into 1 tears as he relates this.

Unlike some accused fathers, however, Norris is believed by the rest of his family. "At first, I had to wonder why she would make it up," said Anne's sister, Marnie Norris, 20. "I mean, here was a woman I'd known all my life. But in my heart I knew who my father was and that he wasn't capable of doing that." For the next two weeks, Judy kept phoning Anne in the hospital, only occasionally making contact. All she could learn about the alleged incest memories was that "colors" were involved and so were Anne's father and brother, Jon.

In deposition, the admitting psychiatrist at South Coast Medical Center where Anne Norris was hospitalized said during Anne's stay, "She still wasn't certain (incest) had actually happened." "She still had the feeling that all of it was of a dreamlike quality, that she had no memories," said Dr. Kathleen Farinacci. As she told me, if she didn't have such trust in Dr. Sawin, she would think she was crazy to even be considering these because it wasn't a substantial, clear memory at that point." As recently as June 9, 1992, Anne Norris still had doubts. In a letter to Sawin, subpoenaed by the Norrises' attorney, she wrote: "Riding on the bus I was afraid my memories weren't real.

I feel less and less able to do this trial. Why don't I feel anger at Judy or Al? All I feel is how I'm hurting them and they are so sad. Then I remember how hard it is to leave a session with you, how strong the replacement and abandonment is." In his phone conversation with The Examiner, Sawin said that "sometimes it takes years" for memories of abuse to emerge and that, of all his 50 weekly clients, "Not one walked in my office and said, 'I'm an incest Asked in a deposition how many of his clients had repressed memories, Sawin said, "That would be about all of my clients, practically." On Oct. 30, 1988, said Judy Norris, Anne called from the hospital, read a long, jargon-laden letter about separating from her mother and said she did not want Judy Norris to try to contact her. "I was dying inside and strug- "I told her that she'd always said I was her best friend, and that this was like losing my friend as well as my daughter.

In this tiny, little voice she said, 'Well, it's not 99 Judy Norris, shown at right with Anne in a 1986 snapshot gling to say something that would break through all the programming and reach the girl I knew," said Judy Norris. "I told her that she'd always said I was her best friend, wand that this was like losing my friend as well as my daughter. In this tiny, little voice, she said, 'Well, it's not The next time Judy Norris was able to see Anne was three years later at the first of four depositions. "I've gone to all of them just to be able to see her," said the mother. "At one deposition, I broke all the rules.

When we took a break, I said, 'Mr. Sawin, do you think it would be inappropriate if I told my daughter that I love Does absolute truth matter? Although Anne Norris filed her initial lawsuit in Orange County in August 1989, the Norrises did not learn of it until December. Al Norris received his copy of the complaint in his office from a sheriff's deputy; Judy got hers in the mail. Anne Norris' grandparents got theirs at home from a uniformed city policeman. Marnie was pulled from a high school class at Miramonte by a child protective services officer who was notified by Sawin of possible child abuse in her family.

"From the very first accusation (of incest), I knew it was ridiculous," said Judy. "At that point I hadn't been accused of anything except supposedly standing by and watching. But I wasn't the kind of mother who would stand by and watch something like this. I'd have to be on another planet to let all this ever happen." Since the first accusation, however, Judy Norris has been accused of a great deal. Anne Norris' charges include alleged incidents of ritual torture by both of her parents and other adults, involving knives, wires and fish hooks.

The sexual abuse claims include rape and sodomy with such objects as carrots, chicken parts and hoses. One particularly graphic scene, related by Sawin in deposition, involves 6-year-old Anne Norris being hung, nude, from a bannister by her mother, a broomstick in the child's vagina, as her siblings are exhorted to beat her. Like Anne Norris, Sawin is not troubled by the lack of medical evidence or scarring that might result from such monstrous abuse. Again, speaking generally of his clients' accusations, not of the Norrises, Sawin said: "There is no way I can get independent confirmation reliable witnesses or some other infallible evidence that (such) material is absolutely true. I don't care whether it's absolute fact." Referring to the "wrenching pain" that people go through during memory recovery, he said, "You don't have reactions like that from a happy childhood.

I believe the content of the memories. It doesn't matter to me whether they are totally the truth or not." Sawin is director of The Healing Center, a therapy clinic in Laguna Beach. He does not use the standard handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III-R, to make his diagnoses of multiple personality disorder, he said in depositions. In deposition, Sawin said he had diagnosed about 30 to 40 clients with multiple personality disorder, and that half his patients were sexually abused by parents or caretakers. Asked if the increasing intensity of Anne's self-mutilation incidents seemed "to indicate to you a lack of improvement," Sawin said in a deposition, "No, not at all." Said Marnie Norris: "I've let go of a lot of my anger, but one thing that still makes me bitter is, I've had to watch my sister get worse and worse and worse, and I can't get her away from this man." Anne's older brother, Jon Norris, likens Anne's therapy to a drug addiction, saying, "She either has to withdraw from it or die from it." Twice postponed at Anne Norris' request, a trial is set for May.

Currently her own legal representative, Anne Norris told The Examiner she had "given up any expectation of having any kind of settlement or award." "My hope is for them to be held responsible," she said of her mother and father. Also, she said, "I would really, really like to have my therapy paid for." Of lawsuits in general, therapist Sawin said he supports them if "it will facilitate (a client's) healing." Sifting through childhood and adult photos of Anne, through I- love-you Mother's Day cards colored long ago with crayons, Judy Norris talked about a 1988 video she has of Anne's senior recital and of her last visit to Orinda. "I remember her asleep my grown daughter in the twin bed in Marnie's room," she said. "I walked over and just looked at her face so peaceful. I smoothed the stray locks of dark hair from her forehead, and I felt I felt a heart that was full of love.

I can't explain it. It's just being a mother, I guess." During his interview with The Examiner, Sawin was asked about his belief in massive repression and about the terrifying scenario of thousands of normal-seeming people walking around, unaware that they had I repressed memories of being horribly abused or of having committed such abuse. "Exactly," said Sawin. "Pretty scary prospects." HOW TO GET HELP Parents who believe they have been falsely accused of incest or abuse by an adult child may call the False Memory Syndrome Foundation at (800) 568-8882. For referral to a therapist, call a facility that is associated with an established hospital or university.

In San Francisco: Mount Zion, 885-7415; UCSF's Langley Porter, 476-2215. In the East Bay: UCBerkeley, (510) 642-2055; Family Services Agency, (510) 834-5433. In Marin: county referral, 499-6835; Family Services Agency, 456-3853. The Menninger Foundation, 696-5900, makes referrals for the Peninsula and Bay Area in general..