ABSTRACT
Criminals are widely viewed as impulsive and unreflective—poor candidates for insight-oriented psychotherapy. Formal studies of insight-oriented psychotherapy have almost unanimously supported this conclusion. In the 1970s I taught my students thusly. As I began to develop memories work, however, my opinion slowly began to shift. Why? Memories work emphasized changing perceptions through changing client behaviors. As perceptions shifted, personality changed. How was this done? I worked with key memories I considered “traumatic”—very clear memories with very strong negative affect. The key was to give clients a chance to experience a similar situation with a different outcome. I was invited to become part of a five-year National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) study with women multiply incarcerated for substance abuse related crimes. Inmates were initially extremely hesitant to participate. As one spokesperson put it, “All of us have had terrible experiences in our lives. What is the point to living them again? Once was enough.” I promised them that I would be talking about how to resolve the problem and get stronger, not about how they were forever victims held hostage by their past. I asked them to remember what I said and to hold me accountable. Memories work proved to be so powerful that subjects in the experimental treatment condition—Therapeutic Community—refused to continue until they were guaranteed memories work as well. Put simply, memories work was so effective, the study design was ruined. The research team shifted to a much more difficult measurement criterion—recidivism. They found that 15 months post release, recidivism dropped by 52% relative to untreated controls. These results replicate an earlier study by DeMuth and Bruhn (1997), which found that memories work tied with social skills as the highest ranked modules among eight offered. A team from the NIDA study was invited to apply for funding on anger-related issues to work with an untreated group of male inmates in federal prison about to be paroled. After two grant cycles, we observed results similar to the NIDA study—about 90% completed group treatment without recidivism occurring. Our group estimated an American prison population could be reduced by 30% with the treatment model we used.
