March 2022
A friend of mine remembers when he was a little child, his mother talking about the croaking frog they were hearing that morning and then being taken outside to look at it. It was huge, gigantic, massive, the size of a small elephant.
I remember a Zeppelin airship flying over our house, even though they ceased to fly decades before I was born and they didn’t fly in Australia at all.
Someone I know has an apparent memory of having sex with his mother. Maybe this actually happened, or maybe it didn’t. Gathering the evidence around such a memory requires much more than relying on a memory reconstruction. It requires close examination of the behaviour of actual people and circumstances and possible situations. Again, maybe it happened, but maybe it didn’t. What is important here is knowing that memory is not to be relied upon as a complete and authentic record of past possible events.
Memory is not a useful tool for determining actual history and so any technique for digging out possible memories can’t be relied upon as the sole means of determining truth – which is why I refuse to pretend to do any so called repressed memory work using hypnosis. I do not want to participate in the making of false memories. It is significant that hypnosis came into disrepute over this very thing. Once upon a time hypnosis was used to “prove” the authenticity of an event and used in a court of law as evidence. This was until sufficient research had been done to discredit the supposed revelation of repressed memories through this method, unfortunately dragging down with it, the whole reputation of hypnosis as useful adjunct in psychotherapy. Very fortunately, hypnotherapy is returning to being recognized as useful in psychotherapy for other purposes, and not as an excavator of the past.
We are creating memories all the time in an attempt to make sense of our life. Memories, as I’ve said already, are not necessarily a record of past situations. Sometimes they are a way to explain things that are poorly comprehended in the first place. A little child sees things, as all little beings do, from a small person’s perspective. They are little in a big world. Grasping at meaning from a perspective that is really limited requires piecing together bits of information from around them. Some of these bits of information could be things half heard and barely understood (like the story of the frog), things seen in books and on screen, some could come from other experiences, and so on. My apparent Zeppelin sighting I realize now came from a book on dirigibles and balloons that my father used to read to us melded into recurring dreams I had and reconstituted as an actual event. The situation of being little, of course, is actually true for all of us as we endeavour to negotiate the complexities of the vast world we live in. At least, though, we adults are generally better able to sort out what is probable and what isn’t – although maybe I’m too optimistic here, given the extraordinary rise in conspiracy theories.
The less information we have, the less we have to test the authenticity of something and the more likely we are to incorporate the flimsily known into what we think we know, creating a world view replete with false memories. This is essentially the way cults operate: the known world is deliberately limited to a tight and restrictive community. Before long, the most vulnerable among the group start remembering abuses that may, or may not, have actually occurred and so cling to the group more and more.
Everything needs to be tested. Nothing should be believed simply because someone has said if you remember it, that it happened. Maybe it did; maybe it didn’t. A memory can be changed, rethought, examined, played with, measured with the feeling status of things, but not relied upon to be necessarily a strict re-membering (re-putting together) of the past. Gather as much information you can and test your memory. In the end, though, maybe your reconstruction is real, but maybe it isn’t.
