Childhood Do you ever doubt your memories?

[oakleaves]

I am really scared, I feel like what if I have mixed up and confused my memories and said things that were not true or that have been exaggerated?
I worry a lot about other people not believing me because some things were just so f*cked up and I also sometimes don't believe myself.
I especially don't know how the same kind of things happened with more than one person. Like am I making that up or was it actually that bad.
I am really scared. I feel confident in the things I remember in isolation but when I put it all together I just think really how could all that happen.
Not just about what happened csa stuff but the people who knew and didn't help. What if I am making that bit up because I want someone to have known but actually they didn't know do I want them to have seen but maybe they didn't really or do I not want to admit that they did see or know. I am so confused.

 

[Sideways]

I feel like what if I have mixed up and confused my memories and said things that were not true or that have been exaggerated?

So many of us go through this in some version (waves hand - definitely I did!!).

The place I got to was: my memory is inaccurate. Memory is like that. It’s not CCTV. And I have no way of knowing what those inaccuracies are. Actually, it could as easily have been worse than I remember it…shit…!

That did 2 things for me. I immediately quit the obsession I had previously had about being ‘entitled to know my own story’ (that was another one of my recovery phases!). No one does. Everyone is operating from their brain’s best approximation. Once I (radically) accepted that as the way my brain just is, I actually became very careful about only ever exploring my memories with a trauma specialist. And I became a lot more comfortable with memory gaps.

So, it helped me loosen up about it, cut myself some slack. My brain actually doesn’t benefit from creating a false narrative of my past. It very definitely doesn’t benefit from making things worse in my mind than they actually were at the time.

So, whatever memory I have, there’s some necessary (albeit difficult) self acceptance and self compassion I need to inject into that space. Just like every other human, I need to trust myself, and accept that my brain has offered me the best that it’s got.

Whatever your memory is, is inaccurate, to some extent. But that’s okay. That makes you human, like the rest of us.

I am really scared.

For me, if I’d written your post, this statement would be the most useful thing to come out of it. This is how I’m feeling.

Having identified that, the way you approach the issue may have nothing to do with the accuracy of your memory at all. Because you’re feeling scared, and given what you’ve been through, scared makes sense.

If a friend told you that were feeling scared, how would you approach that? Compassionately, probably. Scared is not a nice feeling. Scared invokes vulnerability, and probably the most helpful response is to try and help that person feel safe again, right? Not because being scared is the wrong thing to feel, but because Scared is actually really valid, and there’s no reason for you to deal with that alone.

But very definitely, under all the thoughts your brain is pumping out right now, the place you are at with your recovery is feeling scared. And that’s definitely something you can wrap your teeth into in therapy to help resolve.