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Childhood Do you ever doubt your memories?

oakleaves

MyPTSD Pro
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.
 
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.
 
I did originally doubt them but now I don't so much because I don't feel my brain would make it up, though my vague memory is still very difficult to deal with
 
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.
I've had plenty of fictional memories. To learn if my memories are real or not I will dwell on the memory for a period of time and real memories will begin to come about and fictional memory begins to fade. Another way to learn if memory is real is to go to locations where the memories happened and learn if things are different than what memory is telling. Fictional memories for me are like a wading before the plunge. Rather than get hammered at once with a horrible traumatic past fictional memories will produce a movie with lots of drama etc in order to soften the blow.
 
Like @Sideways I've had to simply accept that memory is malleable over time because the further in time we get away from the event, our memories are remembering a construction of what happened each time, (not the actual event that is happening over and over again) and that construction has the potential for variation each time.

I have a lot of weird shit in my history as well - brainwashing, regimentation, hierarchy, indoctrination, propaganda, etc. I catch myself up all the time still thinking of things as I did back then - but those components serve to deepen the fractures and non-linearity and incoherence my memories have.

I'm currently doing FORNET and a big part of that is a construction of a trauma timeline along with narratives of specific formative events. The goal is to write what you factually remember as best as possible. It's OK if some of it isn't accurate or it isn't linear or you only remember bits and pieces (this is my trouble - I remember random stuff out of time and have a hard time with the sequence and composition).

Like in one memory I know that a pipe was involved and got heated, but I don't remember how. This causes me to doubt that memory because if I can't remember how, is it logically possible it didn't happen? But other aspects of this experience are visceral and felt and known enough, and I have corroboration from other people (including the person who did it) that at least something happened at that day and time in a similar way as I recall it.

So sometimes you just have to accept that as your reality and that your reality may not be perfect - no one's is. Everyone is susceptible to variations on reality because when the human brain doesn't know something it will just literally make it up. Things get filled in, gaps get filled in all the time with incorrect information. My therapy has been more or less focused on gaining as much factual awareness as I can with the understanding that how I was abused and how memories work and how PTSD works can seriously impact those results.

What I know is that I am not lying. I am trying to faithfully produce what I know to be the truth about what happened. Could I be crazy? Yup. Could I have gotten it wrong? Yup. But I am not being malicious. Just focus on all the things you can remember and then work backwards from there, preferably as Sideways mentions, in a safe and therapeutic environment.
 
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…!


We all do that, and in the end? Find out that if anything - we are downplaying the worst of it......and there's more to it than we thought, unfortunately.

Spent 45 years telling myself it wasn't bad and trying to hide memories, in the end, the truth was the only part I was really trying to hide.
 
I have always struggled with this and still do; as I would echo other’s, probably all of us do at some point.

It's difficult to get to a point where you accept that memories are not accurate, nor are they usually in a nice neat timeline. I still find myself tempted to fill in the blanks, and then get frustrated by the what ifs and maybes, as if filling the gaps will give me a nice coherent explanation of why it all happened and the way that it did.

Or if it was even real. A lot of it has no wider context at all. I don't know what set my mother off, or why she chose to do that specific thing, or even quite when. Those surrounding details are vague. I'm coming to terms with the fact I'll never know the why, or the context.
 
We were talking about this in therapy yesterday and for me - one of the biggies - is that some of those memories fall into what Bessel Van Der Kolk called "the shattered memories right after trauma". Or in other words they piled one on top of the other and in most cases all there are are bits and pieces, sensations, memories of what was said by someone, no real chunk of memory big enough to trust as real.
 
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