First, I'm going to pick an object (it may be likely to be a trigger). Lets take a rolling pin. The first time a child sees a rolling pin they have no reference to it except what their senses tell them. A set of brain cells are then tasked to it. The first one knows the visual object rolling pin (this is a very high level conceptualization, as there are actually a lot of cells involved in just knowing that an image is a rolling pin).
What does the brain learn about a rolling pin? Mon uses it. Cell 1 starts a list of cells that have the characteristics of rolling pins. The next one associates it with mom. When it goes on the counter, it disappears. That goes in the next cell. But wait a minute, that's wrong. It doesn't matter "that it's wrong", it still goes in.
Now the child gets put in the high chair and the rolling pin is seen on the counter. A new cell gets "the rolling pin is visible on the counter". Now when the child sees the rolling pin, he gets a rolling pin that has disappeared half of the time and appeared half of the time when it is on the counter. As the child sees it more and more often on the counter a more reasonable interpretation is established.
So, what happens if someone is playing with the facts. Daddy brings home a soft foam rolling pin that looks exactly like the real thing. The child's parents never let him have any contact with the real thing. For 18 years she only relieve input that rolling pins are soft floppy funny objects. But then she gets away from home and receive a real shock. The rolling pins in this store are hard! What will she think? She'll think that this store has really strange rolling pins. You see 5000 brain cells refer to rolling pins as soft. Only 1 refers to them as hard. In her experience, its 5000 to 1 odds against rolling pins really being hard.
So, her abusers trained her for years and years that men hurt women. Your friend show her a number of occurrences where they don't and says see there, now you must change your mind. To them it is obvious. But to her brain, there is nothing obvious about it! She even knows that she should not think that way but she can't help herself.
The world just doesn't get that though because they haven't seen all of the dis-information that she has. The next time you think why can't they (your sufferer) get this, think instead, "In their brain what do the odds look like now?" When people tell them "this is so obvious, why don't you get it now", look at them and say "She has seen it the other way 50,000 times and you've given her 1 counter example. Can't you see that to her the odds are severely against your version!"
Bear
It's obviously not that simple. So some other things that you'll want to be thinking about:
- Memory aging
- Memory importance (the multiplier)
- Memory loss
