TRANSCRIPT
When bad things happen to people, especially when really bad things happen to children, the people who do those bad things, 99.9 percent of the time, do not want to take responsibility. And they don’t want the children to remember. They don’t want the children to be believed. They actually do a lot of the things that they do counting on the idea that people won’t believe the kids, or maybe that the kids won’t even be able to remember it in a normal way.
Then we add to this another phenomenon that when kids are young enough, they don’t process memories like older people do, even like older children do. So they may not remember things in specific detail, exactly how they happened according to how adults remember things. But they remember things in feelings, or in smells, or in certain sensations in their body. They may remember terror. They may remember extreme sadness. They remember feelings of betrayal and abandonment, but they may not all be connected to visual memories. They may also not be at all connected to a verbal ability to place all these pieces together into a narrative that adults would listen to and say, “Ah, that makes sense. Now I understand what happened.”
A big problem is that often it is adults who do the deciding if a memory is correct or not. And in the far majority of cases, adults don’t have that much ability to empathize with children. And so when they hear a child’s version of what happened, a lot of times, if it’s not presented in a very adult manner, they don’t relate to it. It doesn’t really make sense to them.
Now, why do adults not really relate very much to the perspective of children? A big part of it is actually connected to this also. It’s because most adults, so many adults in so many ways, are so disconnected from their own childhood. They’re actually disconnected from their own memories of childhood. Those memories are in their psyche somewhere. They’re in their bodies. They’re in their memories in a childlike way, unprocessed, undealt with, often unfelt, disassociated, split off from consciousness. And many of their memories, many adults’ memories, the ones especially that they really do split off and put away in the unconscious or split them off into the body somewhere, are memories that are extremely painful, extremely distasteful, have a lot of feelings around them.
So when these adults listen to children in their own childlike way share their feelings about what they went through, share their emotions about what they went through, their sensations, their memories through a childlike perspective, often I think for many adults it kicks up their old memories, their old feelings, their old sensations, the things that they’ve been splitting off. And it’s painful. And often they say, “Wait a second, I don’t want to feel this.” This is what they unconsciously say with themselves. They find it very unpleasant and stressful to have these feelings in their own memories in a childlike way come up. So what do they do? They censor children. They say, “You don’t feel that. That didn’t happen. Stop feeling that way. You shouldn’t feel that way. Stop talking about this.” They just shut down the child and don’t acknowledge what the child is going through, what the child is feeling.
This, of course, is especially true when the child is having those feelings and those memories about that specific adult themselves who did something bad to them.
I find it interesting that there’s a large contingent of people who put a lot of effort into promulgating this idea that false memories are a common thing, that people say they remember things that never happened. Well, I’m much more the opposite. I say, “God, what about all the things that happen to people that they don’t remember?”
I think the problems with humanity, so many of these problems in our society, our problems in our world—conflicts, wars, people doing child abuse, doing horrible things to other people, abusing animals, hurting themselves, being depressed, wanting to kill themselves, sometimes killing themselves, abusing substances, taking advantage of their children, manipulating each other, manipulating each other in relationships—the list can go on and on. These come because people haven’t processed what was done to them. They’re split off from what was done to them, and they’re just replicating it. They’re replicating it on other people in their personal lives. They’re replicating it in business. They’re replicating it in economy. They’re replicating it in war.
These are all things that happen to people because people who didn’t have really bad things done to them couldn’t do bad things to other people. It doesn’t work that way. So to me, the problems that I see in the world do come from people not remembering what happened to them, not being able to process and work through and grieve the traumas that they went through.
And yet, do people talk about this? I think there’s much more talk about false memories. “Oh, you have a false memory. You can’t trust your memory.” Because again, it’s very convenient for traumatizers if we don’t trust children, if we don’t trust people who talk about their childhood experiences.
Now, I think about my time as a therapist. It was rare, but I had a few times where clients of mine shared memories they had that could not possibly have happened. I want to go into details; there’s confidentiality. But I heard people share things that happened to them that just couldn’t possibly have happened, mostly because of time frame. I heard clients share about terrible war experiences they personally had as veterans, yet they were the wrong age to have been in that war. It was impossible. I heard that one. I heard other ones that were kind of similar things that I thought, “Oh, this I think would qualify as a false memory.” So yeah, people can remember things in distorted ways, and this is like adult people now.
I also worked with a lot of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, people who were in episodes that were called psychosis, in extreme states. And a lot of stuff was coming out, and sometimes people said things that didn’t quite add up. Sometimes it wasn’t in what’s considered consensual reality, consensual adult reality. It just didn’t make sense. It was considered bizarre, or I questioned it. But here’s the key: even this person who talked about fighting in a war that this person was the wrong age to have been in, well, sometimes the real memory of what actually happened was too painful. So people remember things metaphorically. They were so horribly abused in their childhood. Their childhood literally was the most horrible war zone where you can imagine. It was just trauma every day, terror every day, horror and violence and fear and abandonment and betrayals all over the place, sexual abuse. And sometimes people went on like this for years. You wonder how they survived. Well, I think a big part of how they survive is they split it off. They disassociated from it. And later, when they started to remember the feelings, it was still too painful to remember the details. Maybe they still want to believe their parents love them. Maybe this is exactly what they need to hold on to. So they say, “I was in a war,” and they can believe it in their minds.
I think about it sometimes in my life. I’ve even done things like that, twisted a memory a little bit to make it more palatable to me. And later, when I was more secure in myself, when I was able to have a better relationship with myself, to look at it and to realize, “Oh, I actually did remember that slightly distorted way.” Now, another thing is the whole subject of psychosis. Actually, what I think is this whole psychosis thing—a huge amount of this thing called schizophrenia and mania and psychosis and delusions and hallucinations—a lot of this actually is just unprocessed childhood memories, early childhood memories. Children remembering terrible things that happen to them, and that’s coming up in their bodies. And they’re creating, with their now adult minds, they’re creating narratives and stories that hold on to these childhood memories. And so what they’re actually expressing through metaphor is the memory of what actually did happen to them.
And we live in a world of adults. We live in a world of mental health professionals who don’t want to see this, who don’t want to know. So if you really want to talk about false memories, I think we live in a world that has profoundly false memories because people say their childhood was good. That’s such a common thing in therapy. People come to therapy and…
I would ask them about their childhood. I asked them about traumas, their relationship with their parents, and they’d say, “Oh, I had a great childhood. My childhood was great. It was really nice. We had a great time, you know, blah blah blah.” All these wonderful things happened. And yet, over time, we could deconstruct that. People would start to remember other things when they were given a safe place to talk about what really happened. It wasn’t so nice. It was awful.
So when people say, “Oh, I had a great childhood,” that is actually a false memory. I think that’s the type of false memory that we should really be thinking about. Not looking at people who talk about being abused and saying, “No, no, no, it didn’t happen. You couldn’t possibly remember that.” Oh, and then getting into all these fancy academic psychology people using rats and pigeons as examples of how, well, we can’t really be sure. And unless you have external validation about what happened, unless you have proof, you really can’t know. And there’s the human ability to distort memories. And so they really do this to go against people who say they’ve been abused.
But when people say they haven’t been abused, who accuses them of having false memories? It never happens. The psychology field never does it. Instead, they say, “Oh, it’s true.” And I saw that so many times when I was working in the mental health system. I would get someone’s old therapy notes. People would sign a release of information so I could get their past notes from other therapists or from mental hospitals. And I would see it in the section about their childhood. The mental health professionals, who sometimes were their therapists for months or years at a time, would say, “Oh, they had a great childhood. Their parents were really good parents. They had a good relationship with their parents. It was a non-traumatic childhood.” And it was total. That was not true at all.
And the more I got to know these people and really listen to them and give people a safe environment, a safe non-judgmental environment to go back and explore their feelings, to explore what really happened to them, a lot of people could access terrible things. And the delusion was that they had a good childhood.
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