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heavenlyabyss
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02 Mar 2015, 1:47 pm

What do you think?

Anyone here ever had a repressed memory come to surface that could be verified by others?

Anyone had a repressed memory come to surface that could not be proven true or false?



RhodyStruggle
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02 Mar 2015, 2:07 pm

heavenlyabyss wrote:
What do you think?

Anyone here ever had a repressed memory come to surface that could be verified by others?

Anyone had a repressed memory come to surface that could not be proven true or false?


I've experienced involuntary recollection of non-verifiable memories in the form of PTSD flashbacks. Typically recall of traumatic events which occurred while I was in a dissociative state. Not sure if the term "repressed" applies.


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heavenlyabyss
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05 Mar 2015, 2:47 pm

So when you say you were in a dissociated state, why were you in a dissociated state? Did it come out of the blue or was it triggered by something?

Sometimes I have doubts about certain things in my past. Snapshot memories that I'm not sure are accurate or not. But then I wonder if I'm just making it up or distorting memories from the past.



slave
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05 Mar 2015, 9:27 pm

heavenlyabyss wrote:
So when you say you were in a dissociated state, why were you in a dissociated state? Did it come out of the blue or was it triggered by something?

Sometimes I have doubts about certain things in my past. Snapshot memories that I'm not sure are accurate or not. But then I wonder if I'm just making it up or distorting memories from the past.


The literature is very clear that memories can be modified by the retrieval process and modified again when stored.

Memories can be influenced by the current state of the individual having them.

Memories are not an objective immutable record of sensory data. Memories are largely a dynamic record of the perception of stimuli rather than an impartial record of same.

The key is that memories record perception not just sensation.



RhodyStruggle
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06 Mar 2015, 4:14 pm

heavenlyabyss wrote:
So when you say you were in a dissociated state, why were you in a dissociated state? Did it come out of the blue or was it triggered by something?


Triggered by institutional abuse. Dopamine starvation due to being force-fed antipsychotics probably did not help. There's basically a two-year chunk of my memories that are mostly blank except for a few points of light that fizzle and then die - I can remember something about it for a moment or two but then I lose it again.

Sometimes I remember faces, sometimes names. Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to this boy, how did that young man turn out. A couple I don't wonder about, I know they're already dead.


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IBrokeMyself
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07 Mar 2015, 3:58 am

I don't know whether this is what you are looking for... It's not exactly about repressed memories, rather about fake ones...
During my teens, there was a time when I had memories that I was absolutely certain about - and that turned out to be completely wrong. It was nothing serious, but it freaked me out at the time. Example: I remember seeing person A write her name on a board and enlisting in some activity. I remember asking her about it. Later, I ask her how it went - and she has absolutely no idea what I am talking about, although I clearly recall our conversation and the fact that I saw her writing her name on that board. Another example: Teacher B tells the class that he will not be in the next day, so we don't have to prepare for class and the homework will be due the day after that. I always do my homework the day before (but I always do!), so I come unprepared... and guess what? The teacher is not gone, class is not canceled, none of the other students remember the teacher talking about his "thing" that he was supposed to be having today... I seriously considered the possibility of me switching parallel universes from time to time, because I could have sworn that my memories were real.
I've always kept my brain under close scrutiny, writing down things that seemed off or felt strange, so I remembered these few times when this "memory switch" happened. I have no idea why it did, though. I don't know why it stopped happening some day, either.



Ettina
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09 Mar 2015, 6:10 pm

I wrote a psych paper about this many years ago. From what I can recall, I found that:

Both repressed memories and false memories definitely exist. The trick is telling the difference.

Repressed memories are associated with poor metamemory - memory for prior memory performance. If you ask someone with verified repressed memories to memorize a word list and then recall it from memory, and then bring them in a week later and give them the word list and ask them to pick out which words they remembered correctly the week before, their original recall of the word list is normal, but next week they do much poorer than controls at figuring out which words they got right before. This has lead some theorists to suggest that people with recovered memories never actually forgot the trauma, but rather forgot they remembered the trauma. People with false memories don't show this issue.

False memories, meanwhile, are associated with a tendency to 'errors of commission' on memory tasks. In other words, if you give someone with false memories (say, a person who remembers being abducted by aliens) a word list like 'bed', 'night', 'blanket', 'pillow', 'rest', etc, they are more likely than most people to misremember 'sleep' as being a word on the list. (Most people do this occasionally, people with false memories do this a lot.) So they seem to have a tendency to form false memories about all sorts of things, not just traumatic events.

In addition, context helps to differentiate the two. Memories that are recovered out of the blue, and are unexpected to the person, are usually true - in fact, they appear to be just as accurate as memories that were never forgotten. In contrast, memories that the person expected or deliberately tried to recover are suspect, especially if the person received hypnosis to recover the memories.

Lastly, false memories do not cause PTSD symptoms, while recovered memories do. However, most people with false memories of sexual abuse have symptoms similar to PTSD, because that's what lead a psychologist to misdiagnose them as an abuse survivor. Many PTSD symptoms can also be symptoms of other mental conditions unrelated to abuse, such as depression, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, etc.

It's also possible for someone to have both true and false abuse memories, because just because someone really was abused doesn't mean they won't get bad therapy as well.