False Memories - Are they real?

Watching the Seagulls

This morning I was sitting outside, watching the storm. The rain was falling as if commanded. The ocean waves were dancing, excited by the chaos. As I looked up, I noticed how gracefully the seagulls navigated the high winds. They understood the winds could not be controlled. They knew that gliding so gracefully, meant they had to remain calm and relaxed. It was beautiful. It helped me understand what I wanted to communicate in this article.

What I wrote last week was very personal. It represented a part of my past that I didn’t fully understand for a long time. A part that I was carrying within me, that sculpted me into the adult I have become, and am still becoming. I was afraid that by openly sharing these memories, I might hurt the people that love me. I was afraid that they might judge me. Some part of me was still afraid that I was doing something wrong.

Facing our pain is not a small task. It takes bravery and courage. When I first started this process, many years ago, my mind always fought to protect me from feeling the pain that was still trapped in my body. I went through a myriad of “what if’s”, and “are you sure’s”, and “if you do this then…” - It was exhausting but it changed, the more I practiced.?

Consciously exploring where our pain comes from, means we have to uncover and explore our own constitution. We have to honestly ask what our bodies remember, as well as what our minds remember, and then we have to compare the two, and see if they add up. Long term change requires not only uncovering and feeling our trauma repressed emotions, but also reframing how we see ourselves, in the reality we exist.

The body remembers feelings and emotions. The mind remembers the subjective reasons we use to translate the experiences that caused these feelings and emotions. Up until I started this process, I spent the majority of my conscious time only in my mind, trying to actively numb the unprocessed pain in my body. That changed. It is still continuing to change.

If you haven’t yet read last week’s article, then I ask you to please take some time and read it. It will help create the larger context. Last week, I shared how I remembered some of my own childhood developmental trauma. The traumas responsible for creating the subconscious neurological architectures in my body, that made me feel afraid of “being myself” for most of my life.?

Today I share with you how someone else remembers these exact same experiences.?

False Memories

Before I published "In constant fear - Trauma in childhood ", I sent it to my Mother. I knew that even though this was the exact testimony of what my mind remembers, it might still only be that - my own interpretation, constructed by the young brain I still had, when these experiences happened. As there are two sides to any one coin, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t just write about my side. Even though this is about my past pain, through uncovering it all those years ago, I learnt that when consolidating the feelings trapped in my body with the thoughts in my mind, it was necessary to also find out how these experiences were, for those on the other side of the coin.

I called my Mother. There was a long pause when we spoke. It was uncomfortable. I knew that I did the right thing in asking my Mother for her memories, but it suddenly felt like I did something wrong. I immediately felt the hot flush in my cheeks, as the blood started rushing to my head.?

“This is not what happened at all, Marcel”, she said.

For a brief moment, I wasn’t sure how to react. Then I remembered my Self, the self I am now. The open and clear version I have become. The Me, I am now, not the Me I was then. I asked her to tell me everything about these memories that she could remember.

The Memories

My memory: Hanging upside down in the air while my father beat the shit out of me.

My Mother’s memory: We agreed that neither of us can remember exactly whether my Dad was holding me up in the air from my leg, or my arm. But this did happen. Why did it happen? We were on holiday. The apartment we stayed in was on the 6th floor. My Dad’s sister, who is only a few years older than me, threw an empty soda can from the balcony which nearly hit someone walking below. They went to the building’s management, who in turn came to address it with my Father. As my Mother explained it, it was a very heated moment. They wanted to evict us. When my Dad asked what happened, my aunt pointed the finger at me. It only came out much later that it was never me. I got the beating.

The Fear Experience of that moment was deeply imprinted into my body. A pattern that would be reinforced many times in experiences to come. A pattern that said if something wrong was done, even if it wasn’t me directly, I will experience fear and pain.?

My memory: Sitting on my mother’s lap in the passenger seat, and going straight into the windscreen.

My Mother’s memory: My Mother doesn’t remember this at all. This was very interesting. It’s a process I’ve experienced both myself, as well as observed many times in my clients. Our minds have the ability to turn off access to the memory of certain experiences if they are too hard to look at. It's a protective mechanism.

My Memory: Being forced to play guitar, in front of my Father’s drunk buddies.

My Mother’s memory: My mother shared the same memory. I can only think that in some unhealthy way he wanted to “show me off”. As if I was a pet that belonged to him. A pet that learnt a new trick. Today I can understand that it might have been driven by pride. As a child however, it caused a deep self-doubt pattern in me that I carried straight into my adulthood. I see this so much in my work. It’s so destructive. Traditional family system conditioning and cultural socialization, still carries the subconscious idea that a child belongs to the parent, and that the child should be the better extension of the adult. This is just not true. Kahlil Gibran put it most beautifully in “The Prophet” where he said:

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”

My Memory: Splitting my head open in the swimming pool and my father raging because of it.

My Mother’s memory: This did happen as I remember it. Apparently when I was at the family doctor to get my head stitched up, I asked him to also inject my ass with local anesthetics because of what was lying in wait for me, when I got back home. I smiled when my Mom told me this part. It sounds exactly like me, but my mind cannot remember it through the fear my body remembers.

My Memory: Being taken out of school because the school decided to allow “black” pupils to attend.

My Mother’s memory: This perhaps was the most interesting discovery for me. The reasons my mind made up to translate and understand this experience, is not what happened at all. The very short version is that my sister needed to go to another school which would support her cognitive remediation treatment after brain surgery, as a baby. The school we were in at the time was far away from the city and services like this were not available. My Mother explained that I actually chose to move schools at the time and that it was a clear decision from my side - a 10 year old, who also just had a stroke. As you can tell by this particular memory, my parents also had an awful lot going on in their life. Trauma creates trauma.

My Memory: Not fitting in.

My Mother’s memory: This was an internal experience. As my Mom remembers it, she said that she cannot understand why I could have felt like this. From her perspective, on the outside everything looked as if I was adapting perfectly. I’m sure that you, reading this now, can resonate with this sentence - “on the outside everything looked fine”. This is often the case in both children and adults. When our minds cannot find an adequate translation to explain what our bodies are feeling, we turn into walking, talking mirror neurons. Chameleons pretending to fit in perfectly on the outside, yet suffering on the inside.

My Memory: Being forced to stop playing rugby.

My Mother’s Memory: The reasons why this happened are very different from how I remembered it. I had a stroke the year before, and it was clear instructions given to my parents by my primary physicians, that I could not participate in any close contact sports. I never knew this, and only found out the actual reason when I had this conversation with my mother. 31 years after the memory was made.

Body, Mind and Memories?

Our bodies have their own memories. They remember in terms of how intense the external experience is or was. Our minds are the interpreters. They define and translate these experiences, so that both, the reason and the result, can become unified within our own consciousness.

With trauma experiences that happen during childhood, the part of our brain responsible for higher cognitive functions, isn’t developed enough to help us translate these experiences. Because of this, the experience gets translated from the foundation it was created - either the animal brain, or the emotional brain, but not the rational, creative brain.

My memories are a perfect example. My brain searched for the reasons to explain the experiences my physical body was going through. Because my neocortex was not yet developed enough to see the bigger picture, it took whatever was most prominent in my environment and used that to create a memory construct which could justify the experiences.?

The difficulty in my case, and what I see in many others, was that this memory construct wasn’t updated until much later in our lives. Not because we weren’t able to, but because the trauma didn’t stop. It continued throughout our life. One trauma turned into many.?

We only have a finite cognitive processing capacity. If this capacity is already full, we cannot process anything new. It's not something that can be forced. It’s a process that can be cultivated carefully over time. Forcing it only adds to the already existing pressure experienced, leading to further distructive coping mechanisms. In my case, I was an alcoholic for 10 years.

Back to the Seagulls

I’d like to come back to the seagulls. How did they learn to be so still, calm and composed during the storm? How did they learn to ride the power of the wind with such grace? They learnt from their parents, who learnt from their parents, who learnt from their parents. If the gull chick doesn’t learn this skill from its parents, it will either turn into a Jonathan Livingston, searching for a higher meaning from an intrinsic source, or like Anthony de Mello described in “Awareness”, the eagle might grow up thinking it’s a chicken, in awe of the other eagles. In this case seagulls. ;-)??

Human beings are the same, most of what our parents know, follow and believe, they learnt from their own parents. Either directly or indirectly. Just like I was a child, my parents were also children not that long ago, and whatever hurts us when we are children, will be carried into the adults we become if left unprocessed.?

I know for a fact that my grandparents never taught my parents how to process their traumas, or that perspectives can be changed, or that it’s okay not to follow the general consensus expected of us by our conditioning, our traditions and our socialization. In this example, I can confidently say that one of the reasons my own parents never learnt how to heal their own pain, is because their own parents never learnt to do it either. It’s a vicious circle. A mental rat race that destroys the soul inside us. But the circle can be broken, and it can only start with you.??

The memories that define our past can become an enigma. We will always remember first, how the events of our past made us feel, then we will remember the “details” constructed by our mind, to explain where these feelings might have come from. What I’ve learnt on this journey is that there’s always more to the story than what our minds tell us, and that our bodies never lie about what it remembers.

Acknowledge your own feelings. Ask yourself where they might come from. Ask yourself, why they are here, and for how long they have been with you. It’s in the answers to these questions, that you can look beyond the narrative created by your mind and remember the places where the feelings were made.

Once you are here, you have started the journey towards healing yourself, and processing your past.