#recovered memory

[monitorchakas]

Me rewatching bomberman jetters

Oh fuck this is the episode where gangu fucks everything up for everyone and almost gets everyone killed

[librarychair]

On Generational Trauma

Generational trauma is a thing, it's just not the thing people think it is. Real generational trauma is when parents act towards their children in exactly the way their grandparents acted toward them, the way that caused them so much pain, but they don't or never bothered to find a different way to parent. Also known as a cycle of abuse, in some circumstances.

"generational trauma" as you will find referred to in some new age circles is not a real thing. You might find recommended a book called "the body keeps the score". The person who wrote this was involved in the Satanic Panic of the eighties.

What was the satanic panic? It was a series of investigations into and moral panics about supposed secret satanic ritual abuse of children. Yes, pizzagate was an extension of this. This is fueled by the popular acceptance of the theory that you can suppress traumatic memories so it is as though they never happened. In reality all of the investigations of these recovered memories of secret satanic abuse found no evidence that they actually happened.

So what gives? Why would you question someone who is obviously traumatized? The trauma is real, but it turns out, the memories are not memories of actual events. The process of "recovering memories" involves guiding someone to relax until their mind is in a more suggestible state, more ready to accept and internalize what they hear, also known as hypnosis. Then they're asked to imagine a familiar scene from their childhood, and asked a lot of leading questions about it - for example, instead of "what happened next" you'd get a question like "where did they take you" or instead of "how did you feel" you'd get "did you feel scared". On to more and more explicit leading questions, until the patient has a traumatic memory as real as any of their other memories, of something that they never actually experienced, only vividly imagined as instructed by the therapist.

How does this tie into generational trauma?

"The body keeps the score" puts forward the idea that physical ailments and difficulties, rather than being just symptoms of physical illness, are the result of traumatic memories you inherited from your ancestors, or were transmitted to you from people you have been close to. Not in any specified way, like via their behavior toward you, but through the air, or blood, or genes, or something. Yes, this can get very racist as practitioners make assumptions about your family history based on your race.

All this is to say, if you get into looking at this, and someone starts to mention recovered memories? Back away. This can hurt you severely, despite how much popular support there is for it, recovered memories (as opposed to ordinary forgetting and remembering) are not real, and if you go in search of the ones you're sure you have, you may wind up with new and disastrous ones.

[radicaled]

raise your hand if you’ve ever recovered a blocked memory all of a sudden!

🙋‍♂️

[librarychair]

There is fairly good evidence that recovered memories (of satanic panic fame) are largely manufactured by a specific subgroup of fringe therapies. That book "the body keeps the score" that people keep referencing is by someone who was right in the middle of the satanic panic in the 80s, hypnotizing people and then implanting traumatic memories by asking a lot of leading questions while they were in an easily suggestible state. People end up with real horrific memories of things that did not happen because of these therapies. Please tread carefully around this, everyone, it has the potential to harm you very badly and alienate you from your loved ones.

If you want a lot more info on this I'd suggest Oh No Ross and Carrie's podcast series on recovered memories. Here is an episode where they interview a memory expert.

[internutter]

Challenge #04748-L364: Sealed Recall

Whilst diving through an archive, Wraithvine comes upon a volume chronicling hir own adventures. A nostalgic read turns bizarre when ze comes upon a tale which ze does not recall experiencing. Surely its an exaggeration, a conflation with another's myth.

Only, it weighs on Wraithvine, the language and details making it uncanny. Only investigating this fully will let hir know the truth of this lost memory… -- [Deathshead419](https://www.internutter.org/bb/user/deathshead419]

It's not often that an immortal looks up their own stories. This one, like so many, purported to be An True and Accurat Accountyng of the Adventuref of Wraithvine the Yternal. It was obviously old, predating the invention of standardised spelling. Either well preserved or accurately copied with magic.

Ze had been looking for traces of ancient magic in the local legends or lore. Just in case there was something ze needed to clean up.

Wraithvine opened the book, scanning through the stories. Wandering down memory lane, which had since become a long and lengthy labyrinth. Full of potholes. Such as Chapter seventy-three.

[Check the source for the rest of the story]

[scribblesandknots]

I'm gonna talk a very tiny bit about trauma and therapy in this, so it's under a cut, but it's largely because I want to laugh at my own brain a little. I won't get into specifics.

TW for therapy, recovered memory, trauma, mention of flashbacks

I have been having trauma-related memories from childhood surface out of wherever my brain stuffed them when they happened for the past year or so (I'm in therapy, it's being dealt with and I'm largely okay). These memories are usually context around memories I've always had - things where I knew a conversation had happened but didn't remember the details, or I remembered the beginning of something but not what happened after.

Today, I had a fairly big one pop out of nowhere. A particular moment I've had flashbacks to suddenly had context and a reason for why it's so strongly embedded.

As I'm sitting there a little stunned, because this was a lot to take in when I'm trying to work my day job, you know what my little troll brain does??

It switches what song is stuck in my head from the one that's been there for days to a *thematically appropriate one*

My brain just soundtracked my trauma memory like it was making a fan edit

Please laugh at my brain with me and tell me what kind of troll things your brain has done lately.

[quantumcellularis]

one time, my mom got confetti poppers for a party, and we went to test one of them. it must’ve been defective or something, cause that shit exploded into a wizard-tier fireball when she pulled the string, and basically I’ve been chasing that level of awe and excitement for the rest of my life