#False Memories

[abbeyofcyn]

Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles AUs

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Phantom Pain

Donnie was finally back to normal. At least.... he was no longer feral. But months of being infected takes its toll and Leo has lost a lot to get him back. It's not easy having two idiots who can't deal with emotions as brothers for Mikey.

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Hiatus

CW: nightmares, amputation

Tags: #phantom pain comic

Krang infection sequel

Krang Infection

Two years after the invasion, Donnie feels sick and his gut instinct tells him it's very different from the rat flu.

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Completed

CW: minor body horror, implied amputation, non graphic brain surgery

Tags: #krangified Donnie #Krang infection comic

False Memory

All the brothers have had nightmares from the Apocalypse pop up and ruining their sleep. Casey confirmed that what they've dreamt actually happened to their counterparts in his timeline. They refer to it as 'false memories'. Leo wakes up to the worst 'memory' he's had thus far.

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Completed

CW: death

Brains and Brawn Apocalypse

Donnie and Raph lost their brothers during the apocalypse when they were only in their twenties. Now, in their thirties, there's not much hope left for them to win this war.

Several one shots: overview

Completed

CW: death

Great, what's next...

A poll based adventure with Donnie as the main character

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Discontinued

CW: none

Wretched Little Pests

Read the comics here

CW: death, injuries, murder, savage mode

Tag: #wretched little pests au

[funeral]

When we try to remember something that happened to us, these sorts of “constructive” errors are common. We can usually recall a few facts, and using these facts we construct other facts that probably happened. We make inferences. From these probable inferences, we are led to other “false facts” that might—or might not—have been true [ . . . ] This process of using inferences and probable facts to fill in the gaps of our memories has been called “refabrication,” and it probably occurs in nearly all of our everyday perceptions. We supply these bits and pieces, largely unconsciously, to round out fairly incomplete knowledge.

Nancy Loftus, Memory: Surprising New Insights Into How We Remember and Why We Forget

[silent-sarey]

So anxious I feel physically sick

[creature-wizard]

Me, an occultist who's seen way too much shit: *Personally goes and locates extremely obvious cases of memory confabulation, like New Agers "remembering" past lives based on racist New Age pseudohistory*

Project Monarch true believers: "Ugggghhhh you're just getting your information from the Grey Faction and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation!!!!"

[aithusarosekiller]

OCD is so fucking stupid bc what do you mean my mum told me that the entire basis of this false memory is bs so it couldn't have happened...and now instead of letting it go, you're telling me she's lying

You're lying, bitch

[haunt3dgrasshopper]

fuck OCD.

fuck obsessions. fuck compulsions. fuck intrusive thoughts. fuck uncertainty. fuck constant shame. fuck constant guilt. fuck constant anticipation. fuck the sense of impending doom. fuck ruminating. fuck reassurance seeking. fuck checking. fuck the exhaustion. fuck mental torment. fuck being stuck on everything. fuck not being able to let things go. fuck stigma. fuck fear. fuck isolation. fuck desperation. fuck misery. fuck feeling like the most vile creature on this planet. fuck not being able to control your mind. fuck the temptation of humoring the obsession. fuck "what ifs". fuck the belittling. fuck the countless days and nights spent trying to figure something out for sure. fuck mental reviewing. fuck mental anguish. fuck not being able to ever fully let your guard down.

[tallerthantale]

On False Memories

There is another moment around Scarlett's allegations I want to expand on. It does come from bits where Tortoise is doing the pseudo attribution thing, so keep in mind we don't have the exact wording used by Gaiman or his lawyers, we have Tortoise's characterization of what has been said. I am going to go forward on the working assumption that it is a generally accurate representation of what was said to Tortoise.

"Rachel Johnson: Neil Gaiman’s account suggests we should treat Scarlett’s allegations with caution, as they first surfaced when she was hospitalized, he says, for the treatment of a condition that’s associated with false memories. But we know her allegations pre-date her admission to hospital. Scarlett’s medical records also show us that Neil Gaiman’s claim that Scarlett has a serious preexisting medical condition to be false. According to her records, she presented as a genuinely high risk of suicide and was discharged after recovering overnight.

Rachel Johnson: There’s no mention, even in her previous medical history, of any condition like the one Neil Gaiman claimed in his account. The only medication she was on was the sleeping pill Zopiclone."

The things about this series of claims that jump out at me might be a bit different than what other people would be paying attention to, so I want to explain what stands out to me and why. But we are going to need to do a little bit of background first. Getting into this is a big ass can of worms, but I'm going to see if I can do a bit of a cliff notes version.

The underlying issue is that a propensity to develop 'false memories' is a disposition that all humans have. That's just normal brain functioning. It isn't a condition you will find in diagnostic manuals because it is the condition of being a human. It's hard for people to process and accept that knowledge, because everyone hates it. Doesn't make it any less true. Functionally everything you consciously remember is a post hoc reconstruction to suit the needs of your current situation.

Under normal circumstances this does not account for things like spontaneously constructing major sexual assaults into existence. That's not a thing, but not having the memory in the front of your conscious experience for years, and then remembering that you have that memory later when it's triggered is a thing.

For most people, most of the time, the shifts of constructed memories are things like your brain not bothering to pay attention to what color someone's shirt was, and making it up later to have a cohesive memory. It would account for something like a person thinking they said no louder than they did, which shouldn't be relevant anyway. It could account for thinking you stated a boundary very clearly, but when you look at the message later it's actually ambiguous.

Ideally, the needs of the current situation are to remember what actually did happen. Unfortunately memory can be highly vulnerable to suggestion in the name of preserving continuity. This why police will do things like shouting "stop resisting" while beating up someone who isn't resisting. People absolutely will form a memory of the person resisting to make it make sense. Not because they have a specific condition, because that's how brains work. The counter to this is for the general public to understand that it 'makes sense' for the police to engage in that deceptive strategy. Once that is widely known bystanders will be more likely to remember the events for what they were.

In moments of high emotional distress people's minds generally prioritize 'making myself feel better' as the main need of the current situation. What it makes a person feel better to remember is going to be very context dependent. One day it might be what validates seeing themselves as a victim, the next it might make them feel better to frame themselves as in control of the situation by seeing themselves as a villain. Both genuine victims and genuine perpetrators can cycle through both perceptions. Shifting reframing of memory to form a narrative can occur to all sorts of things in all sorts of scenarios. These are examples of what's called cognitive distortions. Learning about how they work does not prevent them from happening. They exist in all people. Yes, even you, yes, even me.

However, if a person's emotional regulation is shit, and / or they are stuck in a childlike mode of emotional development, these mechanisms can be more dramatic and reaching. One of the most common folk psychology (popularly believed psychology misinformation) things I run into is people attributing cognitive distortions solely and specifically to people with Cluster B personality disorders.

I see a lot of people start learning about Cluster B and then very quickly start seeing signs of Cluster B everywhere. I think that is because they are largely learning from people who fixate on 'warning about of the dangers of Cluster B people,' describe Cluster B mostly in terms of cognitive distortions, and then frame those cognitive distortions as more or less 'the thing Cluster B people do.' People who get their information from that sort of content start looking IRL and immediately see them everywhere, but it's because literally everyone has cognitive distortions all the time.

My first impression of the "condition associated with false memories" line was that it looked to me like Gaiman was trying to claim that Scarlett was a narcissist and / or borderline off of a poor understanding of those conditions. If Gaiman thinks false memories are 'the thing Cluster B people do,' Gaiman using that narrative fits with claiming she was hospitalized on suicide risk due to the condition and him associating the condition with false memories.

I didn't see anything in the fake therapist's videos or ramblings that looked like he was in the dark triad fandom, (my name for people with strong folk psychology attitudes about Cluster B personality disorders) but it is certainly possible he is. The book that conspicuously popped up on Neil's... amazon reading list? something like that? a while back was a book about getting out of relationships with narcissists.

The other side of the false memories issue is that certain types of hypnotherapists claim to be able to recover memories of childhood abuse through hypnotism. This is a very bad idea to try to do for multiple reasons. While there is evidence that these hypnotherapies result in a person having more memories after than they did before, those memories are post hoc reconstructions, because that is what all memories are. And those post hoc reconstructions are vulnerable to suggestion, particularly surrounding the needs of the immediate situation and continuity.

If the explicit goal of the therapy is to hypnotize a person into a heightened state of vulnerability to suggestion specifically so that they can remember a specific thing, there is little reason to believe any particular memory 'recovered' by a hypnotherapist has anything to do with reality. What ads another layer to the horrifying is that since there is no neurological difference between a false memory and a real one, a hypnotherapist 'recovering' false memories of trauma will create trauma that is just a real as if those things did actually happen.

Neil's fake therapist and the communities he is connected to might have some overlap with the people who still think hypnotherapists doing traumatic memory recovery is a good idea. it's the flavor of pseudoscience they seem to be running on. It is also possible he is more aware of the dangers of hypnotherapists because he has encountered them and bothered to do a bit of reading.

Since he is not actually a real mental health professional and is in community with pseudoscientists, he could have ended up with an overinflated sense of how common hypnotherapist nonsense is, and he may not realize how much policy and training and best practices go into preventing real mental health professionals that work at hospitals from planting suggested memories.

From his own message to Scarlett, he was wildly reckless as to the risk that he might be planting suggestions himself, (assuming that wasn't the intention) in ways a trained professional would know not to do. While many things about him set off red flags, this point was the biggest, and what made me immediately inclined to prompt a license review, which started the 'he doesn't actually have one' rabbit hole.

"A condition associated with false memories" sounds to me like they are trying to diagnose her with a Cluster B personality disorder. Trying to time the origin of the claims to the hospitalization could be an argument that Scarlett was implanted with false memories of the content of the allegations by irresponsible crisis workers. It looks to me like the reasoning of a person who read a few bits and pieces of real things in isolation and put them together into a dangerously inaccurate mess. Which is the sort of thing that can happen when unqualified people LARP as therapists. Or as Cluster B experts.

If the "condition associated with false memories" claim is referring to Cluster B and tracks back to Wayne and his phone call with Scarlett, that would be very gross on a lot of levels. Wayne is not qualified to do that, you really can't diagnose personality disorders off a single session even if you are qualified, Wayne had a preexisting investment in the situation before talking to Scarlett, Wayne did not have her as a proper client, Wayne would have been passing information about his opinions on Scarlett to a different person after claiming to be speaking in confidence, ect.... I can't say if that's what happened, but if it did happen I would have some choice words to say to him about that. On top of the ones I already have.

There is a conversation between a civil lawyer and a psychologist about a lot of these topics on youtube from when they were looking at the Marylin Manson case. It goes over a lot of the issues around false memories if people want to listen through it. It's a bit over an hour. I have mixed feelings about the lawyer in question, (and you probably don't want to look at the chat) but the psychologist is very qualified and knows what he's talking about.

[chronicsheepdrawing]

Having an Off Day

[chimichangasanddoorknobs]

Not from Ohio (thank God)

Deadpool Volume 3 #19  

[lunaghost13]

*Trigger Warning!* Talking about Mental Health and Alice Spoilers

I love so much how this game talks about false memories and having to be certain about traumatic memories. I understand that Alice doesn’t have ocd, but as someone who does, I feel like Alice suffers from the same symptoms I do. For example, Alice had to be sure that she put a dead log in the fire as opposed to a real one. She second guesses herself and blames herself that if she hadn’t she could be responsible for what happened to her family. Another example of false memories (this is rather up in the air but to me seems like a false memory) is when she unlocks a memory of her mother telling her to stay back with her family as they burn. And when Alice confesses to her nanny that she needs to talk about the fire, her nanny tells her to forget it and talking about it never seems to help. It reminds me of the constant reassurance seeking I suffer from and needing to know the exact truth even when countless of others have told me to stop thinking about it. Seeking reassurance only helps briefly, but then the intrusive thoughts and memories come back ten fold. I like to imagine my OCD as being vultures constantly picking at my brain. They bring up real event OCD, past-guilt, intrusive thoughts, etc. It’s very hard to live with it, but it can be managed. Please take care of yourselves and do something you love and be around others who love and appreciate you. You are not hopeless, Alice wasn’t hopeless. Alice was a survivor.

[evilhorse]

We’ve killed. We kill. Because that’s the job.

(Wolverine #46)

[silent-sarey]

If you worry about what you aren’t sure is real, you’ll never get to experience the things that are.

[creature-wizard]

That moment when somebody undergoing past life regression hypnosis gives the year their memory supposedly took place in, but they're obviously going by the Gregorian calendar, which the culture their supposed past life was in wouldn't have used.

[aithusarosekiller]

OCD is kinda crazy bc you'll be minding your own business when your brain goes 'hey remember the time you-' and it's the most diabolical, insanely evil shit you know for sure never happened

But TECHNICALLY you can't prove it wrong so you think about it constantly for like a week and then it goes away and comes back a few months later with more made-up details

[abuddyforeveryseason]

Okay, so, I mentioned in an earlier post a memory of a snack from when I was a kid.

They looked like this, which the internet tells me are called chicharrones de harina, or mexican wheel chips.

They were pizza flavored, like the modern pizza-flavored Doritos. As you see, pizzas are also round, and the're sometimes cut into six slices, just like the six holes in the wheel snacks.

The mascot in the bag was a protoceratops.

As you can see, the Protoceratops skull also has holes, and it's like a semicircle. So, the mascot would have a head shaped like half of one of the chips.

Now, I have no proof that such a snack exists, and even if it did once, I can't exactly find old bags or pictures.

But I don't think I hallucinated it, if only because I'm not smart enough to come up with something like that.

Of course, the memory includes the bag coming with a free comic wherein she would go on a sort of Roger Dean psychadelic journey through time and space with her dinosaur friends, so it's not a realistic memory.

[bilbos-stolen-untensils]

I fucking HATE google sometimes. I have really bad OCD (and some other possible problems) and when I look up what I should do, it says "iF iT gEtS tOo SeVeRe Go tO ThErApY." BITCH I CANT JUST GO TO THERAPY. It's not that easy for me so wtf