#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

[nobeerreviews]

We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.

-- Sophocles

(Riquewihr, France)

[creature-wizard]

I see this (alien abduction communities) having a lot in common with ROMCOA stuff. The Controversial History of Alien Abductions by Kaz Rowe on Youtube (https://youtu.be/of8igM9WFWc?si=LrE_pCrDUMbujQah) What people may get out of ROMCOA (Validation of trauma in a way that is more obviously bad and may be not be as emotionally difficult due to a less personal abuse or mistreatment having clearer motivations.) is different, but the conspiracism of it feels similar.

I say this as a system who has skirted the edge of ROMCOA stuff for reasons like those stated above, but I wondered if you'd have any thoughts on it. (If it's of any interest, I'll send a separate ask with thoughts on the why/how we've dodged the ROMCOA bullet despite being drawn to it, but that's a significant tangent. Also sorry to be anon, I'm shy.)

(To anyone reading this: If you've heard the term "RAMCOA" but haven't heard how it originated among conspiracy theorists and was always meant to push conspiracy theories within legitimate psychiatry, further information is provided at the end.)

Oh yeah, you are absolutely right. I've been comparing these two things for awhile now, and it's basically two presentations of the same exact social phenomena.

You usually have somebody with psychological or physical problems that seem to defy explanation, but are very likely related to something like anxiety, depression, chronic stress, PTSD, C-PTSD, BPD, schizophrenia, bipolar, autism, ADHD, allergies, mast cell activation syndrome, or fibromyalgia. Y'know, a lot of the kinds of things that doctors will dismiss as "all in your head," or that just aren't that well-understood by the public, or might not seem possible because they underestimate just how traumatizing their life actually was.

The way they fall into it is nearly always the same; they never really "remember" any of it until they start coming across literature and people who introduce them to the idea of RAMCOA or alien abduction. And of course by this point a lot of them are absolutely desperate for some kind of explanation or validation, so they look deeper into it. They start learning and absorbing the tropes and narratives that go along with whatever mythology, so to speak, that they've fallen into. Then when they undergo hypnosis, they start "remembering" events that just so happen to line up with whichever narrative they've been exposing themselves to.

There are other groups doing this same thing with their own narratives, of course. In New Age and neopagan contexts, people often seek explanation and validation by trying to uncover past lives. In fact, the whole entire practice of undergoing hypnosis to recover lost memories actually began with people trying to find their past lives.

A common thread is that people remember something that pretty much everybody would agree would be absolutely terrible to endure. Whether you're "remembering" being burned at the stake for witchcraft, eating the heart of a ritually murdered child, fleeing the destruction of Atlantis, or aliens performing invasive procedures on your body, there's no ambiguity or uncertainty that what supposedly happened is horrible. In a society that constantly tells people that they haven't had it bad enough to be traumatized, because real trauma can only come from something way more severe than what they're experiencing, it's just no surprise that this keeps happening. Their subconscious minds seek the images and narratives that seem to align with the distress they're feeling.

It's been observed that what people experience while under hypnosis is basically the same as what they experience while dreaming. What they experience isn't necessarily logical; in fact, it's often far from it. Weird, surreal stuff just happens out of nowhere. People just do things with no genuinely reasonable motive.

In the context of RAMCOA, this is often handwaved away with "well, they're cultists, this is obviously part of their weird cult practices." This is not only an incredibly weak explanation for most of this stuff, but when you look at other supposedly recovered memories, you just can't help but notice that this is a pattern in every belief system people try to recover memories in, so trying to do this for supposed cases of SRA and the like is just special pleading.

And yeah, if you wanna share your story, I'd love to hear it!

For anyone reading this who isn't aware: The term "Ritual Abuse, Mind Control & Organized Abuse", or RAMCOA, is not an innocent catch-all term for religious abuse, institutional abuse, sex trafficking, etc. It was coined by conspiracy theorists in order to repackage Satanic Ritual Abuse/Satanic Panic/Project Monarch alter programming conspiracy theories into something they could pass off as legitimate science/research. Essentially, it's a Trojan horse for far right bullshit. For more information, see Cathy O'Brien - The First Project Monarch "Survivor" and Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler: Two Of The Most Dangerous Conspiracy Theorists Most People Have Never Heard Of.

[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.

[turkitty5]

did i? no i couldnt have. but what if i did? oh god.

[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.

[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

[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)

[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

[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.

[creature-wizard]

New Agers often prey upon and exploit people with C-PTSD by convincing them that the trauma they can't place to any one specific event in this life must have been caused by trauma from a past life; EG, the destruction of Atlantis or Lemuria, or the Lyran-Draconian Wars. In some cases, New Agers spontaneously "remember" these things even without hypnosis after spending time immersing themselves in New Age media.

For many New Agers, the "memories" they supposedly recover are incredibly vivid and feel extremely real. But we know they aren't. For one thing, Atlantis was a fiction created by Plato, and the mythology of the Draconians are just antisemitic conspiracy theories with a sci-fi paint job.

Many New Agers aren't aware of the political agendas they're being manipulated into. They consider themselves pro-equality, anti-fascist, and all of that. But the fact remains that New Age mythology is intrinsically linked to far right politics, and promoting it serves far right agendas whether they realize it or not.

If you see anybody who tries to convince you that you need to undergo hypnosis to remember some secret hidden past, or that some symptom or other means you must have some secret hidden past, get the hell away from them. They are pushing dangerous pseudoscience that will harm not only you, but many others targeted by the far right.

[unhappy-eef]

The Betrayer

(Oc lore through another Oc’s perspective slaps)

This is one of my Oc’s memories, a memory that over the years has changed into something entirely different.

They see Azreal as a monster, a murder who sabotaged their entire mission leading to multiple casualties and deaths. They believe that he planned the mission to go wrong, planned to kill them all one by one and that he had set them up for failure since the very beginning.

[themousefromfantasyland]

Growing up, I never fully watched any of the Lord of the Rings movies, but I remember watching some parts of them with my father.

Since I only watched the movies in parts, child me created a insane false memory about the plot that I only learned it was fake when I was a teen and more intimate with Tolkien's work and fanbase.

I swear, when I was a child I remembered very well that one important plot point was that Frodo was half human, not fully Hobbit. Not only that, I remember that he was a prince, son of a very sorrowful old king who sent him away to the shire when he was just a baby to protect him from an ominous threat. I don't remember if the threat was Sauron, or some other dark force.

To this day I don't know what led child me into thinking that.

@ariel-seagull-wings @thealmightyemprex @the-blue-fairie @mask131 @princesssarisa