Ambiguous Memory

linebaugh

Well-known member
Im not confident that many of the scenes from my childhood floating around in my head are actual experiences or dreams or semi realized representations of things I imagined I did
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I'm not a very visual thinker. It's mostly dark blurs up there. Do the visual types feel this less?
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I often have pretty boring dreams. Just going about doing the quotidian without the fantastical and I think this is part of it. How realistic are your dreams?
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Memories of people - their characteristics stand out. Could run through old football mates this way like a rogues gallery, the older generation even more so. Your oldest memories do fade a bit

Dreams and foresight - seriality innit, run consciousness for x years and the future may seem to peak through, your subconscious gong that goes off when you get close to the half-veiled core of recall, intuition meeting an almost numinous threshold
 

sufi

lala
do you think that if you never bother to think back your memories would fade sooner? lose the threads?
or maybe they'd stay shiny and vivid waiting for you in the dark
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
do you think that if you never bother to think back your memories would fade sooner? lose the threads?
or maybe they'd stay shiny and vivid waiting for you in the dark
The problem is the more you relive an experience mentally the more likely it warps into complete fabrication
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
The problem is the more you relive an experience mentally the more likely it warps into complete fabrication

A traumatic memory can also be reprocessed down to "this appalling thing happened but i own it now", through graded exposure

Dissociative states are revealing for this reason, not to get all MK Ultra

You could add mythomania and pseudologia fantastica as overlaps
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
A traumatic memory can also be reprocessed down to "this appalling thing happened but i own it now", through graded exposure

Dissociative states are revealing for this reason, not to get all MK Ultra

You could add mythomania and pseudologia fantastica as overlaps
Can you expand on and define all that?
 

Dusty

Tone deaf
I'm a very visual thinker, and I am confident in what is a real childhood memory (although warped and rose tinted, mis-remembered), and what was imagined or a dream. Insofar as all old memories become distorted with imagined details, we reconstruct memories rather than just playing back a movie in our heads, and every reconstruction supposedly takes us further from the original.

Oh, except the memory of a fox watching me through the patio doors of our house when I couldn't have been older than 3. God knows if I dreamt that.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Can you expand on and define all that?


Dissociation (maybe if @DannyL has time he could contribute)


If you’re working with traumatised clients who dissociate, the T will ask them to envisage their personality as a round table, with positive and negative parts all gathered in unison. The parts are all given a vote on articulating their concerns, as they have all developed to help the individual survive. By graded exposure to past life events, the parts are integrated back into a reconnected, uniform whole. Trauma is a reaction to disorder, remember. Some of these pointers turned up in the recent Adam Curtis doc

Mythomania you can see maybe in an older Joey Diaz spiel. There’s clearly degrees of it being vocalised, but then if you’re doing performance art of any kind people weave those fictions in and out of their narrative fabric. It can also get you ‘cancelled’ rapid. If you’ve working with someone who’s been trafficked or been a sex worker paying for an addiction, it can present (I fuckin despise that term) as avoidance - people will go on long, complex, narrative detours to avoid the matter at hand

I can’t seem to find it yet there was a really good post I read here recently about shame and politics. Shame and memory are interdependent, so if a child has to adapt to stress by telling fibs it can exacerbate how that person remembers, socialises and communicates further on in life


@WashYourHands is graded exposure something you're familiar with from your job? I'm curious about how it is used and how successful(*) it is

You mentioned a mild phobia (I think about frogs or spiders, apologies for any confusion). For phobias, graded exposure is default method of slowly increasing the rate of distress until a threshold has passed and that distress evaporates. My wife wasnt into spiders after getting badly bitten by something in Israel, so we did the tarantula treatment with a local spider collector and now she has them in our kitchen

With more specific client profiles, the most articulate outline I’ve seen (outside of experience and literature) in the everyday press was from Shane Meadows. The interview says it all

 

sufi

lala
With more specific client profiles, the most articulate outline I’ve seen (outside of experience and literature) in the everyday press was from Shane Meadows. The interview says it all

i think everyone wants to know what happened to danny dyer character on stenders isnt it?
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
If I ever hear that theme tune it’s time to turn the tv off, but maybe the story arc led to this


(bollocks piece of culture, but time to lighten the perspective)
 
Top