Suggestion about how behavior is due to repressed memories can something be problematic. In psychological history, plenty of false memories have been created by pressuring people to remember events that lead to present problems.
I don’t oppose going down that road in principle, but it’s good to be careful and ideally do it with a skilled person who directs the process.
I agree that some nasty stuff has happened under the context of “revealing repressed memories”.
From what I’ve read on that, my understanding is that the mechanism there is similar to what happens with police lineups. There is a pressure for you to recall, the authority figure is intentional or unintentionally wanting you to remember a particular thing, you pick up on those signals and pull together a fake memory of “seeing them commit the crime.”
I’m guessing that Kaj is talking about something very different from the frame of “find repressed memories.”
He has witnessed experiences which make him have extreme beliefs, so that normal IDC is a poor fit and is likely to stall, the way you’ve seen it stall. The part is only going to relax once you’ve witnessed the original memories which make him take on that extreme role, understood why he feels that way, and been able to give him the comfort and adult support that he would originally have needed in that situation.
Now I don’t have experience with IFS, but I’ll explain something that I’ve done which feels like what Kaj is talking about, and feels very different from “find repressed memories”.
I notice I’m feeling an intense feeling about an abstract thing (“I can’t fucking stand doing anything that looks like begging!”). Then I investigate why I feel that way. I think of different movies, books, memories, songs, that feel connected to this feeling. Some memories jump out (the lunch room in middle school, one kid having to tell his joke three times before the group decided to listen to him). Then I go, “Cool, this big cluster of memories of experiences is roughly the grounding for my attitude.” Now that I’ve got a sense of what the attitude grounds in, I can consider what might I might need to do to reshape it.
When I do this, I there’s not much of a sense of “I buried this memory for years!”. I can recall other points in my life when these memories have popped up, and don’t expect anything besides “standard memory drift” to be happening. I’m less “unearthing hidden memories” and more “connecting seemingly disjoint memories to an attitude.”
You made me realize that I almost never think in terms of “How might a given person take this post/writing?” I’m now wondering when that has and hasn’t been helpful for me.
I don’t think it’s a problem to just gently ask and then be open to the possibility of something coming up. That’s different from the kinds of leading questions that typically create false memories. Especially since Focusing/IFS/etc. style techniques seem to cause memories to come up spontaneously in any case, it’s just slightly nudging the process forward.
It also doesn’t necessarily matter whether the memories are true or not, as long as it helps the healing process along. We all have plenty of false or misleading memories in our heads anyway.
When leading techniques like Focusing or IFS you don’t normally tell the person you are leading things like “The part is only going to relax once you’ve witnessed the original memories which make him take on that extreme role”.
The sentence can be understood as a suggestion to seek for traumatic memories that might be the cause. It also contains a limiting belief in that it implies that the only way to deal with the issue is to go consciously through memories.
Writing communication has the problem that the space of possible interpretation from readers is often much larger then in 1-on-1 communication. There the risk of someone doing the wrong thing after reading the post and not just doing a lot of Focusing/IDC.
It also doesn’t necessarily matter whether the memories are true or not, as long as it helps the healing process along.
False memories can have negative consequences unrelated to the healing process. You might falsely remember something that causes you to think badly of someone, for example.
But even ignoring those, I feel like “I’m going to remember false things for instrumental gain” is the kind of thinking that gets people into this kind of mess.
Kaj can correct me if I’m misinterpreting them, but my understanding of:
It also doesn’t necessarily matter whether the memories are true or not, as long as it helps the healing process along. We all have plenty of false or misleading memories in our heads anyway.
Would be something like this: let’s say I’m trying to figure out why I’m scared of people, and a memory pops up of a kid in in elementary school sticking their tongue out at my and everyone laughing. It could be that no one was making fun of me, the kid was just playing around with their tongue (as 8 year olds do), and I later edited in the laughter of the other kids, and added more negative emotional valence to it.
I think Kaj is saying that it is useful to trace “Oh, I’ve got this thing in my head that has motivated me to act like ABC”. Whether or not my memory is an accurate representation of what happened, this memory has been affecting you, and you could do with examining it.
I wouldn’t interpret Kaj as saying “Go ahead and remember false things for instrumental gain. What could possibly go wrong with that!?”. Truth is obviously important, and allowing oneself to pretend “this looks instrumentally useful to believe, so I can ignore the fact that it’s clearly false” is definitely a recipe for disaster.
What Kaj is saying, I think, is that the possibility of being wrong is not justification for closing ones eyes and not looking. If we attempt to have any beliefs at all, we’re going to be wrong now and then, and the best way to deal with this is to keep this in mind, stay calibrated, and generally look at more rather than less.
It’s not that “recovering memories” is especially error prone, it’s that everything is error prone and people often fail to appreciate how unreliable memory can be because they don’t actually get how it works. If you try to mislead someone and convince them that a certain thing is happened, they might remember “oh, but I could have been mislead” where as if you do the exact same thing but instead you mislead them to think “you remember this happening”, then they now get this false stamp of certainty saying “but I remember it!”.
What Kaj is saying, I think, is that the possibility of being wrong is not justification for closing ones eyes and not looking. [...] It’s not that “recovering memories” is especially error prone, it’s that everything is error prone and people often fail to appreciate how unreliable memory can be because they don’t actually get how it works.
I’m pondering this again. I expect, though I have not double checked, that the studied cases of pressure to find repressed memories leading to fake memories are mostly ones that involve, well, another person pressuring you. How often does this happen if you sit alone in your room and try it? Skilled assistant would almost certainly be better than an unskilled assistant, though I don’t know how it compares to DIY, if you add the complication of “can you tell if someone is skilled or not?”
Would be interested if anyone’s got info about DIY investigations.
Suggestion about how behavior is due to repressed memories can something be problematic. In psychological history, plenty of false memories have been created by pressuring people to remember events that lead to present problems.
I don’t oppose going down that road in principle, but it’s good to be careful and ideally do it with a skilled person who directs the process.
I agree that some nasty stuff has happened under the context of “revealing repressed memories”.
From what I’ve read on that, my understanding is that the mechanism there is similar to what happens with police lineups. There is a pressure for you to recall, the authority figure is intentional or unintentionally wanting you to remember a particular thing, you pick up on those signals and pull together a fake memory of “seeing them commit the crime.”
I’m guessing that Kaj is talking about something very different from the frame of “find repressed memories.”
Now I don’t have experience with IFS, but I’ll explain something that I’ve done which feels like what Kaj is talking about, and feels very different from “find repressed memories”.
I notice I’m feeling an intense feeling about an abstract thing (“I can’t fucking stand doing anything that looks like begging!”). Then I investigate why I feel that way. I think of different movies, books, memories, songs, that feel connected to this feeling. Some memories jump out (the lunch room in middle school, one kid having to tell his joke three times before the group decided to listen to him). Then I go, “Cool, this big cluster of memories of experiences is roughly the grounding for my attitude.” Now that I’ve got a sense of what the attitude grounds in, I can consider what might I might need to do to reshape it.
When I do this, I there’s not much of a sense of “I buried this memory for years!”. I can recall other points in my life when these memories have popped up, and don’t expect anything besides “standard memory drift” to be happening. I’m less “unearthing hidden memories” and more “connecting seemingly disjoint memories to an attitude.”
The issue isn’t what Kaj intends to talk about but the space of possible ways of readers, reading Kaj’s post.
It’s possible that someone would read the post and take the lesson that they should seek for the repressed memories from it.
Oh, I see your point.
You made me realize that I almost never think in terms of “How might a given person take this post/writing?” I’m now wondering when that has and hasn’t been helpful for me.
I don’t think it’s a problem to just gently ask and then be open to the possibility of something coming up. That’s different from the kinds of leading questions that typically create false memories. Especially since Focusing/IFS/etc. style techniques seem to cause memories to come up spontaneously in any case, it’s just slightly nudging the process forward.
It also doesn’t necessarily matter whether the memories are true or not, as long as it helps the healing process along. We all have plenty of false or misleading memories in our heads anyway.
When leading techniques like Focusing or IFS you don’t normally tell the person you are leading things like “The part is only going to relax once you’ve witnessed the original memories which make him take on that extreme role”.
The sentence can be understood as a suggestion to seek for traumatic memories that might be the cause. It also contains a limiting belief in that it implies that the only way to deal with the issue is to go consciously through memories.
Writing communication has the problem that the space of possible interpretation from readers is often much larger then in 1-on-1 communication. There the risk of someone doing the wrong thing after reading the post and not just doing a lot of Focusing/IDC.
Right, I agree that having an explicit intention to go looking for traumatic memories is likely to be counterproductive.
False memories can have negative consequences unrelated to the healing process. You might falsely remember something that causes you to think badly of someone, for example.
But even ignoring those, I feel like “I’m going to remember false things for instrumental gain” is the kind of thinking that gets people into this kind of mess.
Kaj can correct me if I’m misinterpreting them, but my understanding of:
Would be something like this: let’s say I’m trying to figure out why I’m scared of people, and a memory pops up of a kid in in elementary school sticking their tongue out at my and everyone laughing. It could be that no one was making fun of me, the kid was just playing around with their tongue (as 8 year olds do), and I later edited in the laughter of the other kids, and added more negative emotional valence to it.
I think Kaj is saying that it is useful to trace “Oh, I’ve got this thing in my head that has motivated me to act like ABC”. Whether or not my memory is an accurate representation of what happened, this memory has been affecting you, and you could do with examining it.
I wouldn’t interpret Kaj as saying “Go ahead and remember false things for instrumental gain. What could possibly go wrong with that!?”. Truth is obviously important, and allowing oneself to pretend “this looks instrumentally useful to believe, so I can ignore the fact that it’s clearly false” is definitely a recipe for disaster.
What Kaj is saying, I think, is that the possibility of being wrong is not justification for closing ones eyes and not looking. If we attempt to have any beliefs at all, we’re going to be wrong now and then, and the best way to deal with this is to keep this in mind, stay calibrated, and generally look at more rather than less.
It’s not that “recovering memories” is especially error prone, it’s that everything is error prone and people often fail to appreciate how unreliable memory can be because they don’t actually get how it works. If you try to mislead someone and convince them that a certain thing is happened, they might remember “oh, but I could have been mislead” where as if you do the exact same thing but instead you mislead them to think “you remember this happening”, then they now get this false stamp of certainty saying “but I remember it!”.
I endorse this summary.
I’m pondering this again. I expect, though I have not double checked, that the studied cases of pressure to find repressed memories leading to fake memories are mostly ones that involve, well, another person pressuring you. How often does this happen if you sit alone in your room and try it? Skilled assistant would almost certainly be better than an unskilled assistant, though I don’t know how it compares to DIY, if you add the complication of “can you tell if someone is skilled or not?”
Would be interested if anyone’s got info about DIY investigations.