Last week, I started to address D.H.'s question about what to look for in a 3-year-old who had been "brutally raped" but who had no conscious memory of that event. Let's continue our discussion of human memory, especially as regards unhappy memories.
A subset of repressed memory is altered memory. Example: For years, an adult woman remembers and recounts a story of an uncle who sexually abused her as a child. Then, in her later 30s, she dons a hat once belonging to her deceased father for the purpose of theater at a youth camp. Suddenly, now, in this moment, she allows herself to remember the face of the perpetrator. It was not her uncle. It was her father.
The TV show "M.A.S.H." included a famous episode about altered memory. Hawkeye "goes crazy," that is, begins to exhibit symptoms of hysteria. Sidney the psychiatrist hears Hawkeye's tale of being trapped on a bus with South Koreans, while North Korean death squads prowl nearby. A woman on the bus is holding a live chicken, whose clucking will alert the enemy. Hawkeye scolds her to keep the bird quiet, and the woman suffocates the bird.
But it wasn't a bird. The woman was holding a baby. Hawkeye's nutty behavior is a consequence of the anguish of unimaginable guilt. Hawkeye's "memory" replaced the infant child with a bird.
Next is a phenomenon I hate to admit, because, damn it, it's hard enough already to get people to take child sexual abuse seriously, but there are indeed cases of people willfully inventing and advancing false stories. Utter fiction. And I don't just mean for the sake of spite or revenge, though that happens, too. I mean I have worked with people who, for a time, narrate tales of outrageous sexual abuse, because they can't seem to access sufficient empathy and support for the pain and anguish their childhood did contain.
Then there is the much-talked-about false memory syndrome, which differs from the above paragraph because the subject absolutely believes the "memory" he or she is recounting. I'm sorry to say that my own industry made a fair share of guilty contributions to this syndrome.
Since the late '60s and early '70s, as Western culture began to awaken (finally) to the reality of child sexual abuse, some well-meaning but wrong-headed therapists were swept away in the backlash, the pendulum swing toward advocacy. We sometimes confused our role with coaxing memory out of people -- even inducing same. A best-selling book from the '80s on the subject of overcoming childhood sexual abuse includes the factoid that if you think you were sexually abused as a child, then you were. That little sentiment is utter hogwash on its face, of course; but worse, it grossly interferes with our effectiveness in fighting the real battles.
Other contributors of false memory syndrome are less well-intentioned. Psychologically unwell or evil parents will sometimes surround their 3- to 8-year-old child with a fictional tale of abuse that the child integrates as actual historical memory. Prying that out of that same child in adulthood is no mean feat.
Lastly is the fascinating discussion of body memory. Meaning the idea that our very soma, our individual cells retain and integrate historical experience as experience (a memory). Be alerted that this writer believes in body memory, though I admit it's an arena of discussion fraught with New Age gobbledygook and navel gazing.
Still, it's not all that unscientific. Modern kinesthesiology coined the phrase "muscle memory." My guitar teacher used that same idea to teach me to be more deft with chord changes. My ski instructor used those same words two weeks ago.
I once manifested a baseball-size bruise on my abdomen. It swirled counterclockwise in blue, black, purple and orange, looking something like a satellite picture of a hurricane. It did not hurt to touch. It faded in 48 hours. There were multiple witnesses.
It happened during a massage from a woman who claimed to see auras. She had just said she "saw" some overwhelming rage and sadness there in my body. Those were her words. The bruise and its location exactly matched the story my mother told to me about an act of violence done to me when I was 2.
To this day, I still have no historical memory of my mother's story. But, apparently, my body remembered.
Weird stuff. Believe what you want. But I ain't makin' it up.
More next Tuesday ...
Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Clear View Counseling Wellness Center in Las Vegas and the author of "Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grief and Doing the Right Thing" (Stephens Press). His columns appear on Tuesdays and Sundays. Questions for the Asking Human Matters column or comments can be e-mailed to skalas@reviewjournal.com.
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