False Memories

[MINI33]

Hi i am new to the forum, I was just wondering how many people also suffer from false memories?

I seem to have floods of memories come back to me every so often these memories are very vivid and seem real to me but they seemed to grow more and more implausible and there is no evidence to support them. They are often horrible telling the story of me harming people in the past or others harming me.

 

Does anyone else suffer from this???

[PAVLIS97]

Well, I've never had harm thoughts for now

However, I have experienced false memores regarding my themes

[snowbear]

Hi Mini 33 and welcome to the forum.

First off let's clear up a misunderstanding. The term gets bandied about by people looking for a way to explain what they are experiencing, but there is no such thing as 'false memories'.  

They are just intrusive thoughts that happen to be set in the past.

People think because it relates to a time that's in the past it must be a 'memory'. As we generally remember what happened in the past they start trying to 'remember' if the thoughts are real or false when they're neither. It's a thought you're having in the present. 

It's an imaginary scenario that your mind has conjured up in the exact same way people conjure up worries about a future that hasn't happened. Worries are about things we fear we couldn't cope with if they did happen and these thoughts set in the past are worries about things we would have found hard to cope with if they had happened.

Problems start when you fail to recognise them as present day thoughts and look for some kind of meaning in them related to your past. 

Accept they mean nothing and are nothing to do with memory and they become easier to dismiss as just thoughts. Like any other random thought you might have float through your mind that doesn't scare you because it doesn't mean anything to you. 

[MINI33]

many thanks for your replies,

 

yes it is better I suppose to look at them as thoughts rather than real memories, sometimes it is hard as before I realised they were false memories or not real thoughts, I had ruminated so much over them that they seemed so vivid and they had almost fed into each other to make a big narrative of my life. in an article I read it says the big step in getting well is to admit the possibility to that your reality might not be correct and that you experiences might be false. I feel I have taken this step and it is scary for I now don't know which of my memories to trust at all.