Memories: good memories, bad memories and false memories
Memories can be a lot of fun and very distinctive. For example, I recently watched a Quentin Tarantino movie that was about a historical event, only the ending did not go the way we all remember that historical event.
That's what's so great about memories, with a little imagination you can change them like happened in Quentin Tarantino's movie. He twists the facts so that it becomes an alternate history that could have happened. It's fiction, of course, but it's also a story as if it could have really happened
I do find this way of filming interesting and it also reminded me that you can't change your past. You can't change the things that have taken place.
How you handle it, how you see it, how you think about it, how you say about it and what you believe about it can all be changed.
You can even change it so that your memory takes a completely different turn, as if something never happened.
This is the power and pitfall of our brain. We think our memories are real, but studies often already show that this is not always the case. Your memory is even distorted the moment it is created.
Because of your way of thinking and your beliefs, you already see situations a certain way and experience that situation the way you experience it. Then, if some time passes before you pick it up again, it can change again. The emotions you feel at that time and the events you have at that time then also affect the memory again.
Your memory seems very real, it feels real and you really experience it, but it's like a movie. Like Quentin Tarantino's.
You can say you have experienced real things, but even that may not be true. For example, there are people who imagine something very often that it can happen and suddenly it has happened in their mind. It feels like a real memory.
For example, there are also known cases of women who believed they had been abused by their fathers, but that was not true at all. That false memory then surfaced during treatment with a psychiatrist. Many (almost all) men have been wrongfully imprisoned as a result. Yet the daughters still believed it. This was due to the process of recall, the leading questions, and the suggestions made by the psychiatrists[1]. Because it became a memory, they thought it was real.
Thus, there are many people with false memories.
You notice this especially when you talk to old friends again. You start with, “Do you remember…?” You then tell your story, and your old friends point out that, according to them, something completely different happened. This might make you wonder if you were actually somewhere else, but it’s simply because everyone has their own perception, and that perception is also shaped by how they’ve developed.
Suddenly the memory for one person is then different than it is for another.
The benefit of this is that you can reshape your memories so that they make you feel good or neutral—and some people even use it as a motivator for the rest of their lives. People who had a difficult childhood, for example, can do this. They reshape their memories so that, because of their childhood, they want to make the most of their lives. Unfortunately, it sometimes goes the other way, so that because of their childhood, they feel they can’t get the most out of their lives.
Anyway, the idea of a bad childhood is often a distortion. Of course abuse or a corrective spanking is bad. But in some cultures, a corrective spanking is quite normal. So what is good and bad is still sometimes up for debate.
I don't do it, I think it's bad. But this is not to say that in retrospect my boys can't distort their childhood in such a way that they still thought it was shit. Rather not, but it's still possible.
They, all of us, have it in us to turn our youth into something cool or something very unpleasant.
This is how people who had a relatively happy childhood can still turn it into something traumatic. How is this possible? It comes down to how people deal with their memories and what they make of them.
Facts are facts, of course, and they can be terrible. You can imagine some of that.
The beauty of the past is that it's over.
In your head, you can then distort it to make it a Quentin Tarantino-esque ending. You can turn the color out of your movie, you can rewind the movie. In your brain, you have those possibilities.
This is not always easy because there can be a lot of emotion involved and a lot of resentment or hatred or whatever.
But when you can pass something off as a movie, you can end it in such a way that you end it in such a way that you think, "Yes, this is a good ending." At some point you then start to believe that. Because to your brain, it doesn't matter whether it's fantasy or reality.
Also listen to this podcast:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/195236/1727590-once-upon-a-time?play=true
Memories and their influence on being happy
When it comes to the memory of a child with a bad childhood that makes him want to get everything out of life, you can see that a bad memory does not necessarily mean you will also have a bad life and have to be unhappy.
Research also shows that people who view their lives as a process in which they want to grow often feel happier[2]. In that sense, it’s almost better to have had a difficult childhood, because that gives you a somewhat easier foundation from which to grow.
So one trick to making a bad memory a good memory is to ask yourself how that bad event caused you to grow as a person. How it made you stronger, how it sent you on a development path.
For example, an integrative memory is one that has taught you something new about yourself or other people.
Slogans such as "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" are so popular for this reason.
Intrinsic memories
Then you also have intrinsic memories. These are memories that have helped you grow as a person. The ones that show you that you built a good relationship with someone or that you did something good for society.
It has nothing to do with status or making money.
So, the memory of losing your job can become much less painful if you also remember that your family and/or friends were there to support you. Or that the job you got afterward was much better for society as a whole.
Using trauma signals in a positive way
Surely you had a traumatic childhood? Research shows that cues from your childhood, such as a familiar smell, can reduce depressive symptoms you may experience in your adult life due to this trauma[3].
This, according to scientists, even explains why adults sometimes still tend to signal abuse in their adult lives.
After all, as a small child, you have to bond with your caregiver, even if they don't like you. So a strange kind of bonding (positive feeling) comes from negative signals. You can then get this positive feeling from some kind of negative signal.
This may also explain why you keep falling for the “wrong” partner.
Change memory so it benefits you
So there are a few tricks you can apply to still give an unpleasant memory a kind of good spin, but this is often easier said than done.
Fortunately, hypnosis can help you do this. For example, if you find it difficult to see how something has actually put a positive spin on your life or provided insight, hypnosis can help.
Just as suggestions and insinuations can lead to negative and false memories, they can also lead to positive memories.
As I mentioned, you can change your memory like a movie. This is something a hypnotist can help you with. There are all kinds of variations on how to do this.
Depending on the memories and how they affect you, different techniques can be used. For example, do you want to get rid of a fear? Then a memory that caused the fear can be transformed into a kind of comedy film.
Is it a memory that causes a conviction that prevents you from doing something? Then you can look at the memory in a different way, such as from someone else who was there, to see how logical that blockage actually is.
All of this can be done with hypnosis.
Want to learn more about how hypnosis works and what you can do with it? Then come to the free online master class on hypnosis.
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[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00029157.1994.10403069
[2] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2004-22407-015
[3] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/3/881?etoc=&csrt=15537073379147429398