Around 40 years ago, I was invited to appear on London Weekend Television’s The Six O’Clock Show. My mother was terribly excited, first that I was to be appearing on television at all, and second because she really liked Michael Aspel, the presenter who would be interviewing me. I was a journalist at the time and I had been asked to appear on the show because the producers had picked up on a lighthearted article I had just had published in the Observer newspaper. It described how I had recently passed the St John Ambulance first aid test and, consequently, had become terrified that someone might fall from a ladder or collapse just as I passed by them in the street, leaving me duty-bound to attempt to use my distinctly inadequate skills.
It was only when, recently, the friend with whom I had taken that first aid course sent me a clipping of the article, which she had come across in her own files, that I noticed the date on it: It was published two years after my mother had died.
The Unreliability of Memories
Memories can be so vivid, and yet they are notoriously unreliable. Many of us may think that our memories are retrieved intact from some storage centre in the brain. As celebrated novelist Julian Barnes put it in his recently published nonfiction work, Changing My Mind, he had assumed as a boy “that memory operated like a left-luggage office. An event in our life happens, we make some swift subconscious judgement on the importance of the event and, if it is important enough, we store it in our memory. Later, when we need to recall it, we take the left-luggage ticket along to a department of our brain, which releases the memory back to us—and there it is, as fresh and uncreased as the moment it happened.”1
In reality, there is no “memory bank.” Memories are stored throughout the brain in the pattern of neural activity that occurred when the event was actually experienced—that is, the aspects we perceived and paid attention to at the time. But memories are susceptible to what neuroscientist Lisa Genova calls “creative editing,” both at the time of encoding and then every time we recall them: “When we retrieve a memory of something that happened, we are reconstructing the story, not playing the videotape…We omit bits, reinterpret parts and distort others in light of new information, context and perspective that are available now but weren’t then.”2
And that means that, as Julian Barnes goes on to say, “[T]he stories we tell most often about our lives are likely to be the least reliable, because we will have subtly amended them in every retelling down the years.”
This is quite a staggering realisation, and it often shocks those of my clients who are convinced that the terrible circumstance that they are recounting is indisputable. To reference Julian Barnes again, “[A] single person’s memory, uncorroborated and unsubstantiated by other evidence, is a feeble guide to the past.” closer to an act of the imagination. However, while a shared memory of an occasion might be more reliable, it is not necessarily so—we can co-opt others’ memories, imagining them vividly for ourselves during their owner’s frequent retelling of them, and then gradually become convinced that the memories are our own.
Memory Recall in Therapy
As it is the memories that we tell ourselves most often that corrupt most easily, accurate recall is likely to be a special issue for those who have a tendency to ruminate over perceived slights or losses, bringing them to mind very frequently for unconscious “creative editing.”
One client of mine vividly remembered being left at home alone at an age when she was only just big enough to peer over the sill of the hall landing window, through which she saw her mother and siblings merrily setting off on some jaunt without her. When she checked this out with her sister, who was a decade older, the sister informed her that there had been no landing window in the house where they lived at the time. Nor did they have a dog, which my client had recalled as her only company. This did not mean that her perception of neglect was not accurate. However, it became clear that the neglect perceived had been emotional rather than physical and needed to be addressed differently.
The tendency to distort memories in the light of newer information and updated perspectives can be a special challenge when working with couples. It is why human givens therapists are likely to ask couples in conflict what drew them to each other in the first place. All that was warm and positive and kind and fun gets forgotten when overriding recollections are about slights and rows and resentments, which duly colour the lenses through which they see each other. Often, remembering what brought them together can be the first step in helping couples rebuild a solid connection.
So, treasured or tortured memories may be wrong, conflated by other events from different times and others’ experiences of them. Because I have cast iron proof that the event didn’t happen, I must accept that I constructed my mother’s excitement that day, 40 years ago.