Memory and trauma: why should we not trust our memories?

Susanna Niehaus deals with remembering. Professor at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts is a court expert and has been looking at people and their stories about sexual crimes for 25 years. She knows what human memory can store, she. She says: “Our brains are picky.”

Thousands of impressions and information rain down on our brain every second, but we are only consciously aware of some of them. And we only store part of it as a long-term memory. And this is only from the age of three. We keep things that are of great importance to us, that are surprising or unusual. First of all, strong emotions. They filter out what’s permanently in the experience memory. What we had for lunch on Monday, what the person who brought us the beer in the restaurant looked like – that’s not part of it.

The important things remain: falling in love for the first time. First meeting with husband and wife. Birth of the child. Where we are as smoke rises from the World Trade Center. We remember all this. But there is a problem.

we remember wrong

Susanna Niehaus says: “Memory is prone to errors.” Over time, things fall or break. This is completely normal.

Niehaus remembers the boar. He is still young and in the woods with his family when the animals suddenly attack. They take shelter in a tree stump. A few years ago, in a conversation with parents, it turned out that your sibling is experiencing something similar. Niehaus didn’t even exist then. He realizes his memory is wrong, but says, “I still have images of the situation in my head.”

We all carry illusions within us. When the ten-year-old said that the Christmas tree was lit on one Christmas. But his family just warned him at the time, nothing happened. Or when we talk about who started the first kiss when we met – don’t be surprised if you see it differently from your partner!

Our brain writes everything it can on the internal memory album: the books we read, the movies we watch, when people tell us things or stories that circulate in the family. This puts us in a difficult position: Memories make people human. If the sum of all I remember is who I am, I cannot trust myself. Who am I?

Starting the war of memories

It’s explosive. The woman to whom we owe this information experienced this firsthand: Elizabeth Loftus. The US researcher’s findings are now incorporated into the handling of cases around the world. When he published “The Myth of Suppressed Memory” in 1994, he was initially different: he received death threats and needed an armed bodyguard. All because of an experiment with teenagers.

14-year-old Chris Coan details how, at the age of five, he disappeared in a shopping mall and how a man with glasses, a blue flannel shirt and gray hair brought him back to his mother. He remembers the “terrible fear” he felt.

But: Chris never lost his mother. Psychologist Loftus asked his older brother Jim to tell Chris three true childhood stories and one made-up story—the one Chris later reenacted. The psychologist inserted a completely new memory into him and the others.

Loftus showed that our memory can be manipulated. Trusted people and authorities can easily do this with narratives. Or through thought-provoking questions. The more time passes after the experience, the easier the manipulation. Its results at the time were progressive. The prevailing view is that the brain works like a recording device, accurately reproducing everything it has experienced as a memory.

Then comes a psychology war known as “memory wars” in the USA.

At that time, many psychologists were receiving treatment according to Freud and his concept of repression: People suppress threatening experiences and traumas from their consciousness, which are no longer accessible to them alone, but can be brought out in therapy. Everything is possible. Anyone can be a victim. And all of a sudden it’s like this: People fill talk shows of the 1980s and 1990s with creepy stories, come out with best-sellers like “Secret Survivors” or “Suppressed Memories,” and do self-tests in the case of repressed childhood abuse: trouble with your intuition. do you live Do certain foods make you nauseous? Deny your teeth?

Loftus takes its foundation from these therapists. They defend themselves publicly. And lose.

Myth edition

Today we know, says expert Susanna Niehaus: “Traumatic things aren’t automatically suppressed or divided, that’s refuted.” Of course you forget things and you don’t like to think about things. But Niehaus knows this from his daily work: Serious violence, sexual violence – that’s what people usually remember. It’s so bad that they get in trouble, can’t get the sights, sounds, and smells out of their heads. This makes sense, too, according to Niehaus: “The brain memorizes states because what you learn from threatening situations is important to your survival.”

So, how was your relationship with Bruno Dössekker? How did he find his story? There is a man who was initially adopted, pushed from house to house, desperate to know where he came from. He is interested in Judaism, finds what he is looking for there, travels to Israel, Latvia and Poland, recalls memories of a childhood home in Riga. For him it is clear: I come from here. And it continues the story. Two therapists, one of whom is Jewish, help him. He writes the book with them. When the biography turns out to be false, he holds a grudge against him. Today he lives in seclusion in Amlikon TG.

Perhaps Bruno Dössekker could have saved himself a lot if he had been suspicious before. Maybe we should all be. Maybe we don’t need to go that far. We can easily get it. Like Max Frisch, who already knows: “Sooner or later, everyone invents a story that they see as their own life.”