I was recently forwarded an article about internal family systems therapy which is the new flavor in trauma intervention. It’s kooky, but not in a harmless way. It’s rife with the potential for psychological abuse. The linked article describes an anorexia treatment clinic where victims are reporting childhood abuse at a wildly disproportionate rate. Their entire lives have been destroyed, strong relationships with parents obliterated, everything turned upside-down because of abuse allegations. And I have not a doubt in my mind that the victims in this case believe their own stories. The potential for psychologists to abuse the fragility of memory, especially in vulnerable populations, is enormous.
This has to be balanced with the reality that abuse happens and those genuine stories often don’t come out until later, and often the first place such experiences are disclosed is in therapy. The incidence of the kind of mental reconditioning described in that article is relatively rare. And some of those women probably have real memories of real abuse. It’s not exactly uncommon, especially in women with anorexia.
I’m confident in saying, however, that IFS encourages delusional thinking in people who may already be prone to it, thus increasing the likelihood that therapeutic abuse takes place.
I have all sorts of memories from ages 2-7, like still images or short 5-second clips. More visual than anything. I’m probably weird, but I’ve gone back and visited the location of those earliest memories just out of curiosity of what was fabulated vs real, and they’re most often real.
For years my family thought I was crazy because I recalled at age 5 being on a road trip through Virginia where we went to a zoo and saw Big Bird. I remember the feet. Then another family member was recollecting the trip and mentioned we briefly stopped at some roadside ostrich ranch and looked at ostriches. A big bird, though not exactly Big Bird as I remembered it.
Then after age 7 most of my memories are proper memories, not just clips.
My apologies - I had no idea you could click on that.
I’m so clueless about technology - I don’t just assume everything on the screen is “clickable.” Which is why I (apparently unnecessarily) block and reply.
Most recent reading was Pollan’s “A World Appears.” Discussion of consciousness, sense of self, thought, feelings, and whether they have a biological source. IIRC, he offered some claims/studies that kids do not really develop independent “narrative memories” (or some such term) until they are 4 or so. One example was, if they went to the zoo, what they described as their memories was limited to what an accompanying adult had commented on. And claimed that sort of memories gave rise to one’s sense of self. (Book was a tad dense, I did not accept all of it, and I did not take notes.)
No, I’m not presenting that book as dispositive - or particularly relevant to memories. But I am continually amazed by the fact that we go about our lives dead certain about what goes on in our heads, when a lot of even what we perceive as sensory input is basically our brain making up assumptions based on past experiences. And don’t even bring up quantum mechanics!
Yeah - sounds a lot like “recovered memories” - a large percentage of which I consider BS.
I wouldn’t dispute that there may be evidence for this being the case in studies, but we seem to be discovering that not everybody is wired alike, thinks alike, feels alike, perceives alike or remembers alike - for example some people report having no internal monologue, not being able to visually remember things etc. I doubt there would be a one-size-fits-all answer for how and whether and when people start remembering things about the world.
Yeah. So possibly all the respondents herein are outliers? And above average in all other respects?
In a discussion of thought, the book commented on how some people think (largely) in words, others (largely) in images, and others in a manner that are not words or images. So not only do we not know WHAT each other is thinking, we can’t be sure HOW they are thinking.
Just so damned weird.
Sure is an intelligent design that maker came up with!
I recently learned about aphantasia, and I’m 99% positive that I have it (I’m not sure there’s anyone that “diagnoses” it). It opened my eyes as far as the disconnect between what people said they could remember, and my own ability to remember. And it’s the first thing I thought of when I started reading the replies in this thread.
Re: the thread topic – I don’t really have any memories earlier than grade school. And my memories are really just the idea that such-and-such happened. I “remember” an incident where I had bad asthma as a child, my parents decided to take me to the ER at midnight, and when the front door was opened the blast of cold air made me vomit, and my asthma mostly cleared up. I don’t remember who was with me, what the actual time was, what color the door was, what kind of car my parents had at the time. So is that a memory? Or is that just me remembering something happened, and that my family talked about it a lot afterwards?
Short answer - my memories don’t go very far back at all, and they are horribly inaccurate.
Most of my imagination I can only describe as visceral. It shows up in my fiction a lot - this emphasis on physical sensation and emotional impression - and I’ve had to tone it down a lot because I don’t think that way of perceiving makes a lot of sense to most people. I think they find it bewildering. Well, that’s how I remember stuff, even good stuff. I remember how I felt. The rest is just details, more frequently forgotten than not.
My memories stretch very far back, at least to when I was two. My potentially earliest memory is a very vague, simplistic cartoon of a picture in my head about something that happened when I could have been hardly more than one and a half years old. My mother and I are on the balcony of the house where my family lived for a few months before my parents bought an apartment and we are watching a man called Jack mow the lawn. I know this man existed (once, when I was 3 or 4, I think we even ran into him at the mall). However, I now strongly suspect that this is not a direct memory, but a slightly later dream or mental image based either on my memory or on my parents telling me about Jack mowing the lawn when I was about three. I am not sure if I could have understood the concept of someone cutting the grass at one and a half.
My first real memories are definitely things that happened when I would have been two to two and a half years old. My long-term memory started developing very early, around the time of my toilet training. A fairly clear memory is of lying on my parents’ bed in the morning. There was an orange blanket instead of a window curtain, and I was telling my mother that my diaper was not comfortable. My mother says this happened when I was two and a half and that she told me I could stop using diapers if I learned to use the toilet. I also remember my potty, other toilet training equipment, and my parents reading me a book about going to the toilet. Other memories that have stayed with me from about this time or even somewhat earlier include a vague recollection of my high chair and of my bib - which had a rabbit similar to Bugs Bunny on it, or of some rather banal moments when I was with my parents at home.
I remember lots of things starting when I was three - by that time, my long-term memory had fully formed. I am amazed when I hear people say they remember almost nothing from before school age.
I was old enough by then to have a keen interest in the space program. I had built models of the Gemini capsule and the Apollo rocket, and on that fateful day of the first moon landing I wanted to record it, but home videotape recorders were still far in the future. So I did what I could, recording the audio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder – the Walter Cronkite version, of course! One quirk that many may not remember is that when Neil Armstrong made his historic “that’s one small step for man …” remark, there was a burst of static and Cronkite was unable to make out what he had said!
I can remember some things from when I was 3 but they’re more like quick flashes of memory. I remember sitting in the passenger side of our new Rambler. Basically I remember the dashboard. It’s weird what the brain picks to retain. I remember the dashboard of that Rambler but not my brother being born, something more significant and I was a little older then. Go figure.
Another thing I remember from when I was 3 is being on the porch of my grandma’s house in Alabama. There was a smallish rocking chair there that really interested me. My mom later told me it belonged to her grandmother who was a short woman. That house burned to ground when I was newly 4.
Another early memory from Grandma’s house in Alabama is being outside in the snow (unusual for there) with my dad. My mom was inside at the window holding up my brother so he could watch my dad and me throw snowballs at each other. I’m about 3 years older than him and he was under a year old or close to it.
I remember moving to Hawaii when my dad was transferred there. I was 4, maybe 4 1/2. I remember flying over the ocean. I also remember landing and being scared to go down the stairs (I’ve always been afraid of heights) and, more pleasantly, being given leis.
As to the question asked early in this thread, I have always been very verbal. My mom told me that I started talking about about 6-7 months and that I startled people who approached me when I spoke in sentences at a year old. They surely wern’t complex or even interesting sentences but they were sentences.
As far as classmates and teachers, the earliest classmate I can name was one kid in 4th grade, who I also knew through some common friends, and who I stayed in touch with, and was later in Boy Scouts with. So I can’t really say I remember him “from fourth grade”. After that, I remember the girl in 6th grade I had my first crush on (at a different school), and I could come up with a few names from 7th and 8th grades (at yet another school).
For teachers, a similar pattern: I remember my fourth grade teacher, and one of my sixth grade teachers, and then a few from 7th on. I might remember other teachers (including earlier) if I saw the names, but then again I also might not.
My earliest memory is waking up in my cot and calling for my mum, but she didn’t come. I stood up and started crying for her, and then she came. I was a month off three when my brother was born and I was moved into a big bed in the other room, so this happened before his birth. I remember that I stayed at my aunt’s house when he was born - she fed me tomato soup, which I dislike.
A lot of my early memories are tinged yellow because of the sun coming through the yellow glass door in our lounge room.
I have memories from probably 2-3 years old, but they are mostly of being confused all the time. Being in one place and then suddenly waking up in the car as it pulls up at a new location. People I don’t know calling me by name - friends of my parents or out of area relatives. Having a toilet accident at the squash court and realizing I didn’t have a nappy (diaper) on, and then my mother being annoyed because I was supposed to be potty trained.
I remember being potty trained. Sitting on a training pot in the main room with a pile of books to keep me occupied until something happened.
I remember being 4 and playing with Tracey, the granddaughter of the lady across the road, and being told we can be good friends because we’ll be at the same school. Didn’t happen, she turned out to be the class bully. I also remember being great friends with Brendan, the boy from across the road. We went to the same kindergarten (4 years old), and I remember being sad that he was kept down in kinder so we didn’t start school together.
I remember transition day, when they walked us up to the primary school from our kindergarten and we met our teacher for the first time, and were shown around the school. I remember where my classroom was, and I remember sitting one on one with my future teacher and having completed something (I assume a test), and she told me I was a very clever girl.
I think I remember all my primary school teachers and many of the kids from primary school, but I did have one consistent school the whole way through and that would have helped.
My first memory is on my fourth birthday. I was coming downstairs and my sister and mother were sitting in the living room on the couch and wished me a happy birthday.
What’s weird is that now it’s a memory of a memory. I know I saw it, I know it’s my first memory but I don’t actually have the memory anymore.
I have aphantasia (but with some visualization) so it’s not surprising.
I’ve got quite a few memories of kindergarten and elementary school, but I only remember a couple of the names of the teachers.
I do remember my first kiss, which happened in kindergarten. The girl asked me if I would be her boyfriend and I agreed. She also wanted to kiss and we found what we thought was a private place but the other kids saw us. The relationship didn’t last long.
Some things are not the sort of things that are likely to be spoken about later. My very first memory is from when I was 4 and a half. I was in my grandparent’s bedroom talking to my mother on hte phone after my youngest sister was born. Not really the sort of thing that was going to come up in later conversations, at least not in my family. Next memory is at least six months later, because it was in my kindergarten classroom. That , however , might be a different sort of memory because it was of something that most likely happened many times (playing in the playhouse) and with those sort of memories I’m never sure if I’m remembering a particular instance or if it’s just what I guess I would call a generic memory. Unfortunately for me that’s what most of my memories from before college are - things that I either know I did many times, like using my childhood best friend’s pool or things that I might have done many times. For example, I remember going from my school to meet my high school boyfriend at his school , but I have no idea if that happened once or twice or if it was two or three times a week
What a coincidence! One of my three earliest memories is of a scene from a Lost in Space episode, as well. (It would have been an early rerun, circa 1973 – I was three, I think).
About a year ago, I wasted an hour trying to identify it. All I have is a fuzzy memory of that robot character in a kind of outdoor courtyard, by a door.
Until recently, I thought my earliest memories were a few isolated ones from when I was three. The first was when there was a man on TV, and my mother pointed at him and said to me “That’s President Kennedy.” (This had to have happened before his death in Nov. 1963; I turned 3 that July.) I also remember asking my mother, in church, why our pastor was yelling. She replied “That’s not yelling; that’s called preaching.” And then finally one day, in our kitchen, I asked her why she was crying, and she told me that President Kennedy died. This last one is rather vivid. I remember how the kitchen looked, how I was fiddling with this weird box-like thing on the table because I was I didn’t know what else to do, and how she had her head in her hand with one elbow leaning on the table. For those skeptics who might think that my mother repeated these things to me later, all I can say is that my mother had a terrible memory herself and definitely would not have remembered the first two. I asked her about the scene in the kitchen when I was an older child, and she didn’t remember that either.
I had a memory from roughly that period, which I couldn’t place until recently. I remember being all bundled up for a shopping trip. My mother and I greeted our landlady, Miss Maud, and she said to me “Don’t catch cold now.” I remember feeling bad, like I wasn’t a “big girl” because I did indeed catch a cold. Recently while chasing down records of my grandparents, I found out Miss Maud’s full name, so I searched for her on Ancestry dot com. I found several records, including a death notice. She died in January 1963, on the day that I turned 2 and a half. So my first memory is from before then.
I have a few random flashes that my older sisters confirmed happened when I was two – our next door neighbor installing a fence in their backyard, finally moving from a crib into a real bed, a freak snowstorm hitting Dallas that winter paralyzing the city, that sort of thing. I have a few better structured memories of our vacation to Florida when I was three.
I can remember my little sister’s first steps, which means I would’ve been around 3. That’s likely my earliest memory.
I can recall my school years very well, some in great detail, such as the toys we had in the classroom, the frog in the tank, and posters on the wall. And all my teachers names, most of the kids names too, the ones who stuck around. The fleeting ones who had short stays are all gone from my memory (I lived in the country, and families would come to live there only to dislike the lifestyle and move away again soon after).
The problem with recalling a memory is now you’re not remembering the event itself but the memory of the memory. It’s why it rapidly becomes unreliable.
