Fake memories?

[Aydel]

I was chatting with DD2 the other day about bringing up children, specifically her and her sister when they were little. She said to me “You used to hit us all the time to make us behave.”

I was horrified - the only time I smacked either of them was DD1’s hand with the fish slice when I was cooking and she was trying to touch the frying pan. DD2 “remembers” me pulling down her trousers and smacking her bottom. She claims this happened at home and specifically when I picked her up from nursery on a few occasions. I said that it categorically didn’t happen. She just said “OK, if that’s what you say.”

She also said she used to scream and cry and refuse to go back to boarding school on a Sunday night. This also isn’t true! She was always quite happy about it, and slept all the way to school. It was never an issue.

She’s 23 now. I asked her what other “discipline” she remembered, and she remembered being taken home from a restaurant when she was about 4, because she kept getting down and running around (true). And also being made to clean her bedroom wall when she had scribbled on it (also true). But I’ve never hit either her or her sister! I asked her sister, and she said that neither I nor DH ever hit her or her sister, and confirmed that DD2 didn’t cry when she went back to school. Yet DD2 is adamant that this happened, and it makes me sad and worried.

perhaps you have blanked this out

what is your relationship like with your daughter op?

I really believe this generation of late teens/young adults make this stuff up in their heads so they can claim to be victims. “I have trauma”
I know of two siblings who have different interpretations of their same childhood. Very peculiar.

@loverofbestbuy brilliant. Get on really well. She’s moving out soon and we’ll miss her.

I’m really against corporal punishment for children so certainly wouldn’t have blanked it out. I still feel guilty about whacking DD1’s hand with the fish slice to stop her burning her fingers.

These will most likely be confusing situations that did happen rather than inventing something completely new.

If I were to guess, perhaps she was beaten at boarding school and attributed that to being beaten at home. Perhaps she cried once she'd arrived back at boarding school and thinks she'd cried before leaving.

Perhaps it's a response to abuse she received (at school) and therapy would help her see what really happened but honestly, you might all be better off with her thinking what she does right now.

she was probably screaming and crying in her head

She probably felt screaming g and crying inside.

yes this

did she enjoy boarding school op?

Is she a fan of those misery porn books/films?

My friend's daughter once talked about 'before we had a proper bathroom'. Turned out she meant a time when she was about 3 or 4 and the bathroom was being renovated so she had to use a potty for a couple of days!

That is different though, that is a real memory, just wrongly interpreted

Yes, false memories are a thing, but they’re usually displacement of some kind. Was she bullied at school? Disciplined harshly by teachers? (Esp as she went to boarding school…) Was family communication open or might she have felt unheard/misunderstood?

She forgot a whole room though, but I get your point.

This! Almost everyone I know under the age of 25 can't wait to tell me about one trauma or another that they have supposedly gone through.
I find it difficult to sympathise as realistically they have grown up with the best standard of living with the most open and supportive generation of parents (obviously excluding actual cases of abuse/poverty).
I can't help but wonder if the years spent encouraging navel gazing and every corner of social media explaining why parents actions are always abusive no matter how well intentioned they were have psychologically damaged an entire generation.
Hope you and your daughter get through this OP.

The older dd says none of his happened either.

@alloweraoway

That is different though, that is a real memory, just wrongly interpreted
But that's the point. Wrong interpretation. Incorrect details.
Smacking at school turns into Op smacked her. Feeling scared and sad in her mind when going back to school turns into cried when she had to go back b

perhaps doesn’t want to revisit / cause a fuss 🤷

She enjoyed boarding school and still goes back regularly to see the boarding parents, and she has a lot of school friends. She certainly wasn’t bullied at school. She has always been very open about her life and would have told us if anything was wrong - at her primary school there was a bit of a bullying culture with kids who were the “wrong” nationality and didn’t fit in, and she not only told us but reported it at the school. She often says how happy her childhood was, so this has come out of nowhere.

Any chance you once did the ‘I’ll give you a snack on the bottom’ joke and her mind has changed it? The people saying above about altered memories- it’s so true, my mum and I once started discussing a place we’d been and a way something had happened and we said it to my sister and she had a totally different story!!! Plus I remembered being somewhere as a child that it turned out was only built in my teens and my brother remembered a football match that everyone says didn’t happen!!! The mind does mad stuff sometimes!! The crying thing though, I used to cry late at night and my parents would never know (they used to work in a pub and would be very very late home and I’d be terrified they’d be in an accident). There’s a chance she screamed and cried but you never saw it x

It depends why they have different interpretations though, doesn’t it?

I was horrendously bullied all the way through my childhood by my sister, but both her and my mum completely refuse to admit or accept it was as bad as I remember it, because they are in complete denial and probably feel guilty, my mum because she couldn’t stop it and my sibling because they realise how shitty they actually were and want to remain in denial.

Besides, experiences are, to some extent, subjective to the victim. One person will find a particular experience more traumatic than someone else. These things are much more nuanced and complex than just one person being a liar, memories can become faded or distorted over time, people can develop disassociation and false memories aren’t usually completely false, they come from somewhere

The smacking thing is really weird. My DM denies smacking me although she absolutely did. Deep down she must know she did though which is different in your case.

I went to boarding school at 11 and let me tell you, EVERYONE was crying at the start. I can't really imagine little girls not crying at least some of the time when going to boarding school. So Im sorry but theres no way you're right about this. Ok sure some of the timing and the details might be different, but I promise you nobody goes to boarding school without shedding tears.

No 23 year old was subject to corporal punishment at boarding school! And if they were it’d be national news.

i tend to agree that there is a trend at the moment to blame parents/exaggerate and imagine trauma. I’m not sure where it comes from but it’s quite unpleasant.

My parents later denied some of the terrible stuff they did to me in the 70s/80s. They've lost their marbles now so I'll never get an apology.

Sadly, it's not just the younger generation. My brother is in his mid 50's and has invented a horrible childhood full of abuse and neglect. The stories he tells about our mum are just ridiculous. He's a strung out smack head, though.

Well if she screamed and cried it would have been at school because we’d have heard it in our flat.

She was a weekly boarder and would often come home late on a Friday night as she wanted to hang out with friends or go to a party - perfectly normal teenage behaviour. And at school she had her own bedroom and bathroom - it wasn’t an Enid Blyton type dorm. It was like a big family house with sitting rooms, games rooms and they all ate dinner together.

DD1 laughed and said no way were either of them hit or smacked. We would remove them from the scene for bad behaviour - eg DD2 had a tantrum and threw all her toys into the garden, when she was about 5, so I took her upstairs and we sat quietly on her bed so she could think about why this wasn’t acceptable behaviour.