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.

@ButWhatAboutTheBees how about just believe the OP? Why are people trying to convince her that she hit her dc when she knows she didn't. It's baffling. This is a forum where people come on to ask things. Share things. What possible point would there be for someone who hit their dc to come on here to fabricate a story about not hitting their dc? Why would they do that? What would be the point?
OP didn't have to post anything on MN. It wasn't some compulsory thing.
People on here are so desperate to find fault or tell people that they are wrong or bad that they lose sight of common sense

It sounds like there is trauma around being forced to go to boarding school

Memories are often emotional, not factual. Perhaps she can remember how she felt ,but not what happened.

Or she may be recalling a dream and think it was reality.

We don’t know the OP from Adam, this is only a snippet of a story. We don’t know her daughter either or why her daughter thinks that. OP might not even realise herself how her parenting affected her daughter. This in no way means that OP is a bad parent. As I said in an earlier post, no one is perfect, ever. No parent ever gets everything right, but whether her daughter is a liar or not, people don’t just turn into liars or drama queens for absolutely no reason, so OP should try and understand where her interpretations are coming from. If it’s a false memory she would do well to try and understand the triggers.

Why are people trying to convince her that she hit her dc when she knows she didn't. It's baffling

MN is massively anti boarding school. As soon as the OP mentioned it I knew how the thread would go.

Lots of kids are also anti boarding school

It's really interesting that you say you were "walloped" as a child, OP. Some people believe that the experience of trauma is passed down from parent to child, unspoken, just as the knowledge of how to weave a web goes down the spider generations.

Did you ever tell your DD stories of how your own mother treated you?

I wonder if there’s something in this. OP I know you say DD liked school and was happy to go and there was no bullying etc but who knows how the separation from family affected her? Falling asleep might even have been a weird trauma reaction or something.

Lots of kids are also anti boarding school

And lots aren't. I weekly boarded too, from much younger than the OPs daughter, and it gets a bit irritating to read the insistence that it is damaging and traumatic when it was a happy and positive experience for me and a perfectly normal option where I lived.

My most vivid memories of being a child aren’t real. I assume they were dreams, but I can clearly remember on a number of occasions jumping from the top stair to the very bottom and sort of flying down (a common childhood dream I’ve since found out), and being about 7 and driving my mum’s car down a one way road by myself and my legs not being long enough to push the brake pedal. Not only is it preposterous that I would’ve been driving a car, it was manual and the road was about a 5 minute drive from our house and there’s no way I could’ve driven there given I didn’t even know what a clutch was, never mind how to use it.

Another is being at a funeral and the coffin flying away at the end. I could even tell you what I was wearing and where I was sat in the crematorium.

These are some of my clearest memories from being a child and are as real to me as thinking about cooking dinner earlier. I only know they’re not real because they’re impossible. If it had been more believable, then I wouldn’t have given them a second thought.

I have no childhood trauma, have no reason to go around making things up and the memories are truly benign. But it does make me realise that not all ‘memories’ actually happened, and it could easily have been more traumatic or plausible things that I’d imagined… and my mum wouldn’t have been lying if she told me they weren’t true, even though I would honestly stake my mortgage on them having happened.

My sister has done the same. Shes in her 30s. No drugs though, she's just an attention seeking pathological liar. I think it started as a teen, slagging off DM as teens do, exaggerated a bit and enjoyed the sympathy. Exaggerated a bit more next time etc. I've heard stories years later that are outrageous.

OK I spoke to her this evening about the hitting, first of all she said she was in her pink pyjamas in the hall of our old house, she lost her temper over something, shouted at us, I pulled down her pyjama bottoms and smacked her bare bottom. I do remember the tantrum. She spat at her Dad from the stairs because he wouldn’t take her to the shop with him (she wasn’t dressed), then she pulled down her pyjama trousers and “mooned” at him. She was really angry. I pulled up her trousers, picked her up and took her to the sitting room to calm her down, and explained that she had been told several times that if she wanted to go to the shop she needed to get dressed. She had refused because she was watching cartoons. We had a cuddle and I said if she got dressed quickly we could go to the park and meet Daddy and DD2 there, which we did. So different recollections of what seems to be the same incident. She would have been about three.

The second one, when she said I hit her outside nursery, I asked her to describe the building. (Nursery was an old house in woods.) She described her primary school, where she used to line up outside, when she would have been six. I rarely dropped her off as we lived too far away and she got the school bus. So another misremembering.

She was happy at boarding school, and came home every weekend. She had a lot of freedom there and could go and see friends after school. Her grandparents often took her and a friend out midweek, and DH or I often did similar. She went there from 14-18.

Also she wasn’t forced to go. If she hadn’t wanted to go and had told us she was unhappy, we’d have found another school. But we travelled a lot for work, she and DD1 had been to a lot of schools and we promised them that this would be their last. (DD1 was at another school as she was doing the IB.)

Memory is a strange thing, every time we recall something it is only the last time we thought about it that we remember, not the original event. Our brains fill in gaps without us consciously realising so memory can be influenced by many things. Even significant life events can be misremembered, a study was carried out over 10years of a group of people asking them to recount their experience of what happened to them on 9/11. Even after one year their stories weren’t 100% accurate and the small details were misremembered or merged with others.

From your comments it sounds like your daughter genuinely believes these memories to be true because, for whatever reason, at one time she recalled the memory and the smacking and crying were added in. The next time she remembered these thoughts would have been more fixed to the memory and so become imbedded as fact to her.

I once had to ask my parents if they had at some point in my childhood split up and my dad moved out. I wasn’t sure it was real but it seemed like a memory I had. Turned out my dad had been away for work for a few weeks mon-fri when I was very young and I had somehow concocted a memory of my parents had officially separated for many months and had later reconciled.

Obviously your daughter believing something so distressing is upsetting for all of you so trying to get to the root of the memories and providing evidence to support the facts might be helpful. Ultimately though please be reassured that memory is complicated and entirely fallible, easily influenced by external sources.

How?

A lot of self work, reflection. Becoming aware of the factors that contributed to how you are and learning that when you’re abused or you have bad parents that doesn’t automatically make them bad people, they’re just struggling themselves and it’s not you that’s that’s not good enough, it’s them that, for whatever reason, made mistakes. As for the bullying, that old cliche is true, ‘’Hurt people, hurt people’’ it isn’t a reflection on your value. Later I found out my sister was abused herself by step siblings and projected it.

The awesome part of parenting is that you never ever forget your biggest lows. They stay with you forever. So if the OP says it never happened, I'm inclined to believe them.

@EconomyClassRockstar this is so true.

<nerd alert>

There's also something called a source monitoring error in memory - where new information attaches itself to an original memory. So for the smacking example, she could have seen a cartoon where a kid pulls their pants down and moons, and then gets their bum smacked. At the time it might have reminded her of when she pulled a moony, which is enough for the two memories to attach to each other and become distorted.

OP explained AFTER my post saying it was no big deal to her that she had a history with it...

Please stop quoting like some gotcha

Well so what? Are you saying that means she's lying? If so, how strange! Would you lie if somebody asked you a question that required clarification? If not, why would you assume that somebody else would?

Here's a slightly different perspective.

I have a very clear memory of having had some sort of really nasty, sticky, growing scabby thing on the back of my left thigh when I was primary school age. I remember it growing over time until it was about the size of my palm.

I mentioned it to my mother as an adult and she swore that I didn't ever have any such thing. She was a careful mother and a qualified nurse, so I don't believe it's the kind of thing she could have forgotten.

However, I do have quite a large, brown birthmark on the back of my left thigh in the place where I remember the scabby thing... 😱

At least you have more of an idea where these memories come from now.