“Emotional manipulators often say they have a ‘bad memory’ to avoid taking responsibility.”

On threads, I’m confronted again by my own “bad memory” and now I’m talking about it again. I don’t like to talk about it publicly. It’s a level of vulnerability that I’m still not healed from and might never be. I’ll always be vulnerable to people who need me to accept their truth instead of mine. I’m working on holding my mind with grace in moments when I can’t remember or when my memory contradicts someone else’s.

But there’s something healing in sharing these things. I don’t know the science behind it, but I can point to a feeling in my body when it’s happening. When I share something that gives someone clarity they didn’t have before, I can feel my shoulders relax. A warmth runs through my chest and arms that feels like laying down in a hot bath. I feel seen and embraced by an unseen part of myself. Internal validation swells to push me forward to keep on speaking or writing.

There are three parts to my experiences with my memory:

* Memory Loss

* Memory Replacement

* Premonitions (stay with me for that one)

Memory Loss

Last year I met up with an old friend on Marco Polo. It’s an app for leaving video messages back and forth, “Marco Polo” style. I was excited to see him. I had only good memories of him. He was a TikTok mutual who was part of a group of friends who all came to know each other through our content.

We exchanged a few pleasantries in a handful of videos, when he brought up a story of us that I didn’t remember. He talked about a particularly spicy moment between us, but didn’t go into detail. He seemed nervous, but also protecting us both in the event these videos ever made it public. I appreciated his discretion. What little he did say didn’t spark a memory for me.

He gave more detail to the event, but I still couldn’t remember. I apologized for my bad memory, but I told him I believed him and I likely lost it with other memories over the years.

He didn’t reach out again, and when he didn’t respond to my video, I knew I had hurt him. I felt terrible. This memory meant something to him and from his perspective it meant nothing to me. If it had been important to me I would have remembered. I couldn’t join him in a shared moment of nostalgia. I felt like an outsider in my own life. I imagine he felt rejected.

On top of memory issues, I’m also healing a wound that causes me to feel shame when I reject someone I care about.

This is a case of memory loss because the memory isn’t there. This shows up in all kinds of situations. My kids will often refer to something from the past and hard as I try, I can’t pull it up. If memories are filed away in file folders, the file is missing. Sometimes I can see the file folder, but it’s empty. I can recognize that something was there, I just can’t see it. There are no pictures or video, no sounds or smells, nothing to remember.

I honor their experience by affirming that I believe their story, but I don’t have the picture of it. I can’t remember it, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. There’s one difference now though. I no longer assume your reality is the ONLY one. I stopped telling myself I’m wrong about a situation. Instead, I assure myself I’m only missing information. In most cases I can trust this person not to lie to me. In rare cases when I believe someone could be manipulating me, I can release their truth as theirs. I can hold that what they believe is valid, even if it’s not my experience.

From there I can move forward with love. If one of my kids tells me I said or did something hurtful in the past, I can apologize even if I don’t remember. I can confirm their experience and encourage my own self-reflection later to make sure I don’t say or do that again.

If I suspect someone may be manipulating me, I would play investigator. Rather than accept their memory of events as I would have in the past, I would inquire to know more. I would invite them to tell me everything. If I care about this person, I want them to feel heard. In the course of their story telling I can pick up on the truth of the situation and call their attention to it. From there, we can either talk about why they tried to manipulate the situation, or I can walk away. If I can’t trust a person to be truthful with me and own it when they’re not, that’s not a relationship I feel safe in.

Memory Replacement

But what do I do if I have a completely different memory of the event? This happens only rarely, but when it does, it can be scary. One of my more memorable experiences was right after dropping out of college. I was working as a store manager and my boss was writing me up for leaving the safe open when I closed the night before.

The thing is, I had a crystal clear memory of closing the safe. I had a ritual of patting my palm on the door of the safe after turning the dial. This is how I was able to sleep each night, seeing that image in my mind of closing the safe, turning the dial, and patting the door.

But here was my boss, whom I had no reason to disbelieve, telling me I hadn’t done that. He was just as sure as I was, that he had arrived in the office that morning with it wide open. What to do now? I accepted his memory as more recent and more valid. I took the write-up and vowed never to let it happen again. But I took that memory with me. I could no longer trust my memory to tell me the truth. I could never be sure I had closed the safe.

In this situation, I opened the file for that memory to find something different inside it. Something else was in place of the files I was told should be there. And now I couldn’t trust my files, my memories, to be real.

I began to study memory and I read about how the brain can replace memories with others that feel better. I concluded that my mind must have replaced the open door with a closed one. My subconscious was aware of the consequences of my mistake and protected me from it.

It didn’t start with that incident though. Somewhere in childhood, something traumatic had happened, maybe several things. My mind formed a habit of creating replacement memories to protect me from the real ones. Over the last few years I’ve been uncovering some of those real ones. It’s been painful, but healing. I’m hopeful that with more healing, my mind won’t need to protect me from anything anymore.

Premonitions as Memories

Now what about when a memory is different from the reality in front of me, but later becomes true? I open a file in the cabinet marked “Past” to find something that not hasn’t happened—yet. It appears to have been taken from the cabinet marked “Future”, when a few days to years later, the “memory” enters my reality.

I’ve talked about this a few times on TikTok. It’s an odd phenomenon I picked up on shortly after I got married. It’s when I remember seeing something that doesn’t exist, or an event that hasn’t happened. A newscaster passed away? I remember seeing his funeral on the news a few months ago. I swear, there used to be a Best Buy on that corner. A month later, there’s a sign saying a Best Buy is under construction and coming soon.

This one throws me still because I’m just getting used to it. It’s not to be confused with Déjà Vu, which is a feeling of having experienced something before. This is a very clear memory of it, including imagery, sound, smells, just as you would see with a legitimate memory. I don’t feel like it happened before—I know it did.

All my life I assumed I just had a “bad memory” as I’ve been talking about, but this shows up differently. Unfortunately, it’s not until after the event happens that I’m able to recognize it as a premonition. I never know in the moment that it’s not a memory but a vision.

I came across a comment that resonates with me. Sue Frantz describes how this happens for her partner in Memories of the Future (Association for Psychological Science).

My partner and I have coined the term “anticipatory nostalgia” to refer to her tendency to project herself into the future to a time when she is experiencing nostalgia for the current moment. So not only is she imagining a future time, but she’s imagining what the current moment will mean in that future time.

My visions usually have no time attached to them at all. Time is a conscious thing. My subconscious doesn’t understand time. It’s why trauma affects everything decades later. It’s still fresh and new. It still hurts just like the day it happened. My nervous system doesn’t care whether a thing happened yesterday or when I was little.

So this is sort of a wrench in the cog of my mind that I’m learning to pay closer attention to. I’m watching for moments when I remember an event someone else doesn’t. If my friend swears there was never a Best Buy on that corner, I believe them. Then I get curious about the possibility there may be one to come.

Back to Threads

The “emotional manipulator” described in that thread is still important. It does happen that people use memory issues to trick people into a reality they prefer. And here’s the important part for me. The memories don’t actually matter. What matters is how we treat each other.

People around me are allowed to remember things I don’t. I’m allowed to remember things they don’t. There will be contradictions and we’re allowed to have them. It’s natural to have them. What’s not natural is telling someone they’re wrong. What’s not okay is accusing someone of manipulating when they don’t remember something. It’s not the memory. It’s the accusation and the declaration that their memory isn’t real.

“I believe you” is a powerful phrase. I prefer to lean into a reality in which we both mean well, we both have each other’s best interests at heart. I work from the assumption that we’re both telling the truth as we know it. And my priorities, in order, are individual autonomy, and then connection.

Individual autonomy looks like accepting your truth as yours and very real to you. It also means holding my truth as mine and equally valid.

Connection looks like finding common ground where we’re both right. And where we’re “wrong” it’s a matter of finding the relevance. Does it matter who’s right or wrong about this? How important is it in terms of our relationship? Can we move forward in love if we’re both right about some things and both wrong about others?

For further reading, there are some links below to help you understand your memory.

* Memory Distortion for Traumatic Events: The Role of Mental Imagery

* Dissociative Amnesia (Cleveland Clinic)

* 📚Unchained Memories, Lenore Terr

* Reddit thread about “memories as premonitions”

* Memories of the Future (Association for Psychological Science)

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