#false memories

[abbeyofcyn]

Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles AUs

Phantom Pain

Donnie was finally back to normal. At least.... he was no longer feral. But months of being infected takes its toll and Leo has lost a lot to get him back. It's not easy having two idiots who can't deal with emotions as brothers for Mikey.

Start reading here

Hiatus

CW: nightmares, amputation

Tags: #phantom pain comic

Krang infection sequel

We're not Kappa!

When a rat turns a 1000 years old they become a Kyūsu. They grow large like a cat and have been known to take care of orphan kittens, but this old rat found four turtles in strange green ooze. The Kyūsu did not expect the second physical change in his long life nor did he expect to raise four not-quite kappa in modern Japan.

Tag: #we're not kappa! au

CW: none

Wretched Little Pests

Draxum, Splinter, April. All dead. Shredder won, the Krang won. The brothers must survive and will fight to protect each other no matter the cost.

Collaboration AU

Read the comics here

CW: death, injuries, murder, savage mode

Tag: #wretched little pests au

Krang Infection

Two years after the invasion, Donnie feels sick and his gut instinct tells him it's very different from the rat flu.

Start reading here

Completed

CW: minor body horror, implied amputation, non graphic brain surgery

Tags: #krangified Donnie #Krang infection comic

False Memory

All the brothers have had nightmares from the Apocalypse pop up and ruining their sleep. Casey confirmed that what they've dreamt actually happened to their counterparts in his timeline. They refer to it as 'false memories'. Leo wakes up to the worst 'memory' he's had thus far.

Start reading here

Completed

CW: death

Brains and Brawn Apocalypse

Donnie and Raph lost their brothers during the apocalypse when they were only in their twenties. Now, in their thirties, there's not much hope left for them to win this war.

Several one shots: overview

Completed

CW: death

Great, what's next...

A poll based adventure with Donnie as the main character

Start reading here

Discontinued

CW: none

[creature-wizard]

New Agers often prey upon and exploit people with C-PTSD by convincing them that the trauma they can't place to any one specific event in this life must have been caused by trauma from a past life; EG, the destruction of Atlantis or Lemuria, or the Lyran-Draconian Wars. In some cases, New Agers spontaneously "remember" these things even without hypnosis after spending time immersing themselves in New Age media.

For many New Agers, the "memories" they supposedly recover are incredibly vivid and feel extremely real. But we know they aren't. For one thing, Atlantis was a fiction created by Plato, and the mythology of the Draconians are just antisemitic conspiracy theories with a sci-fi paint job.

Many New Agers aren't aware of the political agendas they're being manipulated into. They consider themselves pro-equality, anti-fascist, and all of that. But the fact remains that New Age mythology is intrinsically linked to far right politics, and promoting it serves far right agendas whether they realize it or not.

If you see anybody who tries to convince you that you need to undergo hypnosis to remember some secret hidden past, or that some symptom or other means you must have some secret hidden past, get the hell away from them. They are pushing dangerous pseudoscience that will harm not only you, but many others targeted by the far right.

[haunt3dgrasshopper]

fuck OCD.

fuck obsessions. fuck compulsions. fuck intrusive thoughts. fuck uncertainty. fuck constant shame. fuck constant guilt. fuck constant anticipation. fuck the sense of impending doom. fuck ruminating. fuck reassurance seeking. fuck checking. fuck the exhaustion. fuck mental torment. fuck being stuck on everything. fuck not being able to let things go. fuck stigma. fuck fear. fuck isolation. fuck desperation. fuck misery. fuck feeling like the most vile creature on this planet. fuck not being able to control your mind. fuck the temptation of humoring the obsession. fuck "what ifs". fuck the belittling. fuck the countless days and nights spent trying to figure something out for sure. fuck mental reviewing. fuck mental anguish. fuck not being able to ever fully let your guard down.

[chronicsheepdrawing]

Having an Off Day

[veryfuckingconfusedbro]

I fucking HATE google sometimes. I have really bad OCD (and some other possible problems) and when I look up what I should do, it says "iF iT gEtS tOo SeVeRe Go tO ThErApY." BITCH I CANT JUST GO TO THERAPY. It's not that easy for me so wtf

[impunkster-syndrome]

People who talk about false memories and memory repression really need to know those are not clinical terms. Please go look up the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. It's a predator and abuser protection organization, literally created by a woman who sided with her husband after her daughter gave a sexual abuse outcry against him. The "false memory" claim was made as a way to discredit abuse victims, and it was particularly effective against RAMCOA claims.

Please for the love of fuck look into dissociative amnesia instead and let those terms die.

[puppydovey]

Crying Child stimboard!

[deepwaterwritingprompts]

Deep Water Prompt #2882

The Memorysmith has the softest hands I’ve ever known, his voice just as gentle as he returns the samples I’ve brought him. “Sorry,” he says, “but most of these are lab grown.”

[nobeerreviews]

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

-- Marcel Proust

[skylobby]

[promptsforyourwhumpfic]

Whump Prompt #1197

Submitted by Anon - thanks!

An incredibly specific prompt for a magic character who was looking for their lost spouse being pushed through a portal by the whumper... only to fall into a modern day world.

This world however, is so governed by the natural order that anyone from the magic realms would forget their place of origins, and the timeline would shift and move to accommodate the new person.

Character A knew of this and began frantically searching for a way home when they see character running up to them and talking about how much they missed A while they were away on a business trip.

After reuniting with B, character A finds it incredibly difficult not to start giving credit to the false memories of life in modern society as they pour into their head. Especially since it’s memories of a domestic with B, something they could never hope to have in their home realm.

[oveliagirlhaditright]

Angel and Spike being in prophetic dreams of Buffy's, telling her "she has to know what to see," which of course has to do with important things she's dealing with at the time.

With Angel, it was how Jenny (moreso her family) was tied to him becoming Angelus again.

And in this season 5 classic comic, Dawn brings up this missing Slayer who, for whatever reason, was erased from history (Spike told her about this Slayer). The Scoobies at first just assumed said Slayer did something really bad to earn that fate, IIRC. Meanwhile, Buffy and the gang end up facing the above vampire. But of course through Buffy's dream with Spike, she starts to put together that the missing Slayer is this vampire, and that's why the Watcher's Council wanted the Slayer erased from history: because the knowledge that one of their Slayers had gotten turned into a vampire would be too shameful for them to bear (even though it, of course, wasn't her fault. Freaking Watcher's Council).

(In other news, "False Memories" is a really amazing comic and probably one of my favorites of the classic comics that I've read thus far. It also deals with some of Dawn's false memories that the monks gave her. And it was... just really epic, and felt like a missing episode of the show to me. And meeting another Slayer turned vampire, aside from Simone from the Buffy S8-S12 comics, and one from the Buffy tie-in books, was cool.)

[creature-wizard]

Hypnosis is unreliable for memory recovery, and this is one way we know.

Some of you out there might be considering hypnosis to try and recover memories, whether from early childhood or a past life. You may have already heard criticism of it, but may have also heard that the critics are just trying to shut down important discussions. You may not know what to believe because when it comes to a lot of these memories, there's no real way to either verify or falsify them. After all, if someone goes under hypnosis and seems to remember an older sibling pushing them off a swing when they were five, but nobody else seems to remember this, who's to say who's right, who's misremembering, and who's just trying to protect a mean older sibling? And most past lives people report aren't exactly easy to check.

However, there is one area where attempting to recover memories is pretty popular, and where we can be really, really damn sure that none of these "memories" accurately reflect anything that actually happened.

That area is the starseed movement.

For those who don't already know, the starseed movement is part of New Age, which came out of Theosophy, which came out of the very racist brain of Helena Blavatsky. While not every New Ager believes everything Blavatsky said 100% (if they're even aware of what Blavatsky said), New Age mythology today is fundamentally really super racist.

The ancient astronaut hypothesis, which was created for the purpose of discrediting the engineering capabilities of nonwhite people and for which there is zero evidence to support, is a huge part of it. The mythology also asserts that Earth has been manipulated by a race of reptilian aliens who feed on human flesh, blood, adrenochrome, or even fear, depending on who you ask. The reptilians, supposedly, created religious institutions to control us, control most of the world's wealth, and start unnecessary wars for their own personal gain. For anyone who doesn't recognize the tropes, they're literally just old antisemitic conspiracy theories in a new hat. Most of their material can be traced back to David Icke, who was influenced by Fritz Springmeier, a far right conspiracy theorist. Furthermore, Icke asserted that the antisemitic hoax The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are basically true, if you make them about reptilian aliens.

There are various races of "good" aliens in this mythology, but the one that's specifically taking the lead in fighting the reptilians are the Pleiadians - beings who (at least initially) were described as tall, pale-skinned, and blond hair. In fact, another term used to describe the Pleiadians is "Nordics," because they were imagined as looking like Nordic people. And why yes, they have been associated with the swastika.

New Agers also believe in places that never even existed, including Atlantis (a fiction created by Plato), Lemuria (a hypothetical continent that was discredited by the discovery of place tectonics), and Mu (supposedly the "real" Atlantis, made up by a guy who claimed that the Maya were descended from Egyptians). Not only is there zero evidence that any of these places existed, but belief in them was often motivated by a desire to attribute the technological and spiritual developments of non-white culture to others. The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, a supposedly ancient book that this guy supposedly received from this mysterious Great White Brotherhood, for example, claims that that ancient Egyptians received their spiritual wisdom from Thoth, a king who fled Atlantis during its destruction.

So in short, just about everything the starseed movement believes in is total bullshit that can easily be traced back to some extremely racist propaganda or hoax. True believers claim that there's an ancient global conspiracy hiding the truth from all of us, but whether or not they realize it, they are invoking The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, that old Russian hoax.

Meanwhile, people in the starseed movement regularly undergo hypnosis to try and recover memories of their past lives. Here are some selections posted by members of r/starseeds:

"The planet had a wooden area with plants and very interesting buildings and one area that looked more desert , with construction similar to pyramids , ecc that were used as transmitters. We had a connection to Egypt . I knew we had to move planet because of a galactic war . Our enemies were reptilians , grays and these mantis beings … they were the ones that killed us in a crash while we were flying over a planet with super red sand and rocks. I’ve had this memory of the crash ever since I was a child but I thought I was imaging it. I am not into scifi movies , aliens or anything ."

"My home planet Artuvia was destroyed by negative forces (reptilian) in the orion galactic war, i left through a portal of light with other beings and came to Earth, i remember the portal, and everything around me falling apart and crumbling, the war was massive and many died, my planet was peaceful and had never known war, so when the war came most of us Mintakans perished, i believe the pleiadians tried to help us, but the planet fell, it was so beautiful there, paradise, i loved it so much it is my only incarnation outside of earth, i spent over 5000 lifetimes there before i came to lemuria, atlantis and agartha."

"Have you researched the planet Artuvia, we were destroyed in galactic wars some 75,000 years ago. Our souls came to earth in a move to protect the galaxy for we are to help create the next generations of starseeds here. From the Orion star system, powered by the star Mintaka. My memories have been resurfacing the last several days. Im getting massive amounts of incomprehensible information that I am reformatting and understanding. Its led me here. I am accessing the Akashic Records."

"Hello when i did past life regression i saw myself living in atlantis with other races, arcturians, lyran felines and others. It was futuristic and more advenced then they showing today, we had medbeds, flyng cars and spaceships, in middle was a some sort of crystal and guardians guarding it. At first i was confused what i was seeing at first i thought it was a island but no it was really atlantis, and one who created was dude named king atlant, thats why its called atlantis."

"The Great Galactic-War was the biggest conflict in this Galaxy. The horrible things that the Reptilians have done to my race are unforgivable, brutal and disgusting. They were eating my brothers and sisters alive. Without any remorese, brutally slaughtering everyone that was standing on their way. You could lose anyone after not paying attention. So many beautiful and precious souls that I couldn't protect were lost to their murderous instincts, so many memories, families, were destroyed. I couldn't watch no more suffering from my brothers and sisters. Blood everywhere. They are coming. Blue ground, chaos."

Oh, and by the way, there are other people who aren't even using hypnosis, apparently - some of them report intense dreams, or having "memories" just randomly come to them. So, that's definitely also a thing to keep in mind.

In any case, if somebody starts pushing you to try hypnosis to recover memories of any kind, I recommend putting some distance between yourself and that person ASAP. Because we can see from the starseed movement that this shit just doesn't work the way a lot of people want to think it does, and it can get you into some bad places.

[sophieinwonderland]

Imitated DID 2 - Hysterical Boogaloo

We're diving back in from where we left off last time. Now with the "hysterical" group.

There is actually a certain level of logic to part of this.

I don't diagnose people with disorders. But when talking about plurality with questioning systems, I find it much more useful to ask about their internal experiences and hear them described in their own words.

Especially because a lot of medical jargon and even plural community terms kind of suck for describing these type of experiences. If someone isn't describing things in their own words, I can understand feeling like they might be faking. But that doesn't mean they are.

Comorbid Mental Illnesses can affect communication: We have ASD. If you've noticed, we tend to use jargon and big words a lot. I often make up my own jargon too because much of what I see from psychiatry is inadequate. (I could go on long rants about how meaningless the word "dissociation" is.)

The issue is that a lot of people with ASD or other disorders might behave like this. We might use clinical words if we've studied them. I'd like to think We would have the presence of mind to not reply to a psychiatrist asking "what do you mean by amnesia" by explaining whether our amnesia is retrograde or anterograde, but I could easily imagine someone else doing that.

Some people also have personality types where they might be seeking respect, and trying to impress a psychiatrist with their knowledge of academic terms.

Perhaps what appears to not be genuine is just another condition that makes people communicate in ways a neurotypical wouldn't be expected to.

This also goes for other behavior that appears non-genuine. Maybe someone presenting more overt presentation just doesn't have a filter or social awareness.

(Also, amnesia isn't even professional jargon. It's used all the time by lay people.)

Again, most people with DID stated they would miss the voices of their alters: Like I said in the last post, 69% of DID voice hearers said they would miss their alters' voices if they were gone.

The feeling of "I won't let anybody take them away from me!" isn't uncommon. They're in the MAJORITY. Maybe expressing these feelings aloud is uncommon. But that just makes me further suspect influence from comorbid disorders that make it difficult to tell what's socially acceptable.

Another possibility is someone mentions their full trauma history and talks about their conditions as a test of sorts. They've learned to expect rejection, and want to be upfront about everything so that if they scare someone away, it will be right at the beginning of the relationship.

It's so important to account for different behaviors in different people, and different illnesses and conditions that can influence those behaviors.

WHAT?!

She couldn't handle Lucille, who always got her own way. Lucille is convinced that her mother physically and sexually abused her.

There are many ways to write this that wouldn't involve portraying the mother as a victim of a little girl.

It's stated as an objective fact that Lucille's mother "couldn't handle Lucille," suggesting Lucille was always the problem. Meanwhile, "Lucille is convinced" her mother abused her. It's not even neutral language, like she "reported" or "described" it. She's "convinced."

I'm absolutely appalled.

Also, it feels a little gross for the doctors to describe their patient as "attractive" and with a "seductive presentation." I'm not the only one feeling that, right?

So she essentially did report amnesia. It just sounds like she didn't understand what amnesia was or was in denial, and clinicians should have questioned further.

Surely, if she were trying to manipulate the clinicians, she'd have claimed to amnesia, right? Since amnesia is part of the criteria?

Like with the "borderline" group from before, she had DPDR.

So she recognized similarity in her own experiences with DID systems AND an independent clinician confirmed her DID.

But this is what they're using as evidence against her. That she heard about it first and then identified with it. But that's often how people learn about their disorders. Sure, sometimes it can be wrong. But it shouldn't be treated as evidence against somebody as it is here.

Quick reminder that she started to hurt herself in group treatment.

Why would you suggest she go without therapy? Supposedly it worked out if we trust the clinicians' report. But I'm not so certain I do. I doubt they'd say "we told her to take a hike and then she was worse off than when we left her."

Now, the actual section focused on Lucille isn't the last time we'll hear about her, so let's skip ahead a bit.

This adds a bit more context to the earlier wording of her being "convinced" her mother abused her.

But the implications are a bit more terrifying to me. What was left out of this case study?

Lucille comes in experiencing chronic symptoms of DP/DR. She believes her mother abused her. The clinicians here seem to take the side of the mother in a peculiar way, describing Lucille's mother as "being unable to handle" the little girl.

After leaving therapy and coming back for a follow up, Lucille is saying, uncertainly, that the abuse she endured might not have happened.

Did the clinicians, as authority figures, also try to convince Lucille that her memories of abuse were false?

This feels extremely gaslighty to me.

This is actually a good practice. And is a huge problem I have with the anti-endo ideology is that it often encourages people to look for trauma to confirm systemhood. If you tell someone who is a system they need trauma to be a system, there is a real concern of them trying to fit themselves into that box.

But is the implication that Lucille fabricated her trauma after seeking treatment for DID, and never believed it prior? If so, that feels like an incredibly relevant detail to omit from your case study.

So their opinion, ultimately, is that these cases of "imitated DID" are fabricating trauma memories.

Essentially, this paper is advocating for False Memory Syndrome.

And worse, they admit there's no way to reliably assess suggestibility in these patients, since the authors claim the suggestibility is selective and the scale useless.

It comes down to the individual clinicians with their individual biases to determine who is or isn't an actual trauma survivor.

What is all of this REALLY about?

Now we get to the real point

While other parts of the paper pay lip service to helping patients, a large amount of it is focused on addressing malpractice complaints.

Here is some interesting wording. Shouldn't the interests of the patients be the priority of therapy?

I understand the intent behind this. But the wording presents an adversarial relationship between clinicians and hostile patients where clinicians are meant to act as judges and authority figures, and acting in the interests of the patients is "collusion."

Ideally, even if a patient were faking DID, giving them a more correct diagnosis would still be working in the best interests of the patients, right? At no point should acting in the patient's interest be presented as a bad thing as it is here.

Patients suing therapists over believed-malpractice are presented as seeking "attention and gratification."

I'd agree that it would be interesting to know what groups the suing patients fall into. But there would need to be a better way to make such an assessment.

Because if you're going to have cases like Sandra's, mentioned in the last post, where clinicians are forming biases based on her life history of self-medication with drugs and having an older boyfriend before they even observe her, this method isn't effective.

What would be really interesting to me is, if Sandra or Lucille had gone to another clinic, would the other clinics have judged their DID as being imitated? Or is this solely a result of the biases of these clinicians?

In contrast, would those clinics have judged other patients that this clinic said had "genuine" DID of having imitated DID.

Is there even the slightest bit of credence to this concept? Can it be consistently applied or is this just the opinions of one clinic being treated as gospel?

The goal of the whole paper is pushing False Memory Syndrome in a way that pushes responsibility from clinicians onto patients.

Over 20 years later, and this hypothesis is still groundless. Not just the hypothesis that those responsible for lawsuits are imitated DID cases, but even that second opinions could confirm their own case studies as being imitated DID.

This paper that started the "imitated DID" myth, the paper that led to the controversial McLean video, is based on nothing.

It was motivated not with the goal of helping patients with DID nor helping the patients they accuse of imitating DID, but by the self-interest of clinicians trying to protect themselves from malpractice complaints of patients they treat as hostile and adversarial.

[usstrekart]

I am impressed with the "He-said she-said" story in "Retrospect" (S04E17, Stardate 51658.2) because the real villain of the story is someone who jumped to a supposed victim's defense so quickly. The Doctor made a massive mistake and has to live with it, but sadly we won't get to see that development.

I went through several ideas of how to convey Seven's torment in my poster, but nothing was really coming together. What I came up with is Seven with a muted colors palette. Can she trust her memories in the midst of her survivor's guilt?

[kleeradragon]

There's an experience I have that I don't think I've ever seen talked about anywhere, and I'd like to go through it and see if there isn't anyone else who has experienced similar.

See, when I first discovered myself to be a dragon/otherkin/therian/nonhuman, I was of the spiritual sort because that's what felt expected. I didn't even know a psychological side to it existed until later. I got my share of memories and info about my supposed past life and whatnot as a result of this imposed expectation, and some of those memories were pretty unpleasant. Traumatic, even. But eventually I found out about the psychological side of things, and I wanted to take a more psychological approach to my nonhumanity. I didn't feel attached to that existence/past anymore, I suppose I never totally did, I took it all as it came. Cause y'know, expectations, perhaps looking for things that wouldn't otherwise be there.

Not long after that I moved away from a nonhuman identity due to community issues and a general lack of feeling for it, only to return to it a couple years later when feelings for it came back in full force. And in digging around for those feelings, I had to ponder my old kin memories that I no longer necessarily believe in. Through that I realized that they still affect me like any trauma would, even after years of not believing those memories to be real. Now, sure, one can say that coping with trauma in a not-so-great way isn't gonna make the hurt go away. I totally get that. But these memories, false or not, did not happen to me directly, even if they may feel as such. There's a degree of separation. Couple that with the amount of time it's been since I gave much thought to them… I just thought and hoped that maybe that would be enough.

Either because those false memories still affect me, or because it's just what I was so used to thinking back in the day, sometimes I still slip back into thinking of my dragon self as a past life. All of this together makes it so hard to really tell whether my draconity is psychological or spiritual, even if it is a choice of belief in the end. I prefer the psychological approach -- that's just the sort of person I am. But the expectations from the past, and their resulting feelings and potentially-false memories complete with exotrauma, make it hard to let go of the notion of having been a dragon in a past life. It feels like those things really happened because that's what the memories were unintentionally crafted to do, because that was the expectation. These things make it so complicated and blurry what exactly the nature of my nonhumanity is.

My point of saying all this is to ask: has anyone else had a similar experience? Of having past life memories they don't necessarily still believe are true but can't shake? And if anyone has figured out a way to shake them… would you be willing to share how you did so? Definitely definitely would love to hear!