Hi! What is a substitute memory (if you don’t mind my asking)?
asdfalkaklj I actually haven't called upon my brain to define this in a bit so it might not be the "cleanest" definition, but what I'm assuming the bingo was referencing was substitute beliefs (broad term) and specifically when those beliefs are presented with "substitute memories"
Substitute beliefs are concepts / aspects / understandings of self and events that aren't exactly what is actually true / real / accurate but reflect it in a way that it is often easier to handle, accept, and bear for the person with the trauma.
Thats a mouthful, but a simple example would be say... someone's trauma was nearly drowning - they might then have an alter / develop a substitute belief that "I am a mermaid" or have the idea that being underwater like that was wanted because they are "spiritually a water creature" or that the drowning nearly happened BECAUSE they were confused and thought they were a mermaid rather than due to malice / neglect. In both cases the context of that memory might be reframed with a sort of substitute buffer to cover over the hard aspects of a shitty situation to make it more palatable
Those are more "extreme" examples because I can't really think of a more mundane example - but its a common defense mechanism people with DID and other people who were traumatized at a young age kind of do to sort of buffer the blow of being aware of the shit that's happened without necessarily having to deal with the entire reality of it.
I just got vague vibes from back there that it's fine to share, but the Riku subsystem was trained to be our sisters attack dog to a pretty extreme point of her manipulating dissociative barriers she knew of and as a result XIV has always really taken a lycantropic form, particularly when put in aggro mode and while he is aware he is not "actually a werewolf" it actively leaks into his day to day life and it is a really quick "blur" over topics that if dug more into could cause things to be uprooted that we aren't quite ready to.
Similarly, there are substitute memories that can happen where the memory of an event itself might be too hard to "digest" and as a result some people get similar but "slightly off" memories of things that didn't happen. I've seen this mostly talked about in terms of introjects and them developing memories related to trauma the body did experience but instead in the frame work of their source rather than the actual real lived body. Rather than remembering and processing feelings of neglect with your actual parents in reference, the part may still have the feelings that stem from a real trauma and experience the body had, but instead process it in the terms of "people who don't really exist" which makes it easier to operate and handle in an environment where it might be difficult to do that with the real people (often living there still and what not)
In substitute [anything] its really the brain just kinda blurring the details and shuffling around the lines to make it look like something easier and nicer to look at than the reality. It's usually similar to what ACTUALLY happened but often with a few details that are weird / wrong / obviously not real (ie, characters don't exist, werewolfs dont exist, mermaids don't exist, etc.)
It's been a while since I've seen it brought up so it might be a bit off of an explanation but hope that makes sense?
It's easier to process "I'm a werewolf" than process the implications of having been through mental abuse and directly trained as an attack dog for another's benefit.
It's easier to believe that the time you nearly drowned is because you were a "delusional kid and forgot you couldn't breathe underwater" than it is to address possible neglect or malice intent of someone who is supposed to be close to you.
It's easier to (not necessarily for the fictive themselves, but often for the rest of the system) see the struggle of their system member Sasuke processing the trauma of Itachi's betrayl than it is to see and process the betrayal of trust that the sibling you live with and have to see daily.
Substitute beliefs and memories are also often on a sliding scale of how seriously and literally the affected parts / people experience them and how real they actually feel, so theres a lot of variety.
-Riku
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For me, one of the worst aspects of ADHD is memory issues. I find it interfers so much more than executive disfunction, as I can at least force my brain to work under the right circumstances.
I can't do that with my memory
My memory is definitely the worst symptom of my ADHD (other than probably RSD and some other things but I gotta find a therapist for that lol), and I envy other people with ADHD who don't struggle with that aspect as much as I do. And for those who may not have ADHD, let me try to explain what I deal with because I do wish it was a funny thing but most often it's not lol.
It's not just that I forget where I put my phone down, it's I forget why I enter I a room and literally have to walk back my steps to find it despite there only being three places in my small apartment it would be. It's telling myself three times to take something with me to the clay studio to show another student and I forget 3 weeks in a row despite having it right next to the front door. It's my family telling me something important and I just don't retain it, and then they stop telling me things (this has improved again now that I'm on medicine, but I was the last person to find out a lot of things the past few years bc they wouldn't tell me bc I wouldn't remember, which hurts). It's my mind wiping blank in the middle of a sentence when I hit a certain word which results in varying degrees of embarrassment and understanding depending on who I'm talking to. It's my eye skipping over a spelling error no matter how many times I know it's there and I need to change it, I just forget (there are a lot of stupid errors in all my fics because of this, maybe one day i'll get to fixing them). It's learning someone's name correctly taking weeks to stick, and then somehow flipping the spelling because I know other people with that name spelled differently and I remember that spelling as "correct" (I'm glad we have name tags on our clay cubbies in the studio, it's saved me some embarrassing encounters, which was something I had to train myself into doing). It's being able to recall what someone said to me word for word six years ago but I can't remember what my mother told me three days ago. It's remembering a multitude of old vines verbatim, but I couldn't tell you what important news story I watched last night.
It's being able to sit down and talk to you guys clearly and thoughtfully like the intelligent person I can be, and then having my knees taken out from under me in real conversation because my mind just wipes blank. But yeah, I can at least work through my executive disfunction too with the right prodding lol.
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Ever think about the fact that Uther fell in love with a corpse?
That Catrina was dead, had already been dead for weeks, when the troll strutted into court wearing her face
And speaking of the origins of their plan- the troll had likely scavenged the estate of Tregor after the invasion minutes after the event, kicking bodies out the way on her instinctual hunt gold
Instead of finding anything valuable, which the bandits had already taken, she found pretty personal belongings, too lesser for a thief... and the lady that they belonged too.
Brutally murdered maybe, but intact enough to be recreated, and impersonated.
Finding her manservant’s body fallen nearby made the idea too easy to conceive, a "Jonas" in hand and the personal items of Catrina ruthlessly ripped away, the plan wealth beyond their imagining was already in motion
And then in the aftermath, of the whole horrid, gruesome, embarrassing affair, when the rumors had died down enough…
Uther must’ve gone quietly, in the early hours of the morning, to visit Catrina’s grave - the real Catrina
Laid flowers, and shed a few private tears over the woman he had never met, but had strong feelings for, perhaps love. Her physique and voice had enchanted him, in more ways than one, and temporarily given him a happy out from the sins of the past
Though it must've unsettled him, that he had fallen for the figment of a woman, not even a ghost, and pledged his entire Kingdom in a heartbeat over a pleasant if pitying face
Although I'm sure the irony, of beloveds coming back to the present, wearing marred faces with a masked intent for vengeance over ghosts of his evils, must have eluded him...
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By: Robert F. Graboyes
Published: Jan 28, 2024
On this, the 79th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Holocaust Remembrance industry stands as a colossal failure. Holocaust Remembrance Day, it turns out, successfully transfixed eyes on the rear-view mirror and diverted attention from the dangers 10 feet in front of us. And, truth be told, the rear-view mirror is growing a bit foggy, as well. Less than a century ago, the leading intellectuals of Germany—the most highly educated nation on earth—initiated, participated in, or acquiesced to mass murder on a previously unimaginable scale. And only weeks ago, intellectuals in America, Europe, and elsewhere waxed lyrical over the rape, torture, mutilation, murder, beheading, and kidnapping of innocent Jews.
An important parallel underlies both historical episodes. Both Hitler and Hamas were the cancerous outgrowths of respectable and sometimes altruistic intellectual movements that saw individuals as nothing more than avatars of demographic groups, defined by immutable characteristics. At my own Substack, Bastiat’s Window, I’ve written of this in “The Briar and the Rose,” “Intellectual Tyrants Beget True Believers,” and “Zola, Weiss, and J'Accuse...! 2023.”
A century ago, eugenics provided the unquestioned and unquestionable foundation for academic writing and public policy. Eugenics preached a world of predestination, where an individual’s worth was irrevocably determined at birth by race, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, economic status, and family history. No one could escape his or her essentialist destiny by dint of action, accomplishment, or character. Eugenics began as parlor conversation among well-born, well-educated, often well-meaning British academics. Then, it jumped the Atlantic and gave rise to a sexual sterilization machine in America—enabled by a debauched Supreme Court. Finally, it leaped back to Europe, where it metastasized into the Holocaust.
In our time, the equivalent academic tendency is one that travels under many names—diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); critical race theory (CRT); antiracism; white fragility; intersectionality; social justice; anticolonialism; social and emotional learning; progressivism; safetyism; critical social justice; identity Marxism; and (primarily to its denigrators) “wokeness.” The central connective tenet in all of this is something called “equity”—which does not in any way resemble any traditional definition of the word.
A note on nomenclature: “equitism”
Writers like Thomas Klingenstein on the right, Freddie DeBoer on the left, and Bari Weiss in the center decry the lack of a consistent name for this intellectual and activist movement. I use the term “equitism” here and suggest it to others. Unlike “equity,” “equitism” offers no ambiguity of meaning. Unlike, say “the equity agenda,” “equitism” is a single word. Advocates of this philosophy often present “equity” as a substitute for “equality,” so “equitism” is parallel to “egalitarianism.” Unlike “woke,” “equitism” is not an insult or pejorative, and the web shows that a few advocates have used the term to describe themselves. I’ll use the term below for simplicity and clarity.
Equitism as echo of eugenics
Like eugenics a century earlier, equitism presumes that demography is destiny, with some demographic groups imperiled by the immutable malignities of other groups. This often manifests itself as a Manichaean “oppressor/oppressed” dichotomy across demographic categories. Intersectionality and other frameworks array groups along a spectrum between these polar opposites. In its most extreme manifestation, this weltanschauung justifies horrific punishment of perceived “oppressors.” Hence, the pro-Hamas marchers proclaiming “by any means necessary”—which presumably includes baking babies to death in ovens, tying parents to children and immolating them together, raping young girls till their pelvises shatter, beheading children in front of their parents, and visiting all manner of depravities upon elderly Holocaust survivors—as long as they are Israelis and Israelis are classified as oppressors.
Clearly, those Western professors celebrating Hamas have not absorbed whatever lessons that Holocaust Museums were designed to impart. To name one category of protestors, LGBTQ+ Jews marching for Hamas seem not to understand the message of Martin Niemöller. The most enthusiastic practitioners of Holocaust Remembrance, unfortunately, seem to be the members of Hamas, who learned the lessons of those years all too well. It should noted that David Patterson’s 2022 scholarly work, Judaism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust: Making the Connections, documents Hamas’s literal organizational and philosophical links to Hitler’s Nazis.
The central feature of both the Holocaust and of Hamas’s slaughter is that once one abandons the sanctity of individuals and considers only the presumed virtues and vices of demographic groups, one is free to attack those deemed unvirtuous in any way.
Furthermore, equitism, like eugenics, can anesthetize those who do not share the murderous intentions of the Nazis or Hamas. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has been open for 31 years, but its mission clearly failed to educate the Ivy League presidents who hemmed and hawed and equivocated over questions of whether calls for genocide against Jews qualified as protected speech on the same campuses where subjectively discerned microaggressions or misuse of preferred pronouns are grounds for ostracism and punishment.
Who wants to contradict something called “social justice” or “diversity” or “equity?” The anesthetic effect seems to have impacted even the Holocaust museums themselves. At Commentary magazine, Seth Mandel asked, “Why Are Holocaust Museums Cowering in Silence?”
Corrosion begins in microscopic proportions
The most important lesson for Holocaust Remembrance comes from Dr. Leo Alexander’s simple, chilling statement that “corrosion begins in microscopic proportions.” Alexander, an American psychiatrist, neurologist, educator, and author, of Austrian-Jewish origin, was a key medical advisor during the Nuremberg Trials. He wrote part of the Nuremberg Code, which provides legal and ethical principles for scientific experiment on humans, and discovered that German doctors didn’t fail to stop the Nazis’ program of genocide and barbaric medical experimentation. Rather, he discovered they didn’t do more to stop the horrors because they were instrumental in initiating them. In a 2018 article on this subject, I argued that:
German doctors enthusiastically volunteered for [service] to, and leadership within, the Third Reich. Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess declared Nazism ‘nothing but applied biology,’ and many German doctors apparently agreed.” Collectively, they decided that medicine’s primary purpose was to build “an economically productive populace,” a concept that “opened the floodgates for atrocities.”
By contrast, Alexander found that Dutch physicians following the Nazi conquest of the Netherlands, unanimously rejected this assumption and viewed their role as healing and comforting the sick and dying. Even when threatened with punishment and death, “humility assured that no Dutch doctors participated in the Holocaust.
German doctors, besotted with eugenics, gladly segmented society by ethnicity, by disabilities, by sexuality, and so forth. And once they began thinking of groups (e.g., productive versus nonproductive races), rather than of individuals, then they were free to commit atrocities in good conscience—or at least to acquiesce in the atrocities committed by others. The same dynamic plays out today on the campuses of America or the streets of London and Paris and Sydney.
Alexander’s work is described in James A. Maccaro’s brief 1997 article “From Small Beginnings: The Road to Genocide.” Alexander’s full paper is his 1948 New England Journal of Medicine report on “Medical Science Under Dictatorship.” A century ago, the oxidants that began society’s corrosion lay in eugenics. Today, the oxidants lie in equitism.
In the early 20th century, eugenics was almost universally accepted by academicians, politicians, doctors, the general public, and celebrities. Opposing eugenics put one’s career and friendships in peril. One of the few public intellectuals to oppose this madness was the British writer G. K. Chesterton, author of Eugenics and Other Evils (1922). Chesterton understood better than anyone that evil comes most often not from evil people, but rather from good people with unmoored ethics. In 1908, he wrote:
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
Holocaust Remembrance Day is a worthy project, but not if it is solely backward-looking. Looking for Nazis in 2024 is a futile endeavor. Scanning the horizon in front of us for those with parallel intent is far more urgent and challenging.
As goes the aphorism, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
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