Last edited Wed Feb 6, 2019, 11:29 PM - Edit history (6)
And she said she had suppressed the memory till she saw the photo of him in 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/us/politics/vanessa-tyson-full-statement-justin-fairfax.html
After the assault, I suffered from both deep humiliation and shame. I did not speak about it for years, and I (like most survivors) suppressed those memories and emotions as a necessary means to continue my studies, and to pursue my goal of building a successful career as an academic. At the time, I found this horrific incident especially degrading given my regular volunteer work at a local rape crisis center. Over the next decade or so, I would go on to earn my PhD from the University of Chicago and become a tenured professor at Scripps College, a prestigious women’s college in Claremont, California.
Years later, in October of 2017, I saw a picture of Mr. Fairfax accompanying an article in The Root about his campaign for Lt. Governor in Virginia. The image hit me like a ton of bricks, triggering buried traumatic memories and the feelings of humiliation I’d felt so intensely back in 2004.
We know that she was sexually assaulted by her own father for years, and he went to prison for that when she was 8. That causes lifelong trauma.
We also know that what happened to her as a child caused her to become involved with victims as a volunteer. So she has been hearing these stories for decades, while suppressing her memories of what she now believes Fairfax did to her.
So maybe it actually happened. Or maybe her childhood trauma, combined with everything in her life since then, including her talks with other victims, has gotten tangled up in her mind with what happened with Fairfax.
Unless more information comes forward, other victims or corroborators, I don't know how we would decide.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-happens-in-the-brain-when-we-misremember/
What Happens in the Brain When We Misremember
Most people think of memory as a faithful, if incomplete, recording of the past—a kind of multimedia storehouse of experiences. But psychologists, neuroscientists and lawyers know better. Eyewitness testimony, for instance, is now known to be notoriously unreliable. This is because memory is not just about retrieving stored information. Our minds normally construct memories using a blend of remembered experiences and knowledge about the world.
Our memories can be frazzled, though, by new experiences that end up tangling the past and the present.
SNIP
https://www.spring.org.uk/2013/02/reconstructing-the-past-how-recalling-memories-alters-them.php
In the study they found that participants’ memories were both enhanced and distorted by the process of recall. People found it easier to remember those exhibits which they were subsequently shown photographs of. This shows that merely recalling a memory is enough to strengthen it.
This is one aspect of the fact that memory is an active, reconstructive process; recalling something is not a neutral act, it strengthens that memory in comparison to the others.
But the study also demonstrated that false memories were also strengthened. In other words when participants falsely recalled seeing a particular exhibit in the second session, this made it more likely to be flagged up as a ‘real’ memory in the third session.
What this is showing is how false memories can grow in the mind. Of course, in real life things don’t happen as cleanly as they do in the psych lab. Our memories and fantasies are intertwined, crossing over and interfering with one another. Thinking about the past continues this process of interweaving.
https://staff.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/lof93.htm
As a first step, it is worth recognizing that we do not yet have the tools for reliably distinguishing the signal of true repressed memories from the noise of false ones.
= new reply since forum marked as read
