Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F__k (2016, HarperOne) - libgen.li

values and beliefs driving their behavior, regularly insisted that it couldn’t
simply be Meredith’s highly stressful reporting job or her poor relationships
that were making her so unhappy; it must be something else, something
deeper.
Around this time, a new form of treatment called repressed memory
therapy was becoming hugely popular. This therapy involved a therapist
putting a client into a trancelike state where she was encouraged to root out
and reexperience forgotten childhood memories. These memories were often
benign, but the idea was that at least a few of them would be traumatic as
well.
So there you have poor Meredith, miserable and researching incest and
child molestation every day, angry at her father, having endured an entire
lifetime of failed relationships with men, and the only person who seems to
understand her or love her is another woman who is a survivor of incest. Oh,
and she’s lying on a couch crying every other day with a therapist demanding
over and over that she remember something she can’t remember. And voilà,
you have a perfect recipe for an invented memory of sexual abuse that never
happened.
Our mind’s biggest priority when processing experiences is to interpret
them in such a way that they will cohere with all of our previous
experiences, feelings, and beliefs. But often we run into life situations where
past and present don’t cohere: on such occasions, what we’re experiencing in
the moment flies in the face of everything we’ve accepted as true and
reasonable about our past. In an effort to achieve coherence, our mind will
sometimes, in cases like that, invent false memories. By linking our present
experiences with that imagined past, our mind allows us to maintain
whatever meaning we already established.
As noted earlier, Meredith’s story is not unique. In fact, in the 1980s and
early 1990s, hundreds of innocent people were wrongly accused of sexual
violence under similar circumstances. Many of them went to prison for it.
For people who were dissatisfied with their lives, these suggestive
explanations, combined with the sensationalizing media—there were
veritable epidemics of sexual abuse and satanic violence going on, and you
could be a victim too—gave people’s unconscious minds the incentive to
fudge their memories a bit and explain their current suffering in a way that
allowed them to be victims and avoid responsibility. Repressed memory