And on top of all of this, Meredith fell in love and began a relationship with another woman, an incest survivor. Meredith developed a codependent and toxic relationship with her partner, one in which Meredith continually tried to “save” the other woman from her traumatic past. Her partner also used her traumatic past as a weapon of guilt to earn Meredith’s affection (more on this and boundaries in chapter 8). Meanwhile, Meredith’s relationship with her father deteriorated even further (he wasn’t exactly thrilled that she was now in a lesbian relationship), and she was attending therapy at an almost compulsive rate. Her therapists, who had their own 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 therapy then acted as a means to pull these unconscious desires out and put them into a seemingly tangible form of a memory.
This process, and the state of mind it resulted in, became so common that a name was introduced for it: false memory syndrome. It changed the way courtrooms operate. Thousands of therapists were sued and lost their licenses. Repressed memory therapy fell out of practice and was replaced by more practical methods. Recent research has only reinforced the painful lesson of that era: our beliefs are malleable, and our memories are horribly unreliable.
There’s a lot of conventional wisdom out there telling you to “trust yourself,” to “go with your gut,” and all sorts of other pleasant-sounding clichés.
But perhaps the answer is to trust yourself less. After all, if our hearts and minds are so unreliable, maybe we should be questioning our own intentions and motivations more. If we’re all wrong, all the time, then isn’t self-skepticism and the rigorous challenging of our own beliefs and assumptions the only logical route to progress?
This may sound scary and self-destructive. But it’s actually quite the opposite. It’s not only the safer option, but it’s liberating as well.
The Dangers of Pure Certainty
Erin sits across from me at the sushi restaurant and tries to explain why she doesn’t believe in death. It’s been almost three hours, and she’s eaten exactly four cucumber rolls and drunk an entire bottle of sake by herself. (In fact, she’s about halfway through bottle number two now.) It’s four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon.
I didn’t invite her here. She found out where I was via the Internet and flew out to come find me.
Again.
She’s done this before. You see, Erin is convinced that she can cure death, but she’s also convinced that she needs my help to do it. But not my help in like a business sense. If she just needed some PR advice or something, that would be one thing. No, it’s more than that: she needs me to be her boyfriend. Why? After three hours of questioning and a bottle and a half of sake, it still isn’t clear.
My fiancée was with us in the restaurant, by the way. Erin thought it important that she be included in the discussion; Erin wanted her to know that she was “willing to share” me and that my girlfriend (now wife) “shouldn’t feel threatened” by her.
I met Erin at a self-help seminar in 2008. She seemed like a nice enough person. A little bit on the woo-woo, New Agey side of things, but she was a lawyer and had gone to an Ivy League school, and was clearly smart. And she laughed at my jokes and thought I was cute—so, of course, knowing me, I slept with her.
A month later, she invited me to uproot across the country and move in with her. This struck me as somewhat of a red flag, and so I tried to break things off with her. She responded by saying that she would kill herself if I refused to be with her. Okay, so make that two red flags. I promptly blocked her from my email and all my devices.
This would slow her down but not stop her.
Years before I met her, Erin had gotten into a car accident and nearly died. Actually, she had medically “died” for a few moments—all brain activity had stopped—but she had somehow miraculously been revived. When she “came back,” she claimed everything had changed. She became a very spiritual person. She became interested in, and started believing in, energy healing and angels and universal consciousness and tarot cards. She also believed that she had become a healer and an empath and that she could see the future. And for whatever reason, upon meeting me, she decided that she and I were destined to save the world together. To “cure death,” as she put it.
After I’d blocked her, she began to create new email addresses, sometimes sending me as many as a dozen angry emails in a single day. She created fake Facebook and Twitter accounts that she used to harass me as well as people close to me. She created a website identical to mine and wrote dozens of articles claiming that I was her ex-boyfriend and that I had lied to her and cheated her, that I had promised to marry her and that she and I belonged together. When I contacted her to take the site down, she said that she would take it down only if I flew to California to be with her. This was her idea of a compromise.
And through all of this, her justification was the same: I was destined to be with her, that God had preordained it, that she literally woke up in the middle of the night to the voices of angels commanding that “our special relationship” was to be the harbinger of a new age of permanent peace on earth. (Yes, she really told me this.)
By the time we were sitting in that sushi restaurant together, there had been thousands of emails. Whether I responded or didn’t respond, replied respectfully or replied angrily, nothing ever changed. Her mind never changed; her beliefs never budged. This had gone on for over seven years by then (and counting).
And so it was, in that small sushi restaurant, with Erin guzzling sake and babbling for hours about how she’d cured her cat’s kidney stones with energy tapping, that something occurred to me:
Erin is a self-improvement junkie. She spends tens of thousands of dollars on books and seminars and courses. And the craziest part of all this is that Erin embodies all the lessons she’s learned to a T. She has her dream. She stays persistent with it. She visualizes and takes action and weathers the rejections and failures and gets up and tries again. She’s relentlessly positive. She thinks pretty damn highly of herself. I mean, she claims to heal cats the same way Jesus healed Lazarus—come the fuck on.