Trauma and confabulations: how memories can change who we are
Long ago, psychology introduced the concept of a confabulation, an unintentionally fabricated narrative from memory. This immediately raises the question: what would a non-fabricated narrative be? In principle, this would be something that is independently corroborated. If I told a story about how I once found a baby rattlesnake on the slide of a playground in an avocado grove, we could in principle confirm this story through various forms of evidence—other witnesses, video and audio recordings, physical evidence from the scene—together, we could all agree that the events I narrated actually happened. Now the narrative is as confirmed as it can be in a court of psychological law. The psychologist judge rests their case. But did we really avoid confabulation? No, because it is impossible. To see why, we need to think about what memories actually are.
Like consciousness and digestion, memories are best understood as processes, not things. This is the shift from structure to process ontology—something I’m going to keep hitting on because it’s criminally overlooked by people who really should know better. There is no thing that is a “memory” that we can grab onto and hold. If you crack my thick skull open, you’ll find a lot of goopy neurons all wired up together but you will never find any memories (nor will you find any consciousness and not only because the cracking part). Understanding memory is understanding how it works, not what it is. Unfortunately, language makes it easy to commit this ontological sin. I can easily and coherently talk about “my memories”—I can “lose” and “gain” them and I can even “share” them with others (no more air-quoting—you understand my beef). With the convenience of language, we come to confuse ourselves about the process-based nature of many concepts—the economy, good, evil, digestion, consciousness, and, of course, memory. None of these are things, yet we can and do talk about them as though they were something real you can grab onto.
One thing that even neuroscientists understand is that there are several different kinds of things we call “memories”. The traditional splitting of these is as follows:
- Sensory memory: The reverberations of activity from your sensory organs to and through your brain
- Working/short-term memory: Like RAM on a computer, these are echoes of higher-level abstractions (including what you’re reading as you’re reading it)—a little bucket that’s constantly getting filled up and emptied out
- Semantic long-term memory: Things you know about
- Episodic long-term memory: Stories of events that happened to you
- Implicit long-term memory: Unconscious know-how and inclinations
Language curses us again by making it easy to talk about all of these kinds of phenomena as a single thing. Resist the urge! However, they do all share one single unifying feature: their time-spanning, integrative nature. If there’s something that we can point to as memory, it is the phenomena of integrating disparate streams of proto-information. That is, memory is a form of integration. For sensory memory, this integration is only partially realized—the relevant integration occurs when there is a locus that can interpret this information. Therefore, it would be fair to exclude it as a form of memory. Implicit long-term memory is similarly fraught. It only makes sense to talk about implicit memories with regard to a larger integrative system. What I know how to do matters when you talk about my functional performance. And, my inclinations matter when you talk about the way I interface with myself and others.
The other forms of memory are integrated enough to stand on their own. For the sake of this discussion, we’ll focus on working, semantic, and episodic memories.
Working memory is largely where you live and work—all day long, you are constantly cycling through a sliding window of being that is constrained by your ability to keep all your senses and thoughts together. It is not, however, memory in the sense of remembering or recording. It is instead the space wherein you can bring up episodic and semantic memories. As a result of this nesting structure, your episodic and (to a lesser extent) semantic memories are themselves colored by whatever you have rattling about your working memory space. This point is central—your stories and knowings are always built on a moving, rattling train. I don’t bring this up to make you question your memories. That is the usual direction you might take this understanding. Question your reality! Embrace knowing nothing! Not that I disagree, but there’s something more interesting to me here.
Recall (thank you, working memory!) that we opened with the concept of a confabulation as a sort of accidental distortion of reality. A non-distortion would be something that’s fully externally corroborated. But it’s not the memory that’s corroborated, but the narrative, and even then, it’s a narrative generalization of all the many things that occurred within that narrative. That is, the memory is in no way the same as the story as told and interpreted.
As you well know, being a human yourself, memories are incredibly chaotic, writhing impressional eels—they are not movies. In their most wrangled form, these eels get squeezed into simple narrative chunks. X thing happened to Y thing at Z time and then… This chronologically coherent structure belies its writhing nature.
All your wrangling amounts to something very neat and tidy, a simple narrative structure with a beginning, middle, and end—is this confabulation? I think it is. The only difference between the psychologist-approved confabulation and this structure-simulating confabulation is that the narrative that you produced happened to be corroborated at a high level by other sources (themselves subject to your same human limitations). The memory aspect is entirely the same.
To put it differently, a confabulator and a non-confabulator are doing the exact same thing the entire time they are constructing the narrative—the only difference is that their output is agreed to be more or less reflective of human-scale reality. So, rather than tell you that your memories are fallible, I’m here to reassure you that it’s true of everyone. As is the case with emotions, from a first-person perspective, all your memories are completely real—as real as anything could ever be. It is only when they get wrangled into other shapes that they are interrogated.
Why is this all important? Because we are all beings that are universes unto ourselves that happen to constantly crash into other universes. What is real to us is as real as anything can be… but as they say, we live in a society. We also live, which puts constraints on our universe ambitions. Without being able to adequately interface with other universes, we fade away. Less abstractly, we need other people and resources to thrive and survive—constructing an acceptable narrative memory is key to this. It’s also key to maintaining our own universe.
My main area of research is in meaning-making, both in the sense of immediate experiences being meaningful and in the sense of our lives being backed by a narrative purpose that motivates us to organize ourselves around our goals. Narrative meaning is only possible when we use our capacity for memory to construct and re-construct it. Without it, our little universe will stagnate and wither away or be swept up in a larger universal maelstrom—other people and events that threaten your integrity and throw you into chaos.
Memory is often treated as something you have. It is crystalized and constant. Your memories are an anchor—your childhood self is dragged alongside your regrets and pivotal moments. Those suffering from trauma (~5% of US adults confirmed; more likely upwards of 20%) or other weighty experiences (100% of US adults) carry it in their body and environment and brains. These people are often unable to even generate narratives about what has or is currently happening to them. When they do, they are often told (sometimes brusquely) that their memories are confabulatory.
The traditional response to trauma is to think about overcoming it, as though it were a dragon to be heroically slain. It is no dragon. Overcoming it is not done through violence but by reconstruction. The traditional approach to this is through something like therapy. Therapy can help. It can shift the narrative furniture around so it’s less egregiously placed to stand in our way as we stumble around in the dark. But it can’t get rid of the furniture, nor can it change the room entirely. This requires bigger shifts. You cannot fight narrative with only narrative. Reconstruction is necessary.
This isn’t the place to go into this in full detail, but overcoming can be circumvented by disintegration and reintegration.
Disintegration can be done through various methods that open your brain up to major functional shifts: TMS, psychedelics, dissociatives, breathwork, and, potentially (this is what I’m experimenting with) intensive sensory experiences.
Reintegration is the longer part of the process wherein you reconstruct yourself: therapy (including CBT and logotherapy), EMDR, meditation, yoga (as well as other practices that involve bodily focus), and environmental shifts. Throughout this process, memories are both explicitly and implicitly reshaped, but most of the changes will be implicit—that is, your memories will change. This could be concerning to some. After all, aren’t my memories what make me the person I am? That’s a fair point, but we can respond to this by re-considering the confabulatory nature of memories. It can be alarming but it is important to realize this fully—from the perspective of your inner universe (that is, you), these memories are constructions and guesses made real. They always present themselves as real, but they are entirely changeable. And, unless you are willing to bear a cross for no one but your own love of suffering, you owe it to yourself and those you care about to change them into better ones.
Small disclaimer: what we are doing with disintegration and reintegration could be thought of as destructive. This is only true if you continue to believe that memories are objects to be gained or lost. They are not—they are constantly constructed and abandoned. At the center of this, there is some constancy. The thing that’s least amenable to change is your personality, captured in bits and pieces by mostly approved soothsaying devices like the Myers-Briggs and Big Five personality test. No amount of imagining of your personal narrative arc will change this, nor will any disintegrative-reintegrative practice. You can cling to this.
You can also rely on your environment to keep the shape of your self from morphing too much as well. You are kept in check by the expectations and responses of those closest to you (which is partly why fame and riches are so poisonous to the soul—in your newfound status, you suddenly surround yourself with people who expect you to be someone you have never been before). “Remember your roots” comes to mind. And this is of course a two-way street—your roots are perfectly capable of anchoring you to a persona that you ought not to be. (I get this in small measure visiting home for the holidays—a feeling of being a child again.) Applying this idea to the many people suffering from complex traumas, we can begin to see why and how it is so difficult for our little universes to escape this black hole. The best solution is to avoid that part of the multiverse entirely—getting rid of that black hole is much more fraught.
Happiness is the story we tell ourselves. To be convincing, we need to learn to shape the narrative. This is a lifelong endeavor, but it needs to be actively pursued.
