False narratives

“I never wanted to be a baseball kid,” my friend’s college-aged son told her this year, although not for the first time. By senior year, he had written a litany of complaints about his childhood, and this one was at the top of the list.
“You begged to be on the travelling team,” my friend sighed, tired of having this argument. “You slept in your uniform.” Would facts work this time? She wondered. What could she say to make him remember correctly?
“No,” he persisted. “You pushed me into it.”
For three years, my friend’s son has been mis-narrating his childhood, essentially washing away all the photos, phone calls, inscriptions, plans, contingency plans, group chats, calculations, negotiations, attention, late-night talks, work-life balance webinars, inconvenience, and work-arounds that my friend had made out of love for her baseball-loving child. For ten years, she washed stained uniforms and made snack bags; she cheered him on deep into countless chilly nights, and now he says she did him dirty. Now he says it would have been better had she left him alone.
Do all parents carry an expectation that the seeds we sow will yield some kind of nice-tasting fruit? I think so. “You’ll thank me later” captures the belief that the tree of memory is growing solid and true. The fruit tastes best when our thirty-year-old has a newborn and says “I never knew how hard it was. Thanks, Mum.” Delicious. A runner-up grows on a tree familiar to middle-aged parents. “They did the best they could with the resources they had” is a kind way to talk about our parents’ flaws without putting them on the rack. We know our day is coming. If my friend’s son took this route, he might say, “I thought you would love me more if I loved baseball, so I convinced you that I did. Thanks for buying into my little scam.” It would be painful to hear, no doubt, but compared to the mouldy bite he’s giving her now, it would be nourishing.
What do you do when someone you love tells their mother, father, siblings, friends, cousins, uncles, aunts, internet, or chatbot that everything you sacrificed for and celebrated was damaging? What can you do when they write their false narrative into wet concrete?
In her 2023 Nobel Prize Summit talk, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus talked about her research on false memory over the last fifty years. Loftus wanted to know if a person could ‘remember’ events that never happened, so she created the “rich false memory procedure”. Under the right conditions, she found, it’s possible to ply a person with suggestions about their past until they remember getting lost in a mall as a child, or almost drowning and being rescued by the lifeguard. False memories soon harden into false narratives, leaving us with limited options.
Option 1: Cling to the facts. Call your loved one a liar, revisionist, or propagandist. Pledge allegiance to the way it really happened. My friend could say to her son, “Well, I guess that’s your story. Too bad it’s not true.” This is the old-school method, and I fear it strands us on an island far away from our loved one, like it did for many of us with our own parents. If we want a close relationship with our keeper of false memories, we’ll have to keep thinking.
Option 2: Pack your bags for Deepfakelandia. Revise your story to match theirs. Jettisoning facts for them communicates, “I love you so much I would give up reality.” My friend might apologise to her son and ask, “What other terrible things did I do to you?” If you are a fan of ‘the way things really happened’, though, this will be hard. I support the current push to feel our feelings, but for the love of factual accuracy! What about the truth?
Loftus concluded her talk by pointing out that “just because somebody tells you something and they say it with a lot of confidence; just because they give you a lot of detail about it; just because they cry when they tell you the story, it doesn’t mean that it really happened”. I have no reason to believe that my friend’s son was forced into playing baseball. I watched him pitch in the backyard, and I asked him about the season’s best players. Likewise, his aunt and uncle remember him as a baseball maniac. Loftus said that trying to collect “independent corroboration” is the best way to try to convince someone to doubt the story they are telling themselves.
Still, questions linger: who gave this person a false narrative? Who and what supports his need to feel unsupported? Loftus discovered adults who went into psychotherapy in the 1980s only to come out with memories of childhood satanic rituals. Who were these therapists, and why did they do it? Why would anyone turn a perfectly nice childhood into a nightmare? In her talk, Loftus quoted Salvador Dalí as having said that memories are like jewels: the false ones shine brightest. What is so brilliant about feeling mistreated? I have more questions than answers, but we have to try something.
Option 3: Enter the broken narrative with an open mind, curious instead of correcting. You are talking to a person desperate to make sense of their current situation. Find out everything you can about the satanic ritual or baseball torture. Ask honest questions and wait for answers. If and when you present your loved one with contradictory evidence or independent corroboration, ask them what they make of it. Wonder with them, instead of against them, how so many people who love them could have got them so wrong.
I am not sure there is much else you can do with a person who is convinced that they are a victim against all the evidence you believe to be true. You can’t give up on them, or yourself, or your relationship, but you can try authentic curiosity.