Magical Thinking and Memory

It begins with LSD

Photo by Nikola on Unsplash

The first of only three times I “dropped acid,” my then-boyfriend, Steve, and I saw @’s swirling out of knotholes in the wood panelling. We’d lazed back on a lumpy floral couch in someone’s basement to wait for the show to begin. I was fifteen, Steve seventeen. He was a kind-hearted, shaggy blonde with a slight lisp, who soon after, I dumped for a man who thrilled me; one who’d spent two winters in Morrocco before he turned eighteen.  (Sorry, I tend to digress)

I said to Steve, “Do you see those “at” signs?” They continued to spiral out of the wall in red, green, and blue. He did. “Cool,” he said. “But look, now it’s letters.”

“It’s spelling something,” I said. We watched the @’s morph into letters half an inch high. M-E-R-R-Y-C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S we intoned together. We laughed because it was July. We speculated that perhaps this wall in this basement physically stored all this family’s Christmas memories. Right in the woodwork. We were awestruck at this glimpse into the workings of so-called inanimate objects.

I hesitate here because it occurs to me that I don’t have this memory screwed on right. I think it may have spelled out S-E-A-S-O-N-S-G-R-E-E-T-I-N-G-S. Memory is so plastic. If you tell your mind one thing, it’s bound to believe you.

Plenty of psychological research has shown that memories can be reconstructed and are therefore fallible and malleable. 

“Researchers at the University of Warwick in England developed a coding system that allowed them to compare and analyze eight different memory implantation studies that involved more than 400 people. Memory implantation involves feeding people untrue information about their lives so that it becomes embedded in their memory, causing the people to misidentify the false event as true.

Researchers found that 50 percent of people involved in the studies were susceptible to believing fake facts. These people believed that they actually had experienced the false event, while another 30 percent even “remembered” the event and provided more detail on how the it happened and described images of what took place. Twenty-three percent of participants showed signs that they had some degree of belief the false event occurred.” source

What I find particularly disturbing is that when trial group members are informed that their memories are false, they refuse to believe it. Another kicker is how many who take on the embedded memories as fact tend to embellish these fabricated memories with before and after scenarios in vivid detail.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

How perception and memory coalesce fascinates me. It’s also snapped my knees out from under me.

Years ago I invited a man who’d been an assistant in a healing training in India to come to Canada and share some of his work with my clients. I organized his flight from Germany, workspace, a cell phone, and booked individual and group sessions for him. I hosted him with meals and transportation. He found his workspace substandard and accused me of hitting on him, stealing from him, and lying to him.

I imagine gaslighting occurs when the perpetrator knows the actual truth. But I could be wrong. My therapist said, “Now you understand what I’ve been trying to explain to you about narcissists.” I’d known they existed, but since I was pretty certain I wasn’t the completely rotten human being he imagined, it was time to do some research on “Narsholes.”

I found an enlightening book called, “Why Is It Always About You?: The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism” by Sandy Hotchkiss wherein she navigates the reader through the causes, hallmarks, and responses to and of unhealthy narcissism -- Shamelessness, Magical Thinking, Arrogance, Envy, Entitlement, Exploitation, and Bad Boundaries.

This book was a biography of my “guest.”

But it also shone a light on others in my life, beyond simple gaslighting and into the obdurate corners of magical thinking. For most of us, if we’re on the ball, we recognize that when we receive a response that suggests our hurt or anger is our fault, we’ve been re-directed by a narcissist.

But more than once I’ve been gobsmacked not only by someone’s alternate version of events but by their iron-strong belief in their personal reality. This is not to say that I have perfect recall. I do not. But I’m willing to entertain other perspectives of a shared experience. (Which, of course, offers easy entrance to a gaslighter.)

However.

Last year, I encountered an example of magical thinking that changed my life. Despite confessing to a crime committed against a young girl in 2006, and subsequently being incarcerated, despite being forgiven, and despite being shown compassion for an abusive upbringing that may have triggered the violation, in a ceremony intended to cleanse and heal, this person produced a brand new narrative that shocked everyone involved.

Events that occurred years after 2006 were introduced and conflated with the evening of the abuse. And his “truth” was that the 12-year-old girl begged him, a 46-year-old man, to touch her and he refused so many times that she accused him of rape. Suddenly, nearly seventeen years after the fact, he was innocent.

His dedication to this strange and spurious narrative made hearing it even more traumatic.

And there you have magical thinking at its finest.

Some memory mechanisms, such as mine, are plastic and full of holes, while others who can cobble together a narrative that suits them, are Teflon-coated, and clear as mud.

If only we could all drop acid together and watch the same peaceful greeting emerge. Or buy the world a Coke.

Or simply stop making shit up.

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I'm so grateful for the warm welcomes and engaged audiences these past weeks/months. Soon there will be an audiobook but for now, here's where you can find WHAT THE LIVING DO:

Ontario:

Blue Heron Books, Uxbridge

Ben McNally’s Toronto

Manticore, Orillia

Fanfare Books, Stratford

The Bookshelf, Guelph

Turns & Tales, Chatham

The Village Bookshop, Bayfield

Take Cover Books, Peterborough

Perfect Books, Ottawa

Several Chapters Indigo stores

BC:

Munros, Victoria

Ivy’s Bookshop, Victoria

Notably, Nelson, BC

Your local library... It's a great help to authors to have people request their libraries carry their books!

Online:

Regal House Publishing

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

The next event is at Rama Public Library at 5 pm on September 12.

All are welcome!