Histrionic personality disorder

Re: the ‘false memory’ discussion: I’m going to come down in the middle on this one: I totally get where G1S is coming from, because I too have almost no memories of my childhood (but I have enough really bad ones to know some bad stuff went on, and that my egg-donour is a psychopath and a sadist). And I’m, to say the least, suspicious of most discussions I see around the various ‘false-memory’ trends; particularly since that was one of the two hammers inevitably used to keep me from getting anywhere truthful in my years of excerable therapy and working with the memories I *did* have. It went hand in hand with the other hammer, inevitably brought out by those same therapists – both traditional and feminist – which was that since I was saying it was my mother who was my abuser, and we all *know* women don’t do things like that, therefore I MUST have been imagining it, therefore – voila: “false-memory”. There are certain things that I remember, that I’ve always remembered. No memory implantation possible. The only thing I needed was to ‘denormalize’ my understanding of them. Took me years to ‘realize’ that not all loving caring mothers force-vomit their children and then… well, I don’t need to continue, I’m sure you get the picture. And I’m sure most people here can understand how brainwashing under torture can convince you to accept the most heinous abuse as ‘normal’ – particularly when you have no-one validating your reality, and everyone supporting your ‘wonderful’ abuser, and pulling out the ‘false memory’ card as a defence against hearing things they may not like.

Realizing the truth about what happened to me wasn’t false memory implantation, it was a reality check. It’s been my experience that manipulative &/or cowardly mental health professionals LOVE to pull out the ‘false-memory’ card faster than you can blink in order to influence a situation to fit with their idealogy. Which makes it all the harder for anyone to examine this legitimately.

Did I mention that I was touchy about this term?!?

However, if you substitute the term “implanted false family stories” for “false-memory”, I’m totally behind the questions Sky is asking. One of the conditions a few courageous GPs and therapists have asked me about (only ever people I was seeing peripherally for other things) is Munchausen’s by Proxy. My mother is a nurse and fits the profile and my medical ‘history’, none of which necessarily adds up and I’m now realizing is probably more of a ‘her-story’, is full of holes and contradictions, even though I’ve spent most of my childhood with various illnesses (another clue to possible Munchausen’s by Proxy). I finally started to get somewhere when I started to realize that all of my medical ‘history’ was actually stories my mother had told me, and that the only possible way to start to figure it out was to more or less do what Sky was suggesting: to question every single thing I’d ever been told. Not to infer that it was all false, but to acknowledge that disordered individuals almost always mix lies with a sprinkling of truth, and to acknowledge that I can’t know which was which.

Another problem, and I think this is also perhaps what Sky was alluding to here in her questions to “7”, was my perception of my father. Even though my father didn’t leave my mother until I had left home and my brothers had graduated from high school, my mother had managed to pull off a case of ‘parental alienation’ between my father and us, even though we were all in the same house. She had us all convinced, and all saying in unison, that it was my father who was the monster. (But she could never convince me to say she wasn’t a monster herself – the only flaw in her plan.) I didn’t know whom to trust, and ended up going NC with ALL of them, and ended up never seeing my father again (he passed away several years ago, but no-one notified me – another looong story). I’m just now starting to realize how much he’d been slandered – including by me – and just how much I’d let my mother’s lies about him split us up and poison me. The guilt I feel now for going NC with him is massive. He wasn’t perfect by any means – I believe he tried to protect me when I was young but he’d pretty much given up by the time I was in high school and left me to be devoured by her – but he certainly wasn’t a monster. When I was young I remember him being funny and loving, and playful and caring. By the time I was in high school he was a shell of his former self.

But at the time I broke off contact my mother had me convinced (she had EVERYONE convinced) that it was my father who was the monster. But it was all via listening to stories that, when I went back to thing about it, she had planted herself. What I’d missed, for years upon years, was that the stories she told were never about what SHE thought, or what SHE said herself; they were always stories she’d told us about what OTHER PEOPLE had been saying: about my father, about what other people had told her my father had said about me, etc… And there was always ‘lots of corroborating evidence’ from other sources – but always only coming to us from my mother’s mouth. Took me years to realize that the multi-layered reality that I’d thought was coming from so many directions always only had one source.

So that’s not to say that what 7 has heard about her father or step-father is invalid, just that it’s important to question every single piece of information that has come from the mouth of a known slanderer and manipulator. My mother had me convinced of ‘the truth’ and I repeated it to others like the good victim I was, thus providing another point of corroboration for her stories. My guilt now for doing that is almost more than I can handle.