Recovered Memory

Validity of Recovered Memory
Memory is fragile; people forget many things like the lunch they just ate, while believing they saw a celebrity yesterday because they imagined it. So how do people know what is real, what is fake, and what did they simply forget? Recovered memories are an even bigger mystery as they were not previously attainable. How much can people trust these recovered memories if real memory is so unreliable? The validity regarding recovered memories is questionable at best. People are often left without the truth and relationship damage they cannot mend, especially when it involves recovered memories of childhood abuse.
Recovered Memory
Definition
What is a recovered memory? It “refers to the recall of traumatic events, typically of sexual abuse in
Underwager and Wakefield (1998) used the analogy that people believe memory “ operates like a videotape in which everything that happens to us is recorded and stored into our brain, waiting for the correct playback button to be found so that the memory can be retrieved” (p. 402). In reality memory is much more complicated, and many factors go into the making of memory such as what actually happened, other events that happened near, and what was felt and thought at the time” (Underwager & Wakefield, 1998, p. 402-403). Thus what you recall may not have been what actually happened. Adding on to this concept, suggestibility can change, or even create, a memory. People can be confident in saying that they actually witnessed an event, when in reality it was a suggestion (Linsdey, 1996). Lindsey (1996) pointed out that “reports based on suggestions often cannot be discriminated from reports based on accurate memories” (p. 271). Thus thoughts turn into reality for some people. The validity of real memory is questionable, so recovered memories are looked at even more wearily since the memory was not there to begin