False memories can have major legal consequences. See
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/false-memory-syndrome-false-... for some examples. It was particularly bad some 30 years ago when "recovered memory therapy" was popular. Which was a type of therapy designed to create false memories, particularly of abuse. The events remembered might be false, but the pain and trauma from the memories was emphatically real.
For me, personally, this was a source of frustration. I came from a family with actual abuse. But when I went to read up on abuse, the literature at that time was dominated by accounts from those with "recovered memories". And what they described and went through looked absolutely nothing like my experience.
Since learning how easily memories can be implanted, I came up with a simple litmus test to tell the false apart from the true for sexual abuse. People with recovered memories have memories that feel like they would expect. Very simple and stark emotions. By contrast people who have been through abuse have much more complex backgrounds that contain things that non-abused people wouldn't expect. For example abused children do not look at events with adult eyes and mark this as wrong. Instead at the time children try to accept events as normal, and wind up with a very confused picture of the world.
For anyone who wants a picture of how it actually looks from a child's eyes, I highly recommend my sister's book, https://www.amazon.com/Singing-Songs-Meg-Tilly/dp/0929636627. (I was the baby who winds up taken by "Richard" at the end of the book.)
For me, personally, this was a source of frustration. I came from a family with actual abuse. But when I went to read up on abuse, the literature at that time was dominated by accounts from those with "recovered memories". And what they described and went through looked absolutely nothing like my experience.
Since learning how easily memories can be implanted, I came up with a simple litmus test to tell the false apart from the true for sexual abuse. People with recovered memories have memories that feel like they would expect. Very simple and stark emotions. By contrast people who have been through abuse have much more complex backgrounds that contain things that non-abused people wouldn't expect. For example abused children do not look at events with adult eyes and mark this as wrong. Instead at the time children try to accept events as normal, and wind up with a very confused picture of the world.
For anyone who wants a picture of how it actually looks from a child's eyes, I highly recommend my sister's book, https://www.amazon.com/Singing-Songs-Meg-Tilly/dp/0929636627. (I was the baby who winds up taken by "Richard" at the end of the book.)