The title is very accurate, as our system has a hard time trusting our memories to be factual and not some escapism fantasy we concocted in our youth and added to over time…but our system also believes that this definitely should be published.
Because it should be okay to be wrong.
It should be okay to express memories in the way they feel, even if they end up somehow being a mask for the true memories
So long as we do not go into this claiming to be any specific person/persons (which we don’t have enough memory for anyway), what does it matter?
Our therapist has listened to our stories over the last several months, and the things we have said have rarely (if ever) contradicted the story as a whole…and the only time I can recall something along this line actually happening, our therapist said that we had 1) already stated the previous options to be just that…options/speculations as to what happened…and 2) that what we said not only cleared up those speculations but also connected back to other things we had said.
Our therapist also has said that, with the age we were and the memories we’ve shared…there’s only a couple of possibilities for what these memories could be if they are NOT our factual “true” memories.
These options are as follows:
-Someone’s source material (and if this is the case, it would be amazing if we could find whatever it is!) In this case, our memories may be contextually inaccurate, but also…there would still be true memories hidden among the symbolism and structure. Thus making the memories as a whole still worth delving into
-Allegory. This one confused me a little, but as our therapist explained, it made sense (though based on our reactions to her explanation and other things we have discussed, our therapist does not believe this particular thing to be the case.
-Another off-the-cuff suggestion that our therapist had, though they admitted that such was extremely unlikely is that our caregivers played some very weirdly specific documentaries about specific places repeatedly and nearly on loop when we were still a baby laying on a blanket
Anyway…disclaimers about the accuracy of our memories out of the way, some other reasons our system believes it vital to share this post are:
-The truth is often far stranger than fiction. Even if we are inaccurate in the context of our memories, and it’s merely a disguise for other memories we have yet to uncover…that doesn’t mean that someone else may not have gone through something like this.
-We have a really hard time believing ourselves without tangible evidence (thanks gaslighting trauma). We will almost always believe ourselves to be incorrect or wrong when we do not know the whole situation…because how could we 100% know we WEREN’T in the wrong if we can’t remember? (Again…thanks gaslighting trauma). We as a whole believe this post will help us talk among ourselves better (especially because our in-system communication is still shit, and talking to each other in written word is still way fucking easier than any other method…writing this will let us counter each other as needed and pull up other things that we have to support or counter our memory points.
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Now…before I get into the actual post, I want to put one more disclaimer. Our system is desperately hoping to be wrong about these memories.
For us, these memories being real would be a lot harder to handle emotionally than if they are wrong.
Because if they’re wrong, our life has always been shitty. If they’re wrong, we’ve always had a very gross and disgusting family, which is something that wouldn’t change our feelings about the parental-units in any way from how we currently feel.
However, if these memories are somehow real…that would be devastating. It would mean that we used to have people who cared about us and weren’t completely gross. It means that our disgust and anger towards the parental-units would grow and morph into a more potent rage and anger than I think we could prepare for.
So…yeah. If anyone has other ideas as to how these might NOT be real, we would honestly love to hear them
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We have memories of living in France until we were somewhere between the ages of 1 and 2.
We have memories of a “maman”, a “papa”, a “frere” and 1-2 siblings that were supposed to be our twin/triplet counterpart(s), but who did not make it.
We even have vague memories of a “grandmere” and “grandpere”…at least on one side.
We have a lot of memories of places that aren’t what one “typically” thinks of when they think of France.
The Eiffel Tower doesn’t feature very prominently, if at all. Instead, our memories are of cobblestone streets and the coleured buildings (funny how when we struggle to spell “color/colour”, we always add an ‘e’ into it, too…we’ve noticed that with other words too. we tend to spell them the “French” way…without even realizing it. also…why is our fricking username on here French??? Like seriously…why?? We could’ve easily gone with some derivation of “The Triforce System”, as we’ve done on our other system-based socials…but nope. That didn’t happen)
We spoke to our therapist of attending a large church. (We actually said “eglise” as we were speaking to them rather than church). We talked about the fact that it was likely some form of Catholicism, as there was the basin/receptacle of holy water like we’ve seen in other Catholic churches…but this one was a giant seashell.
We laughed this off as silly, and maybe as something that would give us a reason to disbelieve our story.
Only to find out that there’s a Cathedral in certain place that does, in fact, have something of this nature.
Looking up pictures of the surrounding areas of this Cathedral revealed cobblestone and buildings that matched our memories. We even began to cry when we saw this one particular type of window “balcony” in a residential area nearby, because it perfectly matched the memory we have of the “balcony” our “maman” hung a popcorn garland on.
We have memories of our “maman” having lots of pretty perfume bottles.
We have memories of our “papa” tinkering with clocks.
We have memories of our “frere” picking on us…but specifically in French. (We have one very clear memory of him speaking French to us…and we have pretty strong confirmation from our Mom-unit that the languages our older-sibling-units knew did not include French…which lends the question of: if this person was not our “frere”, who was he??? Who was speaking French around us when we were so young???)
…Bouncing off some of those thoughts…our littles are the ones who speak, read, and write French the most fluently. There are definitely some inaccuracies, but it seems to be within the parameters of “this is our native language, but we only grew up with it for the first couple years of our life”. So it’s pretty basic things. Not a whole lot of the proper grammatical structures. A lot more simple things like types of food, family members, numbers…typical little kid things.
We have memories of “papa” reading to us. The room we remember is NOTHING like the ones we know our Dad-unit read to us in. (Which means one of the following, right? 1) for some reason, in that room, nothing scary happened and we were able to make a distinction between “nice dad” and “scary dad”…2) we were with someone who wasn’t “Dad” (but who???), or this is genuinely our papa (which…is the most fitting with other memories, and what our littles have already talked about a little bit)
We also have a lot of memories where we take a few steps and then fall down. We again, wrote this off as silly and reason to discount all of our memories. Except our therapist reminded us that such an age as we remember being is when kids do typically begin to learn to walk…so those memories are actually right in line with making sense.
We remember “maman” playing the harp and piano. Now…we can think of several places where we have certainly seen a piano in our lifetime. But who and where would we have seen a harp??? Like…maybe in some movies? But this was a first-person memory… (and I personally remember touching the strings and maman letting me “play the harp” with her helping me)
There’s definitely more we remember, too (especially about being taken from France and brought to America), but we’re starting to get dissociated and we need to head out to work soon…so it’s probably best to wait to delve into all of that right now…
We will probably edit this as we think about this whole thing more. If for nothing else than to compile these thoughts and memories into one place where our system can look at it and critique it for accuracy and legitimacy. Obviously, the best way to figure all of this out is to take a DNA test. But that will have to be saved up for, so in the meantime…trying to think of other possibilities this could be might help us not feel absolutely insane.
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Seeing that it sounds like y’all just looked at the intro to this, I think I can see where you got that sort of impression. However, that also doesn’t sound at all like what we are experiencing. We don’t have alters who are “spending their time” in another country. We have memories of our life of between birth and no more than two years old and those memories are what this post is about.
After that age, we don’t have anything tying us to France aside from a handful of movies, shows, etc. But the strange thing to all of us is that none of those have accounted for where we would have learned about the stuff we have in our “memories”
We also never went out to learn French until a few months ago (It took until after a couple of our littles started to talk in French and us older people needed to be able to better communicate with them). And a lot of times, those littles are correcting us in pronunciation and such
What makes it so weird for us is the fact that it’s really not like anything we’ve ever heard ANYONE talk of before.
There’s additional points I know we wanted to add to this, but we haven’t had a chance to do so yet. We’re trying to figure out where our system wants to keep the line of “talking about the WHOLE of our experience” and “keep this in therapy until it’s more sorted” ^^
Thank you for the suggestion, though. If y’all have any other ideas/thoughts when you’ve gotten a chance to read the whole post, I would certainly be curious to hear them!
Memory and trauma are seriously screwy, but I’d lay odds it could be real just as easily as not. A DNA test sounds like a good way to get some answers and move forward.
Thank you for saying that. I know Alex is less happy about the support of such an insane-sounding story, but it just…hasn’t matched up with anything else we’ve heard about or experienced for ourselves. So I personally agree that the odds are pretty easily divided!
From my perspective, unless a whole bunch more memories come up (which might not for a long time, if ever, based on the age we would have been at this period in our life, and depending on therapy progression), the DNA test really is the best route forward for eliminating possibilities
Alexei has been having concerns about the whole DNA test being a waste of money…but looking at it from the perspective of eliminating possibilities might ease some of his concerns on that end, too!
-Legacy
That is all really interesting, and I think we have a few alters who have similar things, though ours more have memories of being in Rivendell and in places of Middle Earth. It all feels very different from these French “memories”, though. Our memories are all of being the same little kid, albeit with different clothing at a few points, so there’s not the variation of security guard/pizzeria worker/waitress that y’all experience (We have at least some similar stuff with our Middle Earth fictives, though…so I think I at least now understand what you are meaning with the allegoric memories!!
I know the fact that our own therapist doesn’t believe these “memories” to be allegorical is what has really been throwing us into chaos…and especially Alexei.
-Legacy
I’m personally still waiting to stumble across some old movie/show or book that is set in the part of France we seem to remember…because something like that is the only thing that makes sense to me. But I’m also the alter who is the most adamantly opposed to them being real to begin with, so take that as you will
We had an acquaintance (others in here would say friend, but I am personally not that inclined to throw about such titles this early on in knowing them) provide the means of us getting a DNA test, though, and we got the email letting us know it’s on it’s way to us just a bit ago today…so hopefully we’ll be able to get some more definitive answers in the next bit and be able to move forward with whatever information that provides
I’m definitely still hoping that our parental-units are just our parents. Because even though it would be absolutely shitty for them to have done the things they did to their biological child, it’s also…a lot simpler. Less emotional stress. I’m not good with emotional stress…and especially my own. And if these were to be real memories…I don’t want to deal with it all.
-Alexei
It has definitely been causing more and more distress…especially as Alexei and Wendy-Marie have begun to have more debates with each other over the different possibilities.
The DNA test will definitely be favorable, just for providing information and answers! No matter what those answers are, it will allow us to get another step closer to understanding ourselves ^.^
-Legacy
Where else would you have heard/learned French, especially your littles?
That…is definitely something we’ve been trying to pour over. We grew up with VHS tapes, so the thought of a French dub of something doesn’t work unless it would be later in our life, once we were around DVDs and the internet more. But that wouldn’t have been until our teens, and these littles definitely seem to be older than those memories…so it’s all weird.
Our therapist has also said that French is a really difficult language to learn to pronounce properly if it’s not your native language, because of how your mouth has to be function and be used from a young age, and the only other explanation they could come up with for us having such an easy time with it (we started a Duolingo course a few months back to start communicating with the french-speaking littles more) is that if our family has a lot of French in it as well… (which, according to the parental-units, is definitely not a thing)
If we really weren’t in France at all…we have a LOT of things we need to sort out. Which is going to be really interesting, but also confusing as hell.
-Legacy
We are really proud of all of you for doing so much work in therapy and getting to the point of even uncovering these memories in the first place. No matter what happens, we will be here for y’all.
Thank you [insert heart emoji] I know y’all have helped a lot (especially with Alex) in getting us to the point of even accepting the possibility that these might be real and encouraging us to start bringing it up with our therapist…and then all along the way to where we are today.
We love y’all!!
I was going to very much agree with the Allegory thought, but you said that your therapist doesn’t believe that to be the actual thing…does that mean that your therapist believes these to be real memories? Because they would probably be the best at seeing and figuring out what makes the most sense of everything you’re sharing (and especially moreover if there’s additional info that you have been and/or intend to keep just in therapy) /g
Either way, I hope you guys are able to get a DNA test or some other form of making sense of it all soon! /pos
(Tbh, I can’t even imagine having to sort out stuff like this…maybe try to do a /bunch/ of self care throughout this whole thing, too? /g /npa)
-Ty
Yeah…I know our therapist has been trying to come up with other things that this all could be, but the more we’ve been talking, the more they’ve been encouraging us to just…accept them as they are now, and that we’ll figure it all out as we are able to.
We have a DNA test on the way to us now thanks to a friend, so hopefully we’ll have an idea of how to continue from here within the next bit!
It’s…definitely stressful. But it’s not altogether terrible? Like…if these aren’t real memories, we get to figure out who we disguised as this “maman” and “papa” and “frere”…maybe one of our older half-siblings filled a role or two? Maybe a cousin? Maybe even other kids that were with us and our now partner-system during some of all the trauma we have clearer memories of? No matter what, we have to have some amount of good memories in here, based on some of the things that have come up. It’s just figuring out where all the pieces go!!!
-Legacy