When I was four years old I was playing in the backyard with my neighborhood friends. It was a normal warm, summer night. We had just had some family and friends over to grill out and when they started to leave, I was one the jungle gym in the backyard with whoever was left there. We were having a great time when all the sudden, I started climbing the ladder and fell into the sandpit below. I felt a rush of pain which I had never experienced before. I went inside and as soon as I opened the door, I screamed like no other for my mother. The pain was so intense I cried like I never cried before. I was in so much pain that I could not even form words. We drove to the clinic but they were closed for the night. It would make sense to go to the emergency room, but my parents never took me there. This is where things didn't make sense once I got older. I had formed a memory of intense pain and discomfort that my mother said was never there. She said I cried for about ten minutes and then stopped. She didn't think anything was broken because I stopped crying and acted just fine. When we went to the clinic the next day, I got x-rays taken and my whole left leg was broken. It was a spiral fracture that went from my hip to my ankle. As I grew up, I would tell this story and it only made sense with the injury, that it was super painful. That however, was a memory made up in my head. Memories can be made up especially when you are younger and you don't remember a lot of stuff anyways. My mother tells this story as though I was some kind of super hero as a child, which I still find difficult to understand. Still, memories can be molded, modified, and created out of nothing with the right circumstances.
Wait...how did it happen again?
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I have had a similar experience of a false memory that happened to me as a child. When I was in 1st grade, I was sleeping in my bed and I fell off in the middle of the night and knocked my head on the heater. I didn't wake up but my mom, who had heard me fall, ran into my room to find me still asleep on the floor with a bloody head. Like any mother, my mom was shocked and frightened because my head was bleeding and I looked like I was unconscious. Ever since my mom told me this story, I have told people that the small hole in my eyebrow is from the time I fell out of my bed and had to get stitches. Interestingly enough, my mom told me a few years ago that I never ended up getting stitches but the doctor just glued the gash back together. However, ever since I heard that story, I had made up these memories in my head, and concluded that the slight scar on my eyebrow was from this experience. As weird as it is, I even thought I remembered going to the hospital and getting the stitches removed. Although most of this story never really happened, and because of false memories I built up in my own head, I have been convinced since I was young that I actually went through this experience.
This idea seems so crazy to me. I have had experiences like this but with basic things like memories of vacations I've been on. It seems like it would be so easy to associate the extreme pain with a broken leg but to me it seems so strange that you remember it so different than what your parents say really happened. I feel as if it could even have been that the whole time your leg was broken you were thinking that you should be in a lot of pain because you fell but really you weren't in any pain. My neighbors used to do this type of thing when they saw blood. They would be fine if they fell down but if they saw blood then they would cry and become very dramatic about the accident. I feel like that could also have been part of your experience. Once you realized how bad the injury really was you created this false imagery about pain. That is such an interesting concept.
While it makes sense that you would blame yourself for having the faulty memory (due to your young age), perhaps your mother's memory is the faulty one. Maybe you DID experience excruciating pain and your mother just forgot. That's the spooky thing about memories. Whose is actually the correct one? Unless you have some other documentation (a video or audio recording, for example) there is really no way to know for sure. This thought really frightens me in terms of the justice system. I feel for those who are wrongly accused of crimes because someone's memory of an event was faulty.
It is quite shocking to see how much faith we put into our memories. It’s very difficult to accept that our memories aren’t perfect. It is especially difficult when the thing we are remembering can seem so vivid that it almost has to be true. It makes me wonder how many memories I currently believe to be true about my childhood, yet are actually are false.
This idea is really interesting to me. How can we be so positive that a memory is true, but it be false. I think it is attributed to the breadth of information that we are constantly taking in on a daily basis. Also, Since the memory is from so long ago, it is easy to confuse that memory with other that occurred around that same time frame-leaving us confused.
I have a similar experience, however not involving injury. My parents have told a story about how I sneezed while my grandma was feeding me sweet potatoes and it got all over her and the wall. I feel like I can remember this actually happening, and vividly at that, however, I was much too young to actually remember this event. It makes you think about how many of your memories that you swore happened, actually did the way you remember them.
I do believe memories can be made up. There are several memories that I share with my sisters, but these memories are so "1st person" and it was not possible for us to be standing next to each other to experience the same thing, and therefore only one of us had the real memory and the others had to be fake.
However, in this situation, perhaps it is your mom that is incorrect? It would make much more sense if you did feel that pain, but your outward appearance as your mother saw it just didn't seem all that pained, despite what you were feeling on the inside. I have had a similar situation that my mom and I have different ideas of what happened, and I think that's much more plausible, especially considering the damage done to your leg.
I can't come up with any similar false memories of my own but it definitely makes sense that you would have created this false memory. Because a broken bone is usually extremely painful for most people, it would be easy to believe that it would be painful for you as well. As the memory became foggier over the years you probably assumed that you experienced pain with the broken bone even though you didn't just because of the prior knowledge that broken bones are extremely painful.