Is there a difference ? Certain recollections surface from time to time that I can reality test but despite that are quite pervasive. One is the idea that I can levitate and have done in the past. It is of course-nonsense.
I can’t find good studies on that subject… I have a lot of questions about this that are not being answered. I have clear memories of stuff that never happened, and I think I can tell the difference between a false memory and a true one but it takes a lot of reality cheking and asking people around.
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The notion of a ‘false belief’ is a good way to start grasping what delusions are, but fails to cover all of them. Not because many delusions are true after all, but some delusions are simply not verifiable/falsifiable. In such cases, any ordinary reality-checking seems to have reached its limit as an explanatory and therapeutic tool. Sometimes logic may help a bit there, it seems.
False delusional memories, that’s a new one on me. at least you can apply the ‘reality’ test to them, so maybe they’re not delusional. If you believed them, then they would be delusional false memories.
I’m in that boat too.
When I really ponder it… it’s a fine line between false memory and delusion…
I’m not sure I’ve been able to tell the difference. A lot of my false memories happen when I’m crumbling and delusional anyway and my mind tries make sense of the situation…
Sometimes my delusions turn into false memories…
I have a few memories that I was really sad to realize were false.
This sounds somewhat familiar to me. I do not have false memories that mislead me, perhaps some of hallucinations: when I came out of my last episode, there was this weird period where I wasn’t sure whether I was ‘really’ hallucinating, remembering a past hallucination, expecting a future hallucination, pondering what my past hallucinations would say in this situation… these are all different modes of thought, typically clearly distinct. Coming out of that episode all was blurred.
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I’ve been told all my life that I remember things that didn’t happen.
I’ve caught my memories in the process of changing before - I seem to have two memories of the same event, one of which is true, one of which is altered by how I felt about the event. Someone is rude to me, for example, and my memory will change so that I remember that person calling me an expletive they really didn’t say.
I have a memory of driving through a blizzard late at night, past my bedtime, parents tense and upset and me trying to be as quiet as possible in the back seat. I have another version of the same memory where we’re being pursued, maybe by the police, maybe by something worse. The first one is true. The second is how it felt to me.
I can easily see how this could turn the corner into delusion.
I think the question of delusions/false memories is more complex than the so called experts make it out to be. Conventional wisdom is that a delusion is a false belief held with utter conviction and the belief that the belief is true ie non delusional. Yet I have known several/quite a few people here say that they are delusional.
Conventional wisdom argues that if you are delusional you don’t see that you are delusional and that a delusional person would never admit to being delusional. Obviously there is a flaw in the standard belief about delusions suggesting that degrees of insight can be present but that insight is not guaranteed to take away the unusual thought. Sometimes it is a case of delusion/unusual thought-insight-persistence of delusion/unusual thought.
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I agree, but in my case I still have the memories, just know they aren’t real, but they still pop up, just aren’t as proeminent.