An Examined Life is Worth Living, But Beware: A Possible Side Effect of Therapy is Changing Memories of Childhood

Memories of emotion are malleable, and everyone needs to know that.

ho dè anexétastos bíos ou biōtòs anthrṓpōi 

but the unexamined life is not lived by man

Plato's Apology (38a5–6)

The above statement in Plato’s Apology relates to the idea a life devoid of introspection is simply not a fully lived existence. Therefore, in this article I cannot in good faith discourage people from going on a long self-examination in therapy, including talking about childhood and parents. Live an examined life, as indeed I did for many years. But what I can do is warn about some of the possible side effects of talking about parents (or other loved ones) in therapy. “Talk therapy comes with side effects!?!?” I hear you say! Yes, it does, and one of the most unfortunate legacy my generation, Gen X, has passed on to the millennials and Gen Z, is the incorrect idea that therapy has no side effects. In fact, there is a whole branch of research just a click away that documents iatrogenesis in therapy.

In our recent study published in Psychological Reports (Patihis & Herrera, 2024), we found that simple writing out recent examples of one’s mothers’ behavior can lead to reappraising one’s mother. Secondly, it changed the participants’ current emotions towards their mother. Third, and most surprisingly, it subtly nudged the participants’ memories of emotions from childhood (see also Patihis et al., 2019). The latter result is not something most people realize happens.

In these experiments, we slightly nudged people’s appraisals of their mothers, but I worry that this happens in a much bigger way in the real world. The types of therapies that focus on examining childhood, or on talking about parental influences on current problems, can cause much bigger reappraisals than out 15 minute experiment writing prompts. Talking to a therapist for years in a way that blames parents and reconstructs the meaning childhood, and then links this to present problems could cause massive reappraisals of parents. All too often these are reappraisals in the negative direction. What such therapy clients will not realize, nor will their therapist, is that these re-evaluations are tragically changing their memories of childhood. Precious memories of love and happiness towards mothers and fathers that should be preserved and cherished rather than massively distorted. The concern is that such large distortions of reality will forever spoil the parent-child relationship for decades to come.

So, what can we do about this? I am a strong believer in living an examined life, and I also believe that people should be free to both practice psychotherapy relatively freely, and clients should be free to seek out therapies that dig deep into parental and childhood themes. So, the only solution I can think of is that clients are fully aware of the side effects of therapy, and that they have a line or two on the malleability of memory in the forms they sign before therapy begins. Ideally, I would like all therapists to be taught in their training about the several ways that memory can be distorted, such that they are able to remind clients of these hazards before, during, and at the end of therapy. Therapists should never be making negative comments about parents. For example, even a simple “wow, your mother sounds like a controlling type,” should be off the table. Negative comments will change appraisals of parents, lower current positive emotions towards parents, and tragically subtly change memories of emotions in childhood as well.

I believe large negative reappraisals of parents in psychotherapy (indeed toward spouses and others, too) can lead to partial or total estrangement. I believe that many sessions in therapy of doing this can lead to people not visiting their parents as much, nor supporting them as much in older age. I think that the estrangements of families that happens to many clients who engage in memory recovery therapies can be total, and can result in grandparents rarely, if  ever, seeing their grandchildren. Some of these reappraisals are very unfair, and some have some justification, but all are heartbreaking when they are unforgiving and forever.

In contrast, revaluating your parents in a positive direction will likely lead to better relationships over time. In many cases, this may result in the real joy of childhood being better remembered and appreciate. In many cases, such positive re-evaluations are fair because previous negative reappraisals in adolescence and early adulthood were unfair and forgetful of the sacrifice and love the parents had given in early childhood. Nevertheless, there is a potential negative side effect if parents are positively reappraised too much. If your parents had set up conditions to illicit a lot of negative emotions in childhood, if you gloss that over you risk repeating the same mistakes as you raise your own children. Better to be as accurate as you can be, as we live fully examined and rich lives.

Articles referred to in this article (both open access):

Patihis, L., & Herrera, M. E. (2024). Reappraising a Parent can Occur With Non-suggestive Questions: Changing Emotions and Memories of Emotion. Psychological Reports, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00332941241283413 .

Patihis, L., Cruz, C. S., & Herrera, M. E. (2019). Changing current appraisals of mothers leads to changes in childhood memories of love toward mothers. Clinical Psychological Science, 7(5), 1125-1143. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702619842468

Further reading:

For more on the effect of reappraisals on memories of emotion, see the pioneering work of Martin Safer and Linda J Levine in the peer reviewed literature. I will list reference two here:

Levine, L. J. (1997). Reconstructing memory for emotions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 126(2), 165-177.

https://www.researchgate.net

Safer, M. A., Bonanno, G. A., & Field, N. P. (2001). " It was never that bad": Biased recall of grief and long-term adjustment to the death of a spouse. Memory, 9(3), 195-203. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09658210143000065

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