Transcript for Writing Your Resilience Podcast Episode 109

Can You Trust Your Memories with Stacey Simmons

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:04]

Well, hello, Stacy. Welcome back to the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I am so excited about today’s conversation.

Stacey Simmons [1:06]
I am so thrilled to be here, Lisa. Thank you so much for having me back. It’s truly an honor. I love talking to you, so I’m really looking forward to this.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:13]
Feeling’s mutual. And I’m just going to give a quick plug for your book, The Queen’s Path, because, writers, if you do not have a copy, I’m telling you, it is going to change how you think about your writing and how you think about your story and your life.

If you want to know more about that, we already had an episode on it, so I will link that in the show notes so you can listen. But today, we are going to talk about another issue that is really important if you are writing a memoir, and that is the issue of memory.

Before we get started, I want to give you a chance to let everyone know a little about yourself, and then we’ll dive into the questions.

Stacey Simmons [1:49]
So, I am a psychotherapist, but I’m also a big neuroscience nerd. I am a psychotherapist trained at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California, and I am a certified psychedelic therapist. I work a lot with people who want to use psychedelics for a therapeutic purpose, and there are only a handful of certifications in the country.

I was part of the first cohort of the Integrative Psychiatry Institute’s program. I am on the research team in the Integrative Psychiatry Unit at UCLA. I’m also part of the research team at the Trans Science Research Institute in Paris, France.

So those are my neuroscience “pay-the-fee” days. I am not a trained neuroscientist myself, but I love neuroscience, and I do a lot of research that intersects with it. I know probably a little bit more than your average therapist.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [2:41]
Which is why we are all in for a treat today. And I will say, I felt like you infused some of that into The Queen’s Path. I mean, that’s not hardcore research, but I felt it. Thanks.

Stacey Simmons [2:53]
I do have a more hardcore research book in me, right? This one is like the nerdy, nerdy version of me. It reads very, very differently. You kind of get the geek girl coming out, for sure, with all the acronyms and the science talk.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [3:09]
And we’re going to dive into that in another episode, so listeners, stay tuned for that conversation.

But today, we are going to dive into memory. And I’m going to tell you, Stacy, this is a huge issue for so many memoirists, because there are different kinds of memories that we’re navigating.

When you start remembering, you remember more, right? You start going down that rabbit hole. And at the same time, you begin to think, oh my gosh, maybe I didn’t remember this as accurately as I thought I did. Or why doesn’t my memory line up with this other person’s memory?

There are so many nuances to this that trip writers up and make them feel like they can’t trust their own story. So, my hope today is that we can debunk, demystify, and explain some of these things so people can feel good about their stories, understand what’s happening to their memories, and think about how to use them in a way that’s effective.

To begin, we’re going to talk about the types of memory that might be important to storytelling. The one I think about most is episodic memory—that’s the one I work with the most. But when you think about memory, what types feel most important for all of us to understand, especially if we’re navigating our stories?

Stacey Simmons [4:35]
It’s a hard question to answer, because episodic memory, in and of itself—as human beings, and especially as writers—we like to think of ourselves as caring about the truth, as caring about accuracy, right?

And so, I find that writers especially treat memory as though it’s supposed to be capturable, like you’re supposed to be able to have an objective truth that you’re reporting on. And memory doesn’t work like that at all. There’s no objective memory.

So even when we’re talking about the experience of memory and the way it works in your brain, it doesn’t work like a computer. Science has always treated the brain in whatever capacity the most elevated scientific metaphor is at the time.

If you go back and read science from a thousand years ago, they were just figuring out pneumatic machinery. They knew they had to have liquids in those machines in order for them to work—oil, water, all kinds of compounds. And so, when they thought about the body, they thought about pneumatic machinery. They had ideas like black bile, yellow bile, red bile—concepts they used to explain how the body worked.

Then, with industrialization, the metaphor became Frankenstein: you can put the body back together, give it a little electricity, and boom—you have a creation. That was the highest version of science at the time, and that’s how we metaphorized our understanding.

Each of these metaphors has helped us understand ourselves better. Now, we use computers. So, people think of the brain like a computer: a file goes into storage, and then the file is retrieved. But that’s not how memory works. We’re closer with that metaphor than we used to be, but it’s still not quite right.

Our understanding of science and computers has informed how we think about the brain, the nervous system, and the body. There isn’t really a separation between mind and body. The neurons in your body are the same kind of stuff as the neurons in your brain. They all have different functions, but the structure is the same.

So, when we start talking about memory, I want to encourage people, first and foremost, not to think that your version must be the absolute truth. Your version gets to be your version.

If you’re a writer telling your own story, it’s fine if you want to hear how other people recall things. But your version is going to be charged, and that’s part of how your brain works with memory—through your experience.

I’m trying to avoid getting into things like the posterior cingulate sitting right next to the parietal lobes—but that’s actually true. The part of your brain that navigates narrative memory sits right next to the part that regulates emotion. So, your emotions become part of the dance of creating memory.

When that happens, the memory gets a flavor. It’s kind of like you marinated it in juice or wine. The memory and the emotion that goes with it become fused. Where the memory gets stored, how it gets stored, and the quality it’s given all matter—especially when you retrieve it later, or even if it stays in the unconscious.

For me, one of the most important things is not just understanding this but allowing it: your version of something is still true for you, even if it doesn’t match other versions.

Several years ago, there was a lot of research into memory because scientists found that memory is so suggestible that eyewitness testimony no longer carries the same weight in court as it used to. It’s actually not hard to change someone’s memory of an event by leading them with questions—even unintentionally.

You can repeat something often enough and change the image the brain creates of the event. For example, in police interrogations, an officer might say, “When you saw the car, what were you doing?”

The witness might say, “I was standing on the corner. I saw the car come in. I saw it hit the pedestrian.”

Then the officer says, “Okay, so you were standing on the corner, and you saw the car come in. When that red car came down the street, what did you think?”

They didn’t say it was a red car—the interrogator did. Whether it was true or not, now there’s a red car in the memory. The more that gets repeated, the more it becomes part of the memory: I saw the red car. When I saw the red car, I saw the man jump out of the way, but it still swerved, and then the red car sped away.

That’s how the person will remember it—forever. It gets reinforced with emotion: the emotion of being interrogated, of witnessing something terrible, of being seen and having someone care about what you’re reporting. All that gets braided into memory.

So, while I want to encourage people not to treat their memories as gospel facts, I also want them to allow that their memory gets to be their memory.

If you’re worried about writing a memoir because your Aunt Sally is going to hate it since you said something bad about her—too bad. It’s your memory. You’re entitled to it. You have your own version, and it doesn’t have to be computer-generated truth.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [10:14]
What I love is that you’re sharing many things I’ve been teaching for a long time, right? When we think about memoir, we’re not talking about capital-T Truth that is 100% factual and provable. Of course, if you’re a memoirist, you want to do your research so you’re writing in a fair and balanced way. But what we’re really looking at is your emotional truth.

As you’re writing, you are changing your memory—just the act of writing does that. I sometimes encounter memoirists who say, “Well, maybe it’s not good to write about my memories because it’s going to change them.” But when you’re trying to come to an emotional truth—especially one that integrates and settles something inside your body, which I feel is the power and magic of memoir, both for you as the writer and for your reader—that’s a wonderful thing.

I also love that you pointed out how our understanding of the brain and memory is shaped by our understanding of science and the metaphors we use. I want to add another layer that’s part of the lexicon for many people who’ve experienced trauma: The Body Keeps the Score.

There’s a lot of controversy around that book right now, and some of that controversy, I believe, is about the author, Bessel van der Kolk, rather than the concepts themselves. I’m curious what you think about that.

I’m sorry, I’m not trying to ramble, but I feel like this is another layer of how our understanding evolves. And when it comes to recovered memories—which you refer to as reconstituted memories, a concept I really love—some people say memories can’t be stored in the body, that if you don’t remember it, it isn’t actually inside you. And I take issue with that.

Stacey Simmons [12:16]
I agree with you. I don’t think that’s true at all. And look, Bessel van der Kolk—like most people—has some baggage. I don’t know enough about his baggage to feel qualified to comment on it.

But the book, when it came out and for a decade after, was groundbreaking. It changed how people think about trauma, and I think that, in and of itself, is really helpful. I don’t think we should slam the work. Granted, like I said, I don’t know all the baggage, but, you know—straight white man in psychiatry for 30 years at Harvard—yeah, sure, there’s probably something there. Fine.

But the ideas themselves—and pairing them with the work of people like Dan Siegel and Peter Levine, who’ve done so much work around presence in the body—you can’t undo the impact that’s had. And that impact has largely been good.

I do think we store things in our body in ways that science hasn’t yet figured out how to explain. I think it’s that simple.

I had an experience I can’t explain any other way. When I was 26, one of my ovaries ruptured. I had terrible consequences for several years after that—hormonal issues, weight gain, not having a period. After years of trying to figure it out, and not having had a period for a year, nobody was able to help me.

One of my doctors finally said, “Why don’t you try acupuncture? Because nothing else is working, and the next step would be coring out pieces of your ovaries—and I don’t want to go there.”
 And I said, “Yeah, I don’t want to do that either.”

So, I found an acupuncturist in New Orleans—acupuncture wasn’t popular at the time; it was really off the beaten path. He placed the needles in all the usual places and said, “I can help you, but it’s going to take several sessions a week for several weeks.”
 At that point, I just needed to feel better.

On the third treatment, he placed a needle over my left ovary. The ovary that had ruptured was on the right side. I already had needles all over my body.

When he put that one in, I had this unbelievable experience: all the memories of every bad sexual experience, every bad relationship, every romantic betrayal just downloaded into my consciousness all at once. It was like a rush. My body was crying before I even realized I was crying.

And I had a period the next day—after not having had one for a year.

So, was the memory in the body? I don’t know. Was it triggered by something energetic he touched with his needle? I don’t know. We’re now discovering entire lymph networks in the body that we didn’t even know existed. Is that connected somehow? I don’t know.

What I do know is that science isn’t sophisticated enough yet to describe many of our experiences, and that’s good enough for me. I believe memory is in the body, or at least implicates the body. The body isn’t separate from the brain and mind.

I’ve seen this firsthand in my own experience, and in therapy with clients—watching people feel the need to move parts of their body when they remember something and then feeling better afterward.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [15:40]
I’m right there with you. I’ve had very similar experiences.

I also think about the book What Happened to You?—I’m blanking on the co-author’s name right now, but it’s by Oprah Winfrey and another author, and I’ll put it in the show notes for everyone. I think it’s one of the best explanations of what happens when trauma occurs.

So much of it is about how input from the environment hits the brainstem, and then all these physiological responses happen in the body before you even have a chance to think, oh my gosh, I’m having a fear response or a trauma response. That awareness comes last.

Stacey Simmons [16:20]
Well, and it has to be that way because of how the brain works.

If you think about the brain, the signal comes up through the spinal cord, hits the cerebellum, and then moves toward the forebrain where your cognitive processes live. The signal doesn’t have time to go all the way to the frontal cortex for you to decide what to do.

Instead, it activates the cerebellum and the motor and visual cortex, and it goes to the auditory and olfactory parts of your brain—so you have all the data you need to move now. You can figure it out later. The frontal cortex is the last stop.

The signal doesn’t have time to go there and then come back. So, we respond immediately based on the pathway of the signal itself.

When trauma is occurring—or when something is very frightening—the brain actually shuts down access to the frontal cortex. Most of what’s happening is happening at the level of the amygdala, the posterior cingulate cortex, and the midbrain structures: the parietal lobe, hippocampus—everything you need to move fast and survive.

If the trauma is severe, the brain can block narrative storage altogether. The memory isn’t stored in a narrative way; it’s stored in fragments. Movement gets stored in the motor cortex, smell in the olfactory areas, location data in the hippocampus and PCC.

That’s what happens in PTSD. When a similar stimulus appears, all those areas light up at once, and the person has little to no conscious awareness of what’s happening because there’s no story—just experience. It feels like it’s happening again.

Modalities like EMDR and brainspotting can help move that experience into the frontal cortex so it becomes narrative. But fundamentally, the brain is brilliant and efficient. It keeps us alive—and sane—by not forcing us, in the moment, to make meaning out of something that could kill us.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [18:47]
Yes. We need those instantaneous reactions to survive. And because of that—someone once explained this to me as a kind of hippocampal bypass—we lose access to the thinking brain in those moments.

That’s why people say things like, “I was so angry” or “I was so frightened I couldn’t think.” You’re in pure reaction mode.

You did a beautiful job explaining why traumatic memories are so fractured. There’s no story—just disparate pieces. That can be incredibly disorienting and make people question their own experiences.

So, I want to start with this question. For listeners who’ve had traumatic experiences and are trying to write about them—and who feel like, I have this piece and that piece, but I don’t know what it means—what can we do?

What can we do therapeutically, or even just in the writing itself, to create narrative around these fractured pieces in a way that’s supportive and healthy?

Because I always say: just writing about something traumatic isn’t automatically healing. If you don’t make new meaning, you can retraumatize yourself and get stuck in a trauma loop that reinforces itself in the brain.

Stacey Simmons [20:32]
Yes, absolutely—avoiding retraumatization is so important, and I’m really glad you teach that.

One of the hardest things, honestly, about being both a therapist and a writer is that people think if they just uncover the thing, they’ll be healed. They believe revelation equals resolution—and that’s not how it works.

I have a longtime client who experienced severe sexual trauma growing up. We worked for years on building the resilience and ego strength she’d need to tell her family that if they continued to associate with her abuser, she wouldn’t participate anymore.

I kept warning her: they are not going to be your champions. This will have ripple effects. There will be additional trauma.

She believed they’d rally around her. Unfortunately, it played out very much as I expected. They didn’t support her, and she was devastated—not just by their response, but by the shattering of her hope that doing the “right” thing would be rewarded.

This is similar to what happens when people believe that unveiling trauma will automatically heal them. Meaning still has to be made. You still have to give it meaning.

So, what do we do? First, yes—I’m a therapist, and I think therapy is almost always helpful. EMDR is often very helpful. Brainspotting can be very helpful. Somatic Experiencing can be helpful too, though sometimes it can feel like too much for some people. Not because it isn’t effective, but because it can be intense.

In writing, I don’t recommend a straight “Dear diary, this is what happened to me” approach. Instead, come at it obliquely.

Let’s use a neutral example like a car accident. If you remember being in the car before the fire department arrived, ask yourself: What would I have seen from the outside? If I were an observer, what might I have witnessed?

Then ask: What would I hope someone would have seen from the outside?

Those two questions help you understand your needs around that event. What did I want people to do? And what did I experience them doing?

From there, you can move toward a deeper healing question: Was it enough?

Sometimes the answer is no. But if you know that, you can begin to unpack why—and that’s where meaning-making and integration begin.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [23:37]
I love that, and that aligns so beautifully with some of the things that I teach people. Because the first thing I tell everyone is: you need to understand your resources, right? When we think about EMDR, the first step is resourcing—helping someone feel safe. So not diving into the deep end of whatever your traumas are is really important. Dip your toe in the water of storytelling with something more neutral, something with less charge, because that will be really helpful.

And in terms writers might understand: one part of what you said—what did you hope happened?—I’ll get people to write that. Write a speculative scene as if you got everything you needed, and notice what that’s like, because that alone can be very healing.

But I also love what you said about stepping back. An exercise I’ll give people is this: write it in the third person, as if you are the director observing what’s happening, versus the person in the car experiencing it. That can teach you a lot, regardless of what point of view you ultimately choose, because part of the integration process is understanding what happened, what you needed to happen, and then that third part—where the sting is.

And that’s the reason resourcing is so important. Because when you confront what you didn’t get, you have to have the resources in place already to deal with the fact that you will be destabilized. You will question everything for a period of time. You will have to feel deep and sometimes very painful feelings in order to get to the other side. It’s very much that going through—you have to.

Stacey Simmons [25:17]
It’s grief. And we’re taught in our culture that grief is something that’s only for when someone dies. It’s not for the loss of a capacity, an option, an ability, or a hope. But grief is appropriate for all of those things.

And being able to sit with grief is, in my opinion, the most important skill we learn as writers. Because it means I can tell my story in an unsentimental way, yes, without an expectation that you validate me.

And if I can do that, then I’m really writing something right. Because I’m not looking for you to tell me it’s good. I’m not looking for you to tell me it’s right. I’m not looking for you to say, “Yes, those are the facts.”

I’m just telling you: this is my experience. And whether you like it or not, whether you agree or not, this is how it affected me. And that gives other people permission to say the same thing.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [26:16]
I love that. And I’m going to restate something you said for everyone, because it’s so, so important: you know your book is done—you know you’re ready to send it out—when you can tell your story without an expectation of validation.

You do not need something from your reader or from the world. You can just own your truth and share it as a form of experience, strength, and hope. And then people will get out of it whatever they need.

Stacey Simmons [26:45]
It’s not yours anymore. Once it’s not yours.

And it’s so hard, because people want to be understood. They want to make a difference in other people’s lives, and they want their story to be validated. But even if it gets into every person’s hands who loves you, and they read it, they’re all going to take something different away from it. Yes—and that’s okay.

That’s what writing is for, because your book is now theirs. It’s their version merging with yours, and it’s no longer a singular thing.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [27:14]
And that truly is the gift of storytelling.

I love how we’ve gone down this rabbit hole to think about traumatic memories and what we can do with them to create integration—which I think is the most important step. So, we have that work.

But then there are the things we remember and have narratives around. How are those memories stored, just at a high level? I know we could go down deep rabbit holes, because you did in your book and your other book—which I loved—and we’re going to get into that.

But what do we need to know about how those memories are stored so we can work with them?

Stacey Simmons [27:50]
Well, there’s short-term memory and there’s long-term memory, right? Long-term memory is stored by repetition. The more you hear the story, the more you tell the story, the more it gets reinforced.

It’s almost like adding bricks to a wall. The first time you tell the story is a brick. The second time is another brick. The third time is another brick. And the more bricks you have—and the more similar in color they are—you get the tone of the story, right?

So, if somebody comes in and tries to smash your story, it’s hard to take the wall down. The more repeated it is, the more singular and strong it is in your memory.

And it’s not just images and narrative. It’s tone. It’s the feeling of the season. It’s smells. What really made me crazy about neuroscience is that the hippocampus sits right next to the olfactory bulb, which sits right next to the amygdala. They’re all tucked into this little part in the middle of your skull—right here, behind your ears.

That means smell, memory, emotion, and fear are tightly connected in your brain. So, if, for example, you were abused by your dad every time he cut the grass, then every time you smell fresh-cut grass, you want to run. That’s why—because those systems are so tightly connected, and the memory gets stored right alongside those structures.

So, the more repetitive a story is, the more concrete the memory will feel. If it’s a story you don’t tell yourself—if it’s a story nobody wants to talk about—then it’s also going to carry a tone of shame.

And you have to be really cognizant of what else is being repeated internally, too. If you’re perseverating or ruminating on something and it always has a tone of shame, or always has a tone of anger, then it’s going to be really hard to separate that in writing—or in retrieving the memory.

So, the kinds of exercises you’re talking about become really important. How do you third-person it? How do you take the 30,000-foot view? How do you look at it through a telescope from a mountaintop far away?

Long-term memory is stored by repetition.

But it’s also important for people to think about this: if you have a memory of something you haven’t looked at in a long time… let me talk a little bit about developmental psychology.

The brain doesn’t have strong hippocampal structure early on, and the hippocampus is necessary for creating memory. If the hippocampus doesn’t work properly—if it’s damaged, or there’s been a stroke—the capacity to create memory can go away.

Children’s hippocampus isn’t fully online until around seven years old. I have clients all the time who say, “Oh my God, Dr. Sims, I can’t remember my childhood. Did something horrible happen?” And I’m like, “No—you’re human. Your hippocampus probably, like most humans, wasn’t fully online until around seven.”

They’ll say, “Well, I remember something from when I was five.” Yes—but do you remember everything from when you were five?

So, memory before around seven is usually stored because it’s highly charged—fear, joy, delight, anger. Those intense emotions can force the memory through the hippocampus and into the frontal lobe.

So, if you have a memory from early life—and this can be true after seven too—where you’re not sure about it, but it’s a sensation: trust it.

That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to understand the objective facts of what happened. But you might have a memory from childhood of an experience, and it might involve an imaginary friend, or a deceased relative, or something like that. You don’t have to treat that like it isn’t real.

It doesn’t matter how your brain made sense of what was happening. What matters is that you have the memory of the experience and the sensation—what it prompted in you, what came forward in you. That’s what matters, not the objective truth of Was there really a ghost in the house? or did my relative really hurt me? or Did XYZ really happen the way I remember it?

It doesn’t matter if it happened in the way you want to remember it versus the way you feel it—because how you feel it is the truth. The little-kid brain didn’t have language or neural structure to give it the meaning you’d give it as an adult.

So, if the memory is, “There were monsters in my house, and every two weeks the monsters would disappear, and when they came back, they’d eat me”—yeah, that really happened. Now, were they monsters? Don’t know. They were monstrous. Did they eat you? Probably not—you’re still here. Did they fundamentally hurt you in some way? Clearly.

So, the brain will give you symbolism when it can’t fill in facts, and that is just as valid as objective reality.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [32:58]
Yeah, and I love how you shared that, because for writers, this example of the monsters is so helpful. If it felt like there were monsters in your house, you could write a speculative piece about what it was like to live in a house with monsters. You don’t have to worry about, oh my gosh, is this factually true?

What do you remember? What was the feeling? The tone? What was that experience like? And then, from a metaphorical place, you can begin to ask: What sense do I want to make of this now? What can I do with the hurt and the pain? Because that’s what really matters—or the joy. It doesn’t always have to be hurt and pain. It can also be the joy.

I’m curious about memories before the age of seven, before the hippocampus is generally fully online. I have some clients I’ve worked with, and I also happen to be someone who has not been diagnosed with hyperthymesia—I don’t know if you’re familiar with that term. That’s when someone has unusually accurate recall of their life, especially early life.

I’m a trauma survivor. I have an ACEs score of nine out of ten. I don’t need to say more than that—listeners, if you’re curious what that means, you can look it up. That’s my experience, and it begins very early.

My first memories were from when I was about 18 months old. I said my first word at six months. I was speaking in sentences by nine months and very intelligibly by the age of one. That’s extremely unusual.

And my memories aren’t only traumatic. I can tell you about playing by myself in my room when I was very young. Those are the memories I look at closely—the ones where I’m alone. I can describe rooms in my grandmother’s house in detail and ask, “Did they have this lamp? Did they do this?” And those memories feel like mine—they weren’t told to me.

I’m careful about that, because when we think about early memory, there’s also what people tell us layered on. For example, my grandparents took me to see The Rescuers when I was three years old. I loved that movie. I’m sure there’s something about that experience that’s part of this.

But I also remember seeing the beginning of Star Wars as we were leaving the drive-in. I have this memory of seeing the stars on the screen. No one in my family would have cared about that—certainly not my grandparents. They just said, “No, that’s a movie for adults. You’re not seeing it,” even though I really wanted to because I’d seen the commercials.

So, I looked it up, and sure enough, in 1977, Star Wars and The Rescuers were playing at the drive-in at the same time. That was legit.

So, for those of us who have experiences like this—and I’m thinking of very specific people I’ve talked to—what do we do with these kinds of memories? Can we trust their accuracy?

Stacey Simmons [35:47]
Trust them. Absolutely trust them.

It’s really interesting, because you have all this other correlating data that suggests you should trust them, right? You were talking early. That means you had strong recall even then, because word-finding is another form of memory.

If you were finding words at nine months, at a year old, and producing them, that means the internal structure was there. So, I’d say that’s correlative evidence that you can have faith in those memories.

And you know what—if down the line you discover you were off by something like, “Oh, it wasn’t when we went to see The Rescuers, it was when we went to see Digby, the Giant Dog”—okay. Just because memories are clustered together doesn’t mean they aren’t true.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [36:35]
And I love how you said, “clustered together,” because when we think about memory and storytelling, some things cluster together because of emotional tone, because of what was important at the time, or because of how they were stored.

So, it’s really important to be curious about memory and to understand that memory—correct me if I’m wrong—is a story we’re telling ourselves.

Stacey Simmons [37:00]
Oh yes—absolutely. That’s exactly what memory is. It’s almost always the story we’re telling ourselves.

That’s one reason it’s so dangerous to be in a relationship with someone who wants to control the narrative—or in a political moment like the one we’re in now, where systems are trying to control the narrative. No. Trust your eyes. Write it down.

I was talking to some college students not too long ago, and they were rightly asking what writers should do. I said: keep a journal.

It doesn’t have to be “Dear Diary, I saw this today.” It can be: “This is what my day was like today.” It matters. Because when this moment becomes something you write about later—or a historical moment—you’ll want your own record of what it felt like.

Capturing the experience is the writer’s job. So, journal, journal, journal.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [37:51]
And I’ll add, as someone who can be a little scattered sometimes: if you can, try to keep one journal and date your entries.

What I’ve learned to do—and I’ll share this as part of my practice—is label the front of a journal with the date range it covers. A friend of mine, Katie Rose Guest Pryal—shout-out to you—taught me that.

That way, when I go back, I can orient myself in time. Because honestly, sometimes I just need to write and grab whatever notebook is nearby. That’s just how I roll. But dating and labeling journals has been really helpful.

So, we’ve talked about the memories we can access and how that works. I want to wrap up by talking about reconstituted memories—those memories where maybe you sense something is there, or maybe you don’t, and then suddenly it comes into awareness.

In the broader conversation, these are often called “recovered memories.” If you start studying this, that’s the language you’ll encounter. Can you explain what we need to know about reconstituted memories—and what we can do with them if that’s part of our story?

Stacey Simmons [39:14]
I want to be very respectful here, because it’s critical to treat reconstituted—or recovered—memories with as much delicacy as possible. Memory is so plastic that if we’re not careful, the implication becomes: It didn’t happen, or That’s not real. And we don’t get to do that.

But we do have to look at the process.

To reconnect the dots of what we’ve talked about today: your memory—especially a reconstituted memory—pulls from many kinds of data: visual, motor, auditory, somatic, emotional. It tries to make sense of all of that.

It’s important to hold this tenderly, not with a kung fu grip. It’s like holding a bird or a hummingbird—you want it to heal in your hands. You don’t want to crush it, and you don’t need to cage it either. Memory is fluid.

I did my PhD in social psychology, studying modern-day witch hunts. One of the cases I researched was the McMartin Preschool case during the Satanic Panic in Manhattan Beach in the 1980s. That case is legally important because it’s all about memory.

A mother with mental health issues brought her three-year-old to the ER with a diaper rash and asked if he might have been molested. The doctor said it looked like a diaper rash, but her fear escalated. She told other parents, and panic spread.

Then, when children were interviewed, they were questioned by psychologists with specific religious beliefs and vested interests in finding something evil. Through leading questions, memories were created.

Even decades later, many of those children still believed they’d been abused in satanic rituals. Meanwhile, the accused spent years in jail without charges and later sued the county.

I share this to emphasize how careful we must be.

A recovered memory can be placed there—context given to you by others. A reconstituted memory, on the other hand, emerges from your own psyche, your symbol-making, your meaning-making.

So, ask: what pieces of this feel true in my lived experience? What moved in me when this surfaced? What meaning am I now questioning or reworking?

You don’t have to know that the narrative itself is factually true to know the experience is true.

That’s very different from having a group memory reinforced by others over years. Separate these: what is your lived experience? How did you reconnect with it? What did you feel in your body? What meaning are you making now?

That, to me, honors reconstituted memory in a way that’s both truthful and careful.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [44:12]
I also love that you touched on the big controversy around recovered memories. In the 1980s, you pointed to a very specific case, which is a great example. But there are other cases where therapists have implanted memories—whether they meant to or not—just by the kinds of questions they asked and how they asked them, which gave people the sense that they were abused when maybe they weren’t.

So yes, we always want to believe victims. And one of our responsibilities—as part of my training, at least—is to not implant ideas in people. And we also want to be careful not to inadvertently implant ideas in ourselves.

I want to name a couple of ways I’ve been processing all this beautiful information you shared. Did you listen to Hysterical? It’s a podcast, and it’s wonderful—I’ll put it in the show notes. It’s about a hysteria that happened in a town in upstate New York, and it really questions the whole idea of memory.

It explores hysteria as contagion—which is a real thing—and asks whether there was some kind of environmental contamination at a school that created a mysterious illness, or whether it was hysteria. They don’t answer the question definitively, but they present the evidence, which I really love.

So, these things can happen. We can have hysterias that become contagious in our memories and in our lives.

And on the flip side, our brains crave narrative so much that in the middle of an experience, we will create one.

I had an experience in 2012 when there was a relatively powerful earthquake here in Virginia—powerful for us, at least. It was in the fives. It wasn’t catastrophic, but it caused some damage.

I was sitting at an outdoor café with a friend, and I heard a sound that felt like a really loud truck rumbling down the road. I felt the vibration immediately. My mind went to, what’s going on with that truck? Why is that truck so loud?

So, my brain grabbed the data and created a story about some runaway truck nearby. Then I realized the table was shaking and the windows of the building across the street were rattling. Suddenly it made sense: Oh—I’m in the middle of an earthquake.

That experience was such a powerful teacher for me about how we’re constantly trying to make sense of what’s happening—and how some of the stories we create in the moment are inaccurate.

Stacey Simmons [47:05]
Yes—exactly. It’s based on the data sets we have available to us in the moment.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [47:09]
And so I have a pretty powerful reconstituted memory. I know it’s mine. I’m not going to share the details here because it’s not necessary—and because it’s part of the book I’m writing.

But even in the book, I’m careful with it. There are pieces I know and pieces I don’t know. There’s what I suspect is true, and there’s also my awareness that I can never fully know the truth, because some things just aren’t knowable.

So, what do I do with that? That’s the whole journey I take people on.

Stacey Simmons [47:42]
I would ask you to trust it.

And I’m saying that because I want to be clear: as someone coming on here to talk about memory, I don’t want to give the impression that we should never trust memory.

There are two classic psychology stories that speak to this, and you probably encountered them in your training.

The first is from one of the fathers of modern psychology, Pierre Janet, who was working in France in the late 1800s at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. He had a patient with full amnesia—she didn’t know anything about her life.

Every day he saw her, and every day he had to reintroduce himself. Yet she knew the layout of the hospital. She knew when dinner was. She knew where her room was. So, she wasn’t disconnected from the world—she just didn’t remember who she was or her personal history.

One day, Janet ran a test. Since he had to reintroduce himself every day, he put a small straight pin in his hand and shook her hand so that it pricked her.

The next day, she refused to shake his hand. She didn’t remember who he was. She didn’t remember why he was there. But she knew not to touch his hand.

Something was being processed at the level of the unconscious that was meaningful and protective. It gave her enough context to keep herself safe.

The second story is almost a counterpoint. Freud trained with Pierre Janet at the Salpêtrière. When he began experimenting with the “talking cure,” many of the women he worked with reported sexual abuse—often by brothers, fathers, uncles, or other powerful men.

This wasn’t a hospital for poor people. These were women from wealthy families—the best families in Europe. Freud was so disturbed by the idea that so many respectable men could have abused these women that he decided it must be delusion.

He concluded that it wasn’t possible for this many women to have been abused and that their stories were products of mental illness. This belief became foundational to his theory—that women sometimes sexualize their distress.

So, I share these stories to say two things. First, there are powerful forces—social, cultural, personal—that will choose to turn away from our lived experiences because they don’t fit their worldview. We need to be prepared for that. And we also need to remember this when we read other people’s stories.

These two examples sit in tension with each other. But together, they show how controversial memory is. It’s not something to treat lightly—like, “Oh, it’s just what I remember.” Memory is powerful.

Treat it with care—not fragile like a flower, but fragile like a bomb.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [51:11]
And that is a gorgeous metaphor for us to end on: fragile like a bomb—that is memory.

So, thank you so much for this enriching, enlivening, and deeply important conversation around memory. I am so grateful to you. Thank you for being here today.

Stacey Simmons [51:31]
Thank you. Thank you for having me back. It’s always fun to talk with you. We have such great conversations—I could be here for the next three hours just soaking it up. So, thank you.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [51:40]
As well. And listeners, just be aware that there will be one more conversation with Stacy, where we’re going to dive into psychedelics. So, until next time, stay tuned. And thank you again, Stacy, for being here.

Thank you.

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