One of the unfortunate legacies that my generation, gen X, has passed on to the millennials and gen Z, is the idea that therapy has no side effects . However, just like many other medical treatments , there can be negative effects . For example, in some cases psychotherapy can be linked with a worsening of psychiatric symptoms , increased anxiety and false memories .
Author
- Lawrence Patihis
Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of Portsmouth
My team’s recent paper investigated the effect of evaluating a parent on the basis of their emotions and memories of those emotions in childhood. Our findings, which show these kinds of reappraisals can distort memories, may have implications for talking therapies that explore clients’ childhoods.
Previous research has shown that as people’s thoughts change, their memory of emotions seems to do so too. In 1997 psychology professor Linda Levine found that people misremembered how they had felt when Ross Perot withdrew from the 1992 US presidential race, when they were asked to recall their emotions after the election. Psychologist Martin Safer found in his 2010 study that some people misremembered how much grief they felt when their spouse died, and this bias was related to their current evaluation of the death.
In my team’s study , published in Psychological Reports, we found that writing out recent examples of participants’ mothers’ behaviour could lead them to reappraise their mother. It also seemed to change the participants’ current emotions towards their mother. And most surprisingly, it seemed to subtly affect the participants’ memories of emotions from childhood.
Our participants were split into four groups and given different writing prompts. The first group were asked to give recent examples of their mother showing a positive attribute. For example: “Please write three to four sentences giving the most recent examples of when your mother showed competence (effectiveness) in her life.”
The second group were asked to give examples of their mother showing a lack of those same attributes. A third group were asked to give examples of a former teacher showing a lack of positive attributes and the last group were given no writing tasks.
The participants were then given questionnaires asking them to evaluate their mothers and about their memories of their emotions toward their mothers.
We found that these reappraisals affected participants’ current happiness and interest towards their mother. Reappraisal also affected their memories of happiness from childhood.
In these experiments, we slightly nudged people’s appraisals of their mothers. But this may happen in a bigger way in the real world. Talking to a therapist for years in a way that reconstructs a client’s childhood, and then linking this to their problems, could cause more significant reappraisals of their parents. What therapy clients may not realise, nor perhaps even their therapist, is that these reevaluations could be changing their memories of childhood.
Warning signs
I believe that clients should be aware of the side effects of therapy, and there should be a line or two on the malleability of memory on the forms people sign before therapy begins.
It would also help if all therapists were taught in their training about the ways memory can be distorted. Indeed, research on infantile and childhood amnesia suggests that humans seem to remember little of early childhood, leaving us all vulnerable to reappraising that period.
We might debate whether therapists should be making negative comments about parents. Perhaps in cases of abuse, some might argue it could help. But in many other types of clients, therapists making negative comments could have a powerful effect that far exceeds our experimental nudges. For example: “Wow, your mother sounds like a controlling type,” if repeated enough by therapists, might cause reappraisals and family rifts over time.
In some cases, reevaluating your parents in a positive direction can lead to better relationships over time. This may result in the real joy of childhood being better remembered and appreciated. Positive reevaluations may actually be fair and moving towards accuracy. For example in cases where 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, glossing over that might increase the risk of repeating the same mistakes as you raise your own children.
I am a strong believer in living an examined life. People should be free to practice psychotherapy, and clients should be welcome to seek out therapies that dig deep into parental and childhood themes. In the same way that people who need X-rays should get them despite the small risks, people who need therapy should take it.
Better to be as accurate as you can be, as we live fully examined and rich lives.
