All the Lies They Did Not Tell

by Pablo Trincia

After all, they’d been living in an upside-down world where the people who were supposed to love and protect them were actually trying to hurt them. And even though they were old enough to distinguish between right and wrong, they still didn’t have all the intellectual and emotional tools to understand and articulate what had happened.

What all these experts seemed to overlook was that the children’s stories could have been contaminated in some way. Someone could have planted a seed in their memories. It then blossomed and grew over time until it devoured their real experiences, substituting them with something that was partially or completely artificial. This phenomenon has been studied for a long time in the rest of the world, but it remains underestimated, especially among psychologists who aren’t familiar with the research on the mnemonic functions of the brain.

That’s the frightening part—the truly horrifying idea that what we think we know, what we believe with all our hearts, is not necessarily the truth.”