I am sure that we are all familiar with disagreements over some family anecdotes and especially those that don’t caste us in a very good light.

‘Do you remember when…..That’s not what happened…’

Granny Mable, has a very ‘clear memory’ about how little Billy swore at aunty Mable who swiped at him, knocking over Uncle Bob’s favourite Football trophy into the fish tank, causing consternation among the tropical angel fish.

This is not how Billy, now a father himself, remembers it at all. He remembers how he was always being picked on by his brother and how, yet again, he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Furthermore, Billy feels that he has always been in the wrong place, at the wrong time and played ‘second fiddle’ to his brother, now the successful banker.

So, he now feels, mightily put out when, yet again, life through storytelling is reminding him of this ‘unfairness’. He feels an impulse to defend himself. He had been ‘hooked’.

The truth however is that Granny Mable and Billy are probably both right. They simply remember the same incident from their different perspectives.

Over time, these two sets of parallel memories have become ‘bedded in’ as each person ‘played and replayed’ them to themselves and others (who would listen), over the years.

The same events had of course been experienced differently and these experiences had become each person’s memory of the event.

This is worth remember, when we challenge someone else’s version of events as not being true because it is different to our own.

They may have experienced the same event through very different representation filters (using different senses such as vision, smell, hearing, emotions) instantaneously deleting, distorting and generalising information to shape their story around how they perceive others, themselves and how they want the world to perceive others and themselves.

Simply put, a person’s map (of the world) created from how they experience events, is not the same as the territory, the fact (the world itself)

So, don’t let a fiction become the cause of conflict, family or otherwise.