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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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Explanation C (how trauma actually works): Jane Doe experienced a traumatic event and in the immediate aftermath rationalized a narrative where the trauma did not occur because denial is normal response to trauma, only later working through her memories and accepting what happened.

I take it that’s why we should also try to recover repressed memories, it just takes time to work through traumatic events that might have never occurred!

This specious argument hews very close to the repressed-memory debacle and hosting it is discreditable given what we understand about how memories are formed and retrieved. It is an incredible indictment on therapy culture that it is able to wear science as a skinsuit while advancing such ludicrous ideas if you can with a straight face say that this is “how trauma actually works”.

Evaluating events later based on different mores and attitudes is different, but that is hardly what you are offering.

This explanation poses such incredibly irresolvable issues for how people interact that it leads to a very different society than the one we now live in, and in the "Islam is right about women" direction.

Is it even theoretically possible to falsify a claim like that? I am unaware of any other circumstances in which memory of an event gets better over time.