Nothing’s Ever Forgotten

You may be familiar with our selective amnesia as we demonstrate that staggering ability to forget something that you said only that morning, or a contradictory comment we made just five minutes ago. The number of times, when we are exerting our manipulative hold over you, we will announce:-

“I cannot remember that.”

“I had forgotten to do it.”

“I don’t recall that being the case.”

“I do not remember ever agreeing to do that.”

“It slipped my mind as it was not important.”

“I have no memory of what you are talking about.”

In our customary manner it is designed to bewilder you and confuse you and of course to draw a response from you that provides us with fuel. Of course, when it comes to advancing our own agenda then our memory suddenly becomes elephantine. We cannot recall the conversation we had two days ago about you going out with friends this evening but we do remember telling you six months ago that we do not like kidney beans and you have used them in the meal on purpose, despite our clear assertion that we do not enjoy eating them. Our powers of recall become especially impressive when it comes to recounting everything that we have done for you. You will be familiar with refrains such as:-

“After everything I have done for you and then you do this.”

“All the support I have shown you in the past and you say that to me.”

“Let me tell you how many times I have taken you out.”

“If I can just remind you of how much I have actually contributed.”

We will then with stunning accuracy, or at least it appears that way, reel off all of the gifts we have given you, the various places we have taken you and all those delightful acts we carried out in order to seduce you. One after another we will recount times, dates and places as if we were reading them straight from our diaries. Of course because it is all about what we have done it is etched into our memories, ready to be called up at a moment’s notice and detailed to you.

It is not just our occasions of largesse and benevolence that are carved into our memories, our ability to call upon vast depositories of knowledge about your transgressions is similarly astonishing. We will remind you that you ate one extra biscuit from the tin that we did two weeks ago in order to reinforce our point that you are greedy. We are able to tell you how many times you have turned up late and spoilt the evening. We recall your failures, breaches, shortcomings and misdemeanours with remarkable accuracy just as if we were reading a charge sheet to you. Whilst it is true we do have considerable powers of memory, it is another illusory act on our behalf. When you are subjected to these tirades about how many times you have failed to do the right thing, you will be caught in our crossfire of manipulative wiles. Your own recall and critical thinking will be significantly impaired. The way we rattle off these instances without giving you time to think let alone respond leaves you disorientated and naturally we say all of these things in our imperious and authoritative manner. You accept we must be right because we say it with such certainty, with considerable conviction and you are now struggling to remember what you ate for dinner the previous evening, so with increasing resignation you accept what we are saying. The reality is that much of what we are accusing you of from our list of wrongs committed by you is fabricated. We pluck them out of thin air but they sound plausible because you vaguely remember us harping on a little while ago about the fact you did not have dinner on time. In fact on that last occasion that was a fabrication as well, but we do it so often you can no longer distinguish between reality and fallacy. Just as we plan.

Our tremendous memory banks are also put into use when we remember your various weaknesses and vulnerabilities. We probed you for them using our subtle techniques of questioning and the false exhibition of supposed interest and caring when we seduced you. Each instance whereby you admitted to or gave a hint of some weakness was always noted and carefully filed away ready to be drawn upon at a later stage and used against you. Often this is so subtle, both in collection and use, that you do not even notice, but where we might use the weakness with a lack of finesse you will find yourself amazed that we even knew this about you, let alone remembered it. We ensure we extract these vulnerabilities and carefully store them as they are each golden nuggets of oppression that we need to rely on when your downfall begins.

Although we may demonstrate a vagueness about certain events in our past and refer to those happenings in an amorphous manner should you press us about the distant times and our formative years, the reality is what happened then is never forgotten either. We wish they could be but those memories occasionally rise up at us from the rolling mists of the past and try to drag us back to that period which we would rather consign into the archives of our mind with the archive door closed and bolted shut and no index card filed for those instances. No, nothing is ever forgotten.