Revisionist History

Family Law, Emotionally Laden Decisions and Cats

This is the first (of perhaps many, we’ll see) guest posts to the Eel-Filled Hovercraft. This one is written by Amanda Bradley, who owns and runs Flat Fee Divorce Solutions. It draws on her 20+ years of experience practicing family law and really offers a useful applied perspective on issues around cognitive science and—inevitably—the interpretative powers of cats. Her opinions are her own—and, being a divorce lawyer, she naturally assumes they are correct. All editing I’ve done is light editing for format and presentation (no content). So here is her post…

Cats Are the Most Notorious Revisionists

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All history is revisionist. No matter how meticulous a storyteller we might believe ourselves to be, we are, after all, humans (or very talented cats, but this is a post for a different blog). Even when you have photos or videos created contemporaneously with the event, they are shot from a static angle. The rendering is based on the quality of the tools and the choices made of what to record and when.

Our fallible brain is only able to process some portion of the event, whether it be because we are hyper-focused on one particular portion of the happening, because we were a passive observer (Overman et al., 2018; Sridhar et al., 2023), or for any number of reasons. The smells, the imperceptible movements, and even the fleeting emotions all escape the cameras’ lens and the perception of the human observation.

Because our brains can only encode so much of any singular moment in time, when retold, our brains, our perfectly unreliable narrators, simply reconstruct what happened imperfectly, incompletely and often, incorrectly. When the event is one laden with negative emotional overtones, the recall is further hampered by out own bio-chemical processes that we have little control over.

History is no more than a re-telling, and with each re-telling, the story is re-shaped, warped and recodified. The neurons from which it came are rewired into a different pattern, ultimately changing the memory from which the story will emerge if retold again in the future. The narrator of the story cannot help it; it is simply how the human mind works. The story-telling modifications may be done without malice, without intent, but is a sign of the inherent limitations of the essential quality of being human. Thus, the story-teller is not a mere narrator or neutral archivist, but an editor, arranging and trimming the story to the listener, contextualizing and editorializing until the story told becomes coherent, even if the event being recalled was not what happened.

The Courtroom as the Theater of “Perfect” Memory

There are very few places where human memory is treated more authoritatively and relied on more for decision making than in a courtroom. And nowhere is this revisionism more stark. I have sat through hearings in which two spouses describe an event with such divergence one is left to wonder if they were even in the same relationship.

For one of them, their relationship, albeit not perfect, was stable and supportive until a rapid, unplanned disassembly occurred. For the other, the relationship was poisoned, perhaps by another, perhaps by the other person changing, slowly calcifying into a prison they courageously escaped. Each account is delivered with unwavering conviction, filled with emotionally charged adjectives, and with ultimate sincerity. Both stories are revisionist and neither is actually the objective truth.

What the law fails to realize is that human memory does not work like the file cabinets that multiply in law offices, where someone can pull out the correct folder and find the truth in black and white. Memory is not retrieval; it is the act of reconstruction and editing.

Imagine you are asked to recall a holiday dinner from years past. You might have some definite memories, such as a toddler yelling, or the taste of a dish, but your retelling is filling in context from other holiday dinners, borrowing from other’s stories, perhaps relying on pictures, and ultimately, creating a curated remix.

This is amplified in a divorce setting or in any other retelling of messy family relationships. Few, if any, human experiences tie so closely to one’s self-worth, and few endings sting as sharply as the end of a familial relationship. These endings cause anger, grief, and often hatred towards the other person, and these feelings become a self-defense mechanism, or worse. Thus, the teller has to edit to story to survive. And this can often involve (intentionally or not) recasting themselves as the sympathetic victim and the other person as the villain.

Law and the Futility of Seeking “THE Truth”

The legal system, for all of its flaws, has little patience for such nuance and little ability to incorporate this philosophical ambiguity. Judges concern themselves with statutes, burdens of proof and concrete questions: How much equity will be awarded to a spouse when the house is sold? Is child support being paid? What is the equitable division of the retirement accounts? Divorce court, and the professional participants in it, try to strip away the messy human side of the equation, translating the stories into very beige terms such as ‘maintenance’, ‘allocation of parental responsibilities’, and ‘equitable division of property’. In other words, getting to “THE Truth” of the why the clients are in the courtroom is often not something a divorce Judge or lawyers care much about.

Clients, of course, often do not see it this way. Many people hold a belief that the courtroom exists to validate their truth and that their truth is “THE Truth”. The holder of “THE Truth” believes when the other person testifies, that their testimony is riddled with lies and wonders how could anyone believe them. They alone posses "THE Truth" and any conflicting story is false. Of course, the same is true about the other person.

Others begin re-telling their story endlessly, embellishing it until it becomes their identity. Over time, they stop simply telling the story and become the story, integrating it into their personality and identity. This entrenches the teller into a position where they will never consider that there is another participant in their story. When this happens, the teller cannot leave their story easily because it is a central facet of their personality, and to change the story would require them to admit that some part of them is wrong, which is simply not a common occurrence.

The law is trying to remove itself from this very problem. In the past 20 years, most states have revised their laws in an attempt to remove the messy story telling from the end of family relationships¹. There is little story to be told about a retirement account balance—the numbers are black and white. Likewise, many states start with the presumption that both parents should have time with the children², and some go further and start with the presumption that each should have near equal time³. Whether or not this ultimately succeeds is another matter.

Beyond Divorce

History is a revisionist story, based on the clues and information recorded, (usually) told from the viewpoint of the victorious one. But in divorce (or the end of other relationships) there is no victor. The way the story is recounted now says more about who the teller is now than the person who experienced the event. Memory is our autobiography, edited in real time, that betrays identity we cling to: victim, survivor or passive observer.

These stories are not harmless. They shape the decisions we have to make. When a person, whether a client in a courtroom or otherwise, has to use these stories and their self-created identity, their future decisions are colored. The story we tell becomes the blueprint of the next, shaping decisions such as destroying family ties, adopting a winner takes all mentality, and occasionally, driving people to bankruptcy or suicide.

Anecdotally, I have read cases where clients fight for years, continuing to fight over a trivial piece of property now long lost⁴ or relitigating a decision made in haste a decade prior⁵. Alternatively, they spend years in emotional turmoil, thousands on therapy, and unable to live a complete life. They choose to do this not because they needed to, but because their revised personal narrative demanded victory at every move—and without it, an essential part of their personality would be destroyed. Revisionism is not harmless; it has a gravitational pull that warps the trajectory of a life and colors future decision making. Our emotions are the co-authors of this journey and influence the future decisions we make and inflict on others.

And Cats

Which brings me back to cats. Cats are the ultimate revisionists—sorry (not sorry) dog people. If you accidentally step on your cat’s tail, to the cat, you are a monster and have always been a monster—at least until they inevitably fall asleep. Leave the house, and you are never coming back; return and your reappearance is accepted without question. My cats could convince you that they have never, ever been fed, much less petted or given a treat. But if I give them treats and snuggles, I am the greatest food giver and feline benefactor in all of feline history.

Cats do not forget; they curate their reality with ruthless efficiency, living in the now. Perhaps, in this way, they are wiser than their humans. They remind us that the past is irretrievable, our memories of it always incomplete, and never the blueprint for the future unless we allow it to be. Our stories are fallible, emotionally charged, and endlessly edited. What matters is not how precisely we can reconstruct the past but how we choose to live with its slipperiness.

In the messiness of human relationships, more so in their messy endings, we might take a lesson from our wise feline rulers: focus on the now, give yourself a treat, and take a nap to forget the then. Otherwise, the stories we revise and retell risk becoming not just our past, but an unshakeable part of our identity and the blueprint for a future we never intended.

1. Compare 750 ILCS 5/401(a)(1) (West 2008), listing the gourds for divorce, including: adultery, impotence, desertion of the marriage, habitual intoxication, and abuse, with 750 ILCS 5/401(a) (West 2024), removing all grounds except the finding of irreconcilable differences. Further, it is presumed that if spouses have lived apart for six months or more, that irreconcilable differences have occurred and there need not be any exploration into the issue. 750 ILCS 5/401(a-5) (West 2024).

2. Compare 750 ILCS 5/602 (West 2008), where the court was required to use various factors to determine custody of a child and 750 ILCS 5/607 (West 2008), which presumes the non-custodial parent should have visitation with a child with 750 ILCS 5/602.7(b) (West 2024), which presumes that both parents are fit to have parenting time with the child. Specifically, the emphasis, at least in Illinois, is that both parents should parent a child, rather than own a child.

3. Mo. Rev. Stat. 452.375(2) (2024) “There shall be a rebuttable presumption that an award of equal or approximately equal parenting time to each parent is in the best interests of the child”. Equal or shared parenting is the starting point or strongly supported in several other states, whether by statute or practice.

4. In re Marriage of Brown, 2015 IL App (5th) 140062. In Brown, the case began in January 2010, and by 2012, the marital home, rental property and business were all lost in foreclosure. ¶¶4, 12.

5. In re Marriage of Mathis, 2012 IL 113496. The Mathis case began in November 2000, a divorce was granted in March 2001,and in 2010, after years of delays, the matter was appealed before a trial had occurred. ¶¶4-12. See also, In re Marriage of Weeks, 2021 IL App (5th) 200043-U, where one party has spent the last 12 years rearguing the same issue, and has appealed a second time, In re Marriage of Weeks, 5-24-0946.