Documenting what you know
The single most useful thing a survivor can do with a record is keep four different kinds of thing apart. Most of the difficulty survivors meet later — with lawyers, with police, with institutions — comes from those four things having been mixed together.
The eight labels
Every entry in a record gets exactly one of these labels. If an entry needs two, it is really two entries.
| Label | What it means | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| I remember this | A direct memory, held now | It is yours, first-hand, and it is not weakened by being a memory |
| Partial memory | You remember some of it and not the rest | Saying so protects you. Filling the gap does not |
| Approximate date | Roughly when, not exactly when | Approximate is normal and usable. False precision is not |
| Learned later | Something you were told or found out afterwards | Keeps second-hand information from hardening into memory |
| Document | Something that physically exists | A letter, report, photo, record, message, receipt |
| Corroboration | Someone or something else that supports it | A person who could confirm a detail, if they chose to |
| Interpretation | What you think it meant | Legitimate and important — but it is not evidence, and it must be labelled |
| Unknown | A gap you are naming as a gap | Recording an unknown is a positive act. It is not a weakness in your account |
Never fill a gap to make a record look complete. A record with clearly marked unknowns is stronger, not weaker, than one that reads smoothly. The gaps are part of the truth.
Start on paper
The Survivor Record — a secure application built around this method — is planned, and it will not be built until an independent security and privacy review has been done and published. In the meantime the method works perfectly well on paper, and paper has an advantage: nobody else is holding it.
- Keep it somewhere only you can reach.
- Date every entry, including the date you wrote it — not just the date it refers to.
- Write in your own words. Do not tidy them up later.
- When you add to an entry, add. Do not overwrite: keep the earlier version visible.
- Keep interpretation in its own labelled entries.
- If you take it to a lawyer or an investigator, take the whole thing, unedited.
What the Survivor Record will never do
- No memory recovery. No technique, prompt or exercise intended to retrieve memories.
- No generated content. No software writing an account of events you did not describe.
- No leading prompts. No question that supplies a possible answer.
- No credibility score. Nothing rating how believable a record is.
- No diagnosis. No inference about your mental health from what you write.
- No silent editing. Every change keeps a visible revision history, and you can export everything.
Planned — after independent security review