It is not unusual for false overlays to be laid in over painful memories to act as a sort of shield or shock absorber. writes Amos.

This description is popular outside of the community of memory researchers (usually the less well informed people are the more popular this idea is with them). Within that community there's hardly any support for such an idea, at least not if we are speaking about frequencies of occurence beyond very rare cases (and surely not 'not unusual').

Wolfgang