I’ve been seeing a lot of visitors led here by queries about repressed memories. Especially over the past few days, seems like. People have come here by googling stuff like…

how do I know if I have repressed memories
can an 8 year old repress a sexual abuse incident?
memory loss sexual abuse
child abuse body memory

And only that last searcher found what they were looking for, if you believe the server stats. That was the only visitor of those four who stuck around and looked at various pages, anyway - but I am not sure whether to believe the stats when they say someone was here for “0 seconds,” so who knows what the other folks did.

So I thought maybe I could address some of that for this week’s Thursday Thirteen!

Thirteen Things about REPRESSED MEMORIES

1. Yes, an eight-year-old can repress an experience of sexual abuse. Even an adult can repress memories of a traumatic adult experience. Adults are likely, in my experience, to recover the memory sooner than a child would, for a few reasons:

2. Even an adult in an abusive relationship is safer, better-off, than a child in an abusive relationship, because they have more coping skills under their belt, and more freedom - more options in general.
3. Adults also have a better-developed sense of what’s normal. Kids, especially younger kids, are still learning what is “normal,” and so they are much more likely to accept that abuse is deserved and standard and unquestionable - even though it’s NOT. (It is, however, pretty common.) So an adult is more likely to notice something like missing time, because they know it’s not normal. They’re also more likely to have friends who are not part of the abusive system, who have strong senses of what is normal, who may point out blank spaces in their memory or effects of the trauma that aren’t apparent to the survivor themselves.
4. Adults, even those who have had parts of their emotional development arrested by childhood abuse, are usually farther along developmentally than children. Which means they have more reasoning skills to devote to the various clues of repressed memories that might come up. It also means their psyches are more willing to release the experience of trauma, because they know on some level that they are somewhat safe.
5. Repressed memories are surprisingly common. The most common argument I’ve heard against them is “How could anyone ever forget something so unusual and traumatic?” The answer, as Jennifer Freyd pointed out in Betrayal Trauma, is that people (most often children) repress traumatic experiences when there is secrecy, betrayal, involved: when they have the sense, for whatever reason, that it is not safe to talk about it. When we are denied any other options for healing, we try to protect ourselves by sealing away the traumatic experience - but we can’t seal away its effects.
6. Repressed memories come in several flavors. We can remember things - any memories, not just repressed ones - through feelings in our bodies (body memories), through emotions that seem to come out of nowhere and be connected to nothing in our everyday lives, through words that come out of our mouths (or our pens) when we had no intention of writing or saying or drawing any such thing, through dreams, through intrusive mental images, through phantom smells or sounds that aren’t coming from the present day, even through full-on surround-sound PTSD-style flashbacks which make it seem as though we are back in the abusive experience. And more.
7. Usually, it is sort of unreasonably undramatic. Our memories leak out of our psyches in all these more minor ways, waiting for us to put the pieces back together.
8. How do you know if you have repressed memories? The best way I know of is to look back at your life. What is missing? It’s easy for us to assume that our memories, however patchy they may be, are normal, unless we take time to examine them and compare them to others’.
9. For example: I always assumed it was “normal” (in the sense, I thought, of healthy - instead of just common) to not remember anything much before age 5. I could name a few memories, but I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be 5 - I had no sense of what my life was like, in general, before that. Even after that, I had some pretty fragmentary memories going on: I couldn’t honestly tell you all that much about any specific age in elementary school, but I knew a lot about what I did in elementary school and that let me overlook not having a sense of really being there for most of it. P.S.: that’s not “normal.”
10. For a while, I went around telling people I knew that I was taking a poll: if someone told them that they didn’t remember anything much before about age 5, what would they think? It was amazing how many people would say that they’d figure something terrible had happened to that person - and then, when asked when they started having real substantial memories, would quote some age like 5 or 7 or even in their early teens - and insist that there was no reason for it. I’m related to some of those people.
11. Repressed memories aren’t all Hideous Trauma. In my case, for example, I dissociated a whole lot of regular everyday stuff because what I learned from Hideous Trauma was that it wasn’t safe to be present in my life. Hence the lack of much of my elementary school years. I’ve heard other people talk about having tons of everyday memories of childhood but nothing after, say, bedtime or sunset, or all the school memories but nothing much at home, or just having little patches missing that they almost didn’t notice at first, or missing an entire year or two, or not having concrete memories of summer trips to relatives, or…. Those are more easily tagged as Probably Hiding Hideous Trauma - although there are also people who experience abuse both in school and home settings (for example) and lose most of their time because of that, not because of being generally dissociative.
12. Repressed memories, both of trivial everyday things and of abuse, can be recovered. I can think of three particular ways off the top of my head. One is to learn about repressed memories, read others’ experiences about them or more literature about how they work, in order to be able to recognize any that have been coming up for you. (I overlooked body memories of rape for years because I didn’t know what they meant - my survivor’s logic was something like “It’s either some horrible STD or nothing, and I don’t want it to be an STD so I won’t get it checked out.” Fortunately, it was not a horrible STD…. And I’ve known one person who was diagnosed with epilepsy and medicated for years, even though they could find no other indications of epilepsy, until he realized that his seizures were actually body memories of electroshock stuff. Which is fairly common in ritual abuse scenarios.)
13. A related way is, when memories come up (in any form), to see if you have a sense of what was coming next, or what came before, or where this stuff was happening. It’s easy to get caught up in the specificity of just a feeling of abuse or a remembered phrase, and not even think to see if your memory will throw anything else up there. Renee Fredrickson talks about this in her book Repressed Memories. And a third way - and my preferred way - is to work on recovery, even in seemingly unrelated ways. Like via working the twelve steps on abuse issues, or in general. Because working on our stuff makes life much safer and better. And in my experience, not only are memories more likely to come up in recognizable ways when I have safety in my life, but I am a million times more able to just learn from them, deal with the feelings in painless ways, understand everything better, and move on.

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    By danica | July 3, 2008 | Filed in: dissociation, effects of abuse, memory, thursday thirteen, tools

Three weeks ago, for Thursday Thirteen, I made a list of Thirteen Steps I Can Take Toward My Dreams. Because, you know, I have a history of sabotaging myself around work and finances. In fact, here’s a little inventory of thirteen ways that I have had a pattern of sabotaging myself:

1. I procrastinate because things are too scary;
2. I don’t market my business because I buy into all this internalized shame that tells me that it’s creepy and invasive to share about it;
3. I expand too quickly, before I have enough customers even for the original idea;
4. I pay no attention to how much other work I am doing in other areas, so I don’t scale back to give myself time and energy for my own dreams;
5. I imagine, codependently, what other people might want my business to do, and don’t balance that with what is actually reasonable for me and still desirable to them;
6. I under-charge, or come up with what I think is actually a reasonable and abundant price and then offer everyone greatly reduced rates;
7. I fantasize great ways to advertise and then never put them into place;
8. I make commitments and find ways to avoid showing up for them;
9. I spend all my time dreaming about how I want my business to look without spending any time on how it looks now and how to bridge that gap;
10. I trip myself out, telling myself shame-inducing crap about how underqualified I am or how useless what I am offering is;
11. I try to start my business cold, without any other funding or income, so that I am distracted by the financial struggle and under artificial pressure to grow it or quit;
12. I ignore my great resources, from business-focused support groups to enthusiastic friends;
13. I spend my time on non-income-generating activities, telling myself that it’s ALL income-generating if it is all something I will need when I am generating an income (?!);
14. I give up too quickly, letting my fear and insecurity crush the project instead of scaling back to a livable, exploratory pace.

So, what am I doing instead, now?

Well, I did everything on that list! (The one from three weeks ago. Not the one you just read!) The scariest, most difficult one was the first one: “Actually tell people I know about what I am doing“. After I made and posted my Google ad, after I revised the entire website, after I resurrected the blog, after everything else, I finally managed to write an email telling everyone what I was doing, and go through my address book, clicking on everyone I knew well enough to share with.

It was kind of agonizing… not writing it, but all the fear and resistance to writing it! All those subconscious messages coming up about how much people will hate me if I tell them about this, if I “pressure them” to “give me money” (neither of which is what is going on there), if I invade their free time with information about what someone they might BARELY EVEN KNOW or NOT EVEN WANT TO HEAR FROM is doing. I managed to meet that insane babble with trust in the people I was sending it to, and in my own process. This is what I wrote:

I have a tendency to not let people know what I am doing, and launch businesses and other big projects without telling anyone, and just assume everyone sort of psychically knows what is up. And then I am like, “Why doesn’t anyone know about my [book/business/move/etc].?”

Well, no more! I am taking the super-daring move right now of emailing all the cool people I know and telling you that I am officially launching my awesome grocery/meal planning business. It is called PeaceMeals, because people can enjoy an hour (or three) of peace instead of going to the crowded grocery store, and also because 10% of the profits go to non-profits that support peace. (Like UNICEF, and Heifer, and PeaceAction.)

Basically, it is awesome: I make a week of healthy meal plans and (for $40 a week, or $60 for the premium plan, plus shipping) send people the meal plan plus all the recipes and groceries they will need for it. Mostly organic stuff from independent companies/farms. The basic plan is healthy; the premium plan is super-healthy because it’s gluten-free, sugar-free, and has more emphasis on protein and veggies.

If you want to learn more, you can check out the website at http://fortydollargourmet.com/peacemeals. There are also free resources there for folks who like to do this stuff for themselves: there’s a free meal planner and a blog where I write a lot of stuff about where to buy good food for cheap, and what recipes I like, and so on. If you are interested, of course you are welcome to sign up for a week or a month of boxes; you can also share this info with any friends who might be interested, and of course you can always just delete it! Anyway, thanks for reading about my life

The hardest part for me was to think of an “appropriate” subject line. Then I remembered that I don’t have to come up with a subject line: I could let my higher power/the Universe/my intuition write it for me! So I checked my gut and it said to title it, “doing an awesome job sharing about my business.” I had my misgivings, but then I thought that I don’t need to obsess about it and be a perfectionist and try to control and analyze it… this is going out to my friends, and I can trust my intuition.

Well, I had gotten I think zero click-throughs on my ads at that point. Now, a week and a half into it, I’ve gotten more click-throughs, maybe three people who made it to the order form, and no orders from the ads. But I’ve had FOUR people place orders from my email!

My little brother was the first one. And then a very good friend of mine. And then my brother also posted about it on this really great green website he loves, and I got another one, and a good place to talk to people about it directly. And then another great friend signed up this morning! Plus, the three people I actually knew all signed up for the more expensive box, which was very exciting.

Plus, before I even got any orders, I got a flood of wonderful supportive excited emails from people who love me and are thrilled to hear about what I am doing, who just wanted to cheer me on and tell me how inspiring this all is. It was both unexpected and delightful. And it’s so great to not just have this support at that time, but to have these emails I can read again and again, and the opportunity to touch base with the people I love some more. This one from Annie cracked me up:

You are an inspiration and a delight! I feel so honored to witness your awesome!! We are great! I love getting to watch you put yourself out there and I love watching the ways that when I show up for myself I can show up for you, and I think it just builds on itself. So, I get to get excited about what you are doing, I get inspired, I do my thing, maybe inspire others to do their own! It reminds me of what I was reading in that Shakti Gawain book today, about the hundredth-monkey!

I paraphrase right here: in 1952, Japanese scientists were studying monkeys, and the monkeys loved sweet potatoes, right? So they were giving the monkeys sweet potatoes, and then one monkey, just randomly, on his own, decided to wash his potato before he ate it. Then another monkey saw him and did it, and pretty soon all the monkeys on this island were washing their sweet potatoes. Cool, no? But it gets cooler!! Then monkeys on other islands started washing their sweet potatoes too! And not because they had any contact or learned about it from other monkeys or anything. It appeared to happen spontaneously!! But it spread to the other monkeys, through the ether or the collective consciousness or whathaveyou!! Neat!

You are my monkey!!! :(|)

(Isn’t she a delight?!)

I am having fun doing it now because I am moving with the flow and guidance of my intuition. And, although this is a tautology, I’m having fun with it because I’m having fun with it. That is, because I’m treating it as something to be enjoyed and not something to frantically binge-work on.

I wrote a welcome letter and a note to put in the invoices, and learned that I want to send those out right away when I get a new customer because waiting is too risky and doesn’t seem professional to me. And I’d like to come up with thirteen more next steps to do, from my intuition to my brain:

1. Write a (fun, joyful) press release.
2. Look through the Food section of the Chronicle today for that column where people can send in local food news, and send them the press release. Also send one to the local food magazine, and another to the View By The Bay.
3. I realized there are still a lot of people who I’m only in contact with via Facebook, so they didn’t get my email about PeaceMeals; I’d like to either gather email addresses from them and send it, or just go send it to each of them individually as a Facebook message.
4. Make menus for the second week of July.
5. Post the menus for the second week of July.
6. Find a template to make the menus and meal plans look pretty, or find someone else who can do it.
7. Make (and prettify) the meal plans for the first week.
8. Do the grocery shopping. (Remember to put a special treat in each box.)
9. Box up the boxes.
10. Make some kind of little press release, brochure, or other (more) shiny thing about PeaceMeals that can go in the box. (Something giving the menu for the next week or rest of the month? It would be good to send them a link to an anonymous feedback poll afterward.)
11. Make nice-looking recipes for the sample boxes (or have someone else do it.)
12. Pack the sample boxes up for the several foodbloggers who are getting them. (If you’re a foodblogger, I might could send you one too - comment or email me!)
13. Print out the shipping labels and schedule a pick-up by Friday.

I also want to make a clearer spending plan for the business, but that is slightly less urgent.

Not too bad, right? And I believe that wraps me up for then. I am having a hard time trusting that I will get any more customers after that, but that’s just the crazy-fear-as-a-result-of-abuse talking. I don’t have to figure out where my customers might come from or when I will get them or how to get them; all I have to do is what is set down on my plate each week. It’s all about trust and following the guidance of my intuition, and having fun doing things that I love. Thanks for witnessing my awesome continuing journey!

By danica | June 25, 2008 | Filed in: thursday thirteen, work

Cody’s on Telegraph

Originally uploaded by Steve Rhodes

Cody’s Books is a famous and beloved local chain that began in Berkeley in 1965. It’s been struggling for at least ten years, I think, despite (or, in my opinion, because of) trying to expand across several cities to at one point three whole locations. On Friday, with very little warning, it closed its final location.

It’s tempting to color this in as a story about multinational conglomerates crushing local chains, or about the painful losses caused by an ailing economy. But the fact is that Cody’s struggled with the same circular, self-sabotaging addict behavior that is so familiar to many survivors.

I’m no expert on Cody’s Books history; I’ve only watched and read about the drama for the short time (12 years) that I’ve lived in the area. But in that time, I’ve seen them shoot themselves in the foot over and over, each time crying out to everyone who will listen that they are just victims of gun violence.

First, they opened their Fourth Street location, a nice big store in a swankier part of Berkeley than their original spot - and, when it naturally drained some traffic from the first location, they complained loudly that their decreased revenues there were because of the homeless people on Telegraph Avenue. They began hustling the neighborhood and the city to “clean up” Telegraph, increasing the police presence on the street and instituting new policies trying to keep homeless people away from the area around the store.

The San Francisco store opening came next - an odd choice at a time when the business was already struggling financially. It stayed open for only 18 months in the high-rent, high-profile downtown location. Owner Andy Ross mortgaged his house to open the San Francisco location: a basement-level local bookstore, with just the door and sign at street level, in an area that caters to tourists who want the familiar and the visible.

When it hemorrhaged money and closed, Ross again searched for someone to blame. He seemed baffled by the possibility that any big store in the busy area could fail: “In spite of the location and the size, it just didn’t work. I can’t interview the customers who didn’t come. The customers who did come liked the store.” Well, that’s all there is to business, right? You see if the people who become your customers like you, and if they do, then you should make a profit? You spend all your money on a fancy spot and wait for it to pay off? No?

In the end, Ross concluded, the killer was… construction of a nearby Barney’s. Even though they chose not to stay open through the end of construction because they weren’t sure it would make enough of a difference.

That store closed April 20, 2007. All that was left was the Cody’s Books on Fourth Street, which - depending on your viewpoint - either closed or simply moved to Shattuck Avenue in April of this year.

APRIL.

The Shattuck location was open for TWO MONTHS before its abrupt closing. This was the most shocking development of them all, and the most telling. Nobody knew that the store was going to close. There were no press releases sent out; no signs announcing its departure; no inventory close-out sales; no attempts to find a new owner or new investors; and certainly no attempts to do anything differently.

It’s shocking because when the original store on Telegraph closed, the community was up in arms. People begged them not to close. Every newspaper, both the daily and the free weekly papers, wrote about it - often more than once. There were letters to the editor, calls for action, and a huge closing event where people came all day to pay their respects.

Which means that Cody’s had options. They had a huge fan base to call upon: not only whatever customers they normally had, but also the many bibliophiles and radicals all over who had fond memories of the store. They just chose not to call on that community at all.

The funny thing is that when the San Francisco store closed just over a year ago, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “the Fourth Street location is thriving and Ross said he plans to keep it going,” and quoted him as saying, “The Cody’s brand lives strong in the East Bay, and that’s what we’re going to focus on.”

It’s frustrating because the store, inasmuch as a store can be, was the victim of addict behavior. It suffered from the classic signs of addiction, which of course are also classic signs of abuse. The Chronicle’s article about it today had a telling quote:

One local Pulitzer Prize winner, Berkeley author Michael Chabon, said of Cody’s closing, “I think it’s a terrible shame. It was a wonderful bookstore. It’s painful, sort of like watching someone suffering from a chronic illness painfully and slowly die. (Cody’s was) part of the fabric of Berkeley, the social fabric and commercial fabric.”

It was very much like that, and the chronic illness killing it was abuse. And, of course, addiction - untreated abuse - is a progressive disease. If you don’t deal with it, it will get worse and worse until it kills you. This is not only true for drug addicts or alcoholics; any abuse survivor who does not have a way of dealing with the effects of that abuse will have an increasingly numbed, deadened, painful, difficult life until they can begin reversing that damage with the tools of recovery.

There was even a twelve-step program for Cody’s Books. Business Debtors Anonymous is a sub-group of Debtors Anonymous which provides lots of clarity and guidance about what does and doesn’t work for people in business. They have a huge emphasis on being clear about spending, assets, business plans, agreements, and detaching from drama with customers, competitors, and employees. It seems as though Cody’s management was missing a lot of those tools.

There was the tunnel vision, that special form of denial where people look at everything as an isolated incident in a desperate attempt to make it controllable and deny the big picture.

There was the constant attempt to pass the buck, the refusal of appropriate responsibility for anything that was happening. “Appropriate” because it’s quite common for abuse survivors to feel tremendous shame and guilt for things that we’re not actually responsible for - while continuing to feel like powerless victims in our lives because we have no idea how to set boundaries, take care of business, or reclaim our power. And because we want to find proof that what happened to us is not our fault, and misguidedly look for that in our present day instead of in the past. It’s the homeless people’s fault! It’s because there’s not enough parking here! It’s because of the construction! It’s because of the internet! Because of the chains! Because the darn students aren’t buying their books from us anymore! Because people don’t read!

I read business books and business blogs like they’re chick lit, and let me tell you: from a business perspective, all those things are challenges, not business-killers. So revenues dropped from $30,000 a month to $10,000 a month between 1990 and 2000 - so what? As long as your doors are still open, that’s an opportunity to take inventory of what you could be doing better, and to come up with some really exciting and innovative changes.

Powell’s Books is a fantastic, if over-used, example of this: like Cody’s, they had a huge store and a huge following before the internet came along. And the market changed, and they changed with it; now they have a huge internet following, and more thriving stores. They evaluate what is working for them, and change what is not, and try new things, and evaluate those too.

Surprise: this corresponds exactly to what people in recovery do. It’s just like the twelve steps, where people learn to take inventory of what has and has not worked for them and make it right, without beating themselves up along the way.

Then there was the search for a quick fix: moving stores around, closing stores, selling the business, mortgaging the house, trying San Francisco, anything but change what they were actually doing within the business.

And the relentless negativity that goes with searching for someone to blame. They were literally surrounded by thriving independent bookstores: Moe’s Books, Half Price Books, Shakespeare & Co., Black Oak Books, Pegasus Books, and many more, in a community that still supports as many as three bookstores on the same block. And yet, they had this growing chant of complaints about how terrible everything was, which rose eventually to drown out even their ability to do business.

And, my favorite, the all or nothing thinking - either we have to be doing the same thing we were doing before, or we have to just close everything down and run. They could never seem to see any other possible solutions than keep trying what they were doing or close down.

This spiraled out of control, by the end, to the point where they left with a store full of books and a pile of paperwork on the street. On the street!

I was there today. I came with three friends, in part specifically to go to Cody’s. (Which, by the way, was in what we thought was finally the perfect location for it: right next to the university campus, on a huge street with lots of bookstores but none right next door to it, with tons of foot traffic and enormous windows to show them what it had, right next to BART and lots of bus stops, next to the Berkeley City College campus as well….)

We were surprised to find the still-full bookstore locked, with printed-out notices on the front doors explaining that they had shut those doors forever on Friday. And we weren’t the only ones who were surprised: during the course of hanging out on Shattuck for a few hours that afternoon, we saw at least a dozen other people try the doors or collect in front of the store staring at it in shock, at several different times. There must have been dozens of surprised would-be customers who went through this on Sunday alone. What the hell was Cody’s doing that meant that that kind of foot traffic wasn’t enough to support one store?

I’m guessing that at least part of it was the former owner’s lust for opening new stores. (Ross sold the business in September of 2006 but stayed on as president, which - along with the store’s continuous bad choices - makes me suspect that not much changed at Cody’s with the sale.) When the San Francisco store closed, the Chronicle quoted Ross as saying, “This is the second store I’ve had to close in two years. This is not what I wanted to do in my life. I wanted to open stores.” While clearly at least some of that cost came out of his pocket, I suspect that the business took a series of financial hits too, hits it was still trying to overcome.

From BDA’s Signs of Compulsive Debting in Business:

• We confused our personal finances with our business finances and drew from one set of funds to cover the other.

• We lived in a state of self-deprivation for the sake of our business. (Ross had to sell his mortgaged house after the SF store closed.)
• We did not or were unable to ask for help when we needed it most.

The most intense sign of the chaos, to me, was that stack of papers. One of my friends spotted a dumpster full of boxes as we were about to leave, and ran to snag them for her upcoming move, with my girlfriend’s help. A long while later, they returned with news: the boxes were full of discarded paperwork from Cody’s Books.

So, not only did they not even bother to pack up the books and clean out the store either before or after closing it, but they for some reason spent some time throwing out papers first? How very fishy.

Upon investigation, they found a wide selection of different kinds of paperwork. There were records of orders the store had made, of advertising and ad prices. There were in-store memos and recent store newsletters. There was at least one whole box of personal correspondence from customers, complete with names and addresses as well as any other personal information the customers had happened to give them. And there was another entire layer of sealed boxes, which they speculated might have been the bookstore’s way of getting rid of more sensitive information. Of course, in a way you don’t need to have more sensitive information when a person or organization is already telling you at top volume how crazy it is.

So that’s Cody’s coda. After decades of passionate work with books, they chose to go under unannounced, unnoticed, and unsung. Maybe over the coming days we’ll see a community response to their closing, or more explanation of it, or some kind of good-bye from the long-lived store. Otherwise, fans will have to get their closure from the awareness that the beloved bookstore was just another victim of the same patterns we see all around us every day: the effects of abuse in our society.

That last post didn’t seem any longer than the ones I usually write, and I don’t think it was. It took me about 40-45 minutes to write. And then I dropped it into Pages to save it because I didn’t have an internet connection right then, and it was almost FOUR FREAKING PAGES LONG.

How DO you guys read all this?