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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One of the big points that Barbara Sher makes in Wishcraft is that you are a genius. That each of us is a genius when we are born, full of curiosity and passion and talents and all the other things we associate with genius.

She offers exercises which are similar to the one Penelope Trunk suggests that I wrote about a few days ago. I’ve found it incredibly useful to look at the things that overjoyed and fascinated me as a child through Wishcraft, and now to look at how my childhood memories can teach me about what I need in my adult life and work.

Tonight, all of this came together in my head and I suddenly understood why I am so awesome.

You see, babies are awesome. Little kids are totally awesome. I personally think this is a universal truth. It was obvious to me with my own kid, but I figured I was biased. But it’s also obvious in every other child I encounter, and especially with my girlfriend’s nieces. Meeting a kid is just like being whacked with the awesome stick. They don’t even know how awesome they are. It’s like fishes and water. They can’t see it because they don’t know any other way to be. (Or, with the sad exceptions, they don’t know they’re awesome because they’ve already learned from their parents that they’re not – even though that’s not even remotely reasonable.)

Proof?:

 

(Sadly, I could not find my favorite baby picture, but I think these add a little something too! How cute am I with those little chocolate eggs?)

Well, a huge part of recovery for me was first learning how awesome I was… slowly becoming aware of the great things about me, my strengths and beauty and character, and slowly becoming willing to accept those things. Learning that the negatives I brought to my life were old coping mechanisms, old responses to abuse, and that I didn’t need them anymore. And, eventually, becoming willing and able to SAY that I was awesome – in front of other people and everything! – without immediately having to shame myself, hedge it around with conditions, trying to keep them from thinking I thought I was TOO great.

I’ve come to see myself, more and more, as (on one level) a spark of universe-stuff. A little bit of what everything else is made out of, connected to everything, with all this stuff that makes me a separate person important because it’s part of my experience now, but not all that relevant to who I am deep down. And that’s how babies and very young kids look to me too – just big SPARKS.

Tonight I saw that I’m awesome for the same reasons, in the same ways, that babies are awesome. You are, too. We are all born with all this great joy and energy and potential. We are born worthy and loving and lovable. Wonderful and good and loved. We are born perfect just the way we are.

We are all incredible, awesome, exciting people. We struggle, a lot of the time, with past traumas and with the crazy messages and old painful coping skills we’ve learned from them. And sometimes we act out, like cranky tired children, because of all that stuff. But that stuff is all layered on later. It’s learned and it can be unlearned.

One reviewer wrote, “Most books on life planning have, to my mind, two fatal flaws: they assume that your ’strengths’ are an infallible guide to what you ’should’ be doing with your life; and they then attempt to map this to a ‘career.’ Barbara Sher starts with the basics: what is most important to YOU? Given that, how are you to get it? (And this doesn’t necessarily translate into ‘career’!)” It’s true: often the things we think of as our “strengths” are the ways we’ve learned to cope. We’re proud of coping, of surviving, sometimes at a cost. Sometimes we don’t notice that we’re choosing painful situations over and over again, things we’ll need to cope with, because we’re so focused on those strengths at the expense of ease and joy.

The weary battle with negative coping mechanisms – aka the effects of abuse – can eclipse the truth: The stuff that’s actually part of us, at our core, at our birth, is pure AWESOME. That’s the stuff we really get to own, and live with, and enjoy, forever.

Well, I guess it’s obvious that abuse, addiction, and recovery is my favorite social issue. It sounds like three things, but it’s really all one smooth loop: being abused, acting that abuse out on ourselves, and learning to love ourselves and end that cycle.

This week’s Weekly Geeks topic is to pick our favorite social issue and list books that we’d like to read about it. So I thought I’d combine it with Thursday Thirteen and come up with thirteen of them.

I felt sort of resistant at first. I want to be done reading books about abuse and recovery. I want to know everything and be an authority and be the one writing stuff that blows people’s minds. And for some reason, I think that those are mutually exclusive. How silly is that?

I tend to feel resistance to reading books about abuse, no matter how interesting they sound, for what I think are pretty common reasons. They seem scary – another case of associating talking about trauma with the trauma itself. And another case of the common problem many abuse survivors have of being afraid of our feelings. Like if I read a book about abuse, instead of feeling fascinated and validated, I’ll be overwhelmed by all the feelings I experienced while being abused, and drown in it.

And then, too, I have more than five years of recovery under my belt and I feel frustrated and bored by some books, the ones that just go over the same basic ideas
about abuse and recovery (you are not alone, make a safe place for yourself, punch a pillow, blah blah blah) or worse, parrot the same misconceptions (falsities like it’s always men abusing girls, very few boys are sexually abused, you can’t trust recovered memories, blah blah crazypants).

But as I keep rejecting the idea of writing about abuse-related books I haven’t read this week, the universe has kept on throwing them at me. It seems like every website I go to or email I open is saying “Remember this book you set aside to look at? Remember this wish list you made at Powell’s?” So I might as well face it: there are still books that I can get delight and clarity from on this subject. Damnit.

In no particular order:

1. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse

This one is a classic. Jennifer Freyd is an amazing psychologist, who took the even more amazing step of speaking out about her parents’ abuse and writing this book which for once and for all answers the question of “why would anyone forget such a huge traumatic memorable experience?” Even when her parents threw a fit and founded the idiotic False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

2. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment by Babette Rothschild

This came up when I searched for Betrayal Trauma. It looked interesting, so I clicked through and saw that readers have said it “thoroughly explains the importance of “body memories” in trauma processing and discusses many ways in which to help clients both elicit and integrate dysfunctionally stored cellular memories,” and that “After more than 20 years treating trauma survivors I all too rarely find a new book from which I really learn something that I can immediately apply to my work. This is such a book.” Sounds good to me!

3. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences by Peter Levine

I saw this book at Black Oak Books a while ago and really wanted to get it. (And Diesel Books too, come to think of it.) It looks very motivational and peppy, all about what awesome mad recovery skillz abuse survivors have to share with the world and what awesome things we can learn from animals about our own healing. Of course, I could be wrong, since I haven’t read it. It also looked like a fairly simple read, which is nice next to books with words like “psychophysiology” in the name.

4. A Young Person’s Guide to the 12 Steps by Stephen Roos

Actually I want to read this more for research because I am writing a guide to the 12 steps for kids. I suspect that mine is more for the 8-12 range, and I know that this one is aimed at teens because I’ve flipped through it in the store. But the steps have amazingly good structure and tools for dealing with the effects of abuse, and it’s always interesting to hear a new perspective on them. Plus, only 128 pages!

5. Clinician’s Guide to the 12 Step Principles by Marvin Seppala

One reviewer wrote, “The most interesting thing about this book is the unapologetic way in which the critical element of spirituality is addressed. For too long sprirituality has been a taboo subject in the cooly rational world of medical education. This book emphasizes that spirituality is the foundation upon which recovery from addictive illness is built one day at a time.” I’d love to see how they explain that to doctors and therapists.

Mainly, I think this sounds wicked interesting because I’ve worked in the recovery field for a while and I am constantly flabbergasted by how many people doing counseling for alcoholism, or running rehab centers or whatever, have no understanding of 12-step programs – even while they refer people out constantly to the few that they know about.It often seems to be more like “Well, I know you need this and these people will be able to explain why.” One of my goals is to educate people in the field about how they and their clients can benefit from the tools and information in 12-step programs, what the programs actually involve and how it all ties together holistically. So I guess I should read this book, huh!

6. The Mother I Carry: A Memoir of Healing from Emotional Abuse by Louise Wisechild

I read another book of hers, The Obsidian Mirror: Healing from Childhood Sexual Abuse, and really enjoyed her clarity about what was going on with her and her explanation of what she went through on this journey. Little did I know it was a sequel! (No, wait… it’s possible that THIS is the sequel. I guess I’ll have to read them to find out!) The Obsidian Mirror has a better first sentence: “Since it is inappropriate to discuss religion, I will begin there.” But both of them look funny, bold, and direct as hell, which are things I look for in personal writing about abuse.

7. Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care about Has Borderline Personality Disorder by Randi Kreger

I checked this out of the library and then stalled on reading it for pretty much all the self-faking-out reasons described above. Plus, I think that on some level, now that I have no one in my life with BPD, I want to avoid reading about it too – as if ignorance protects me! It is, in fact, exactly the opposite that is the case. The author has put together a lot of really helpful and clear information about borderline personality disorder and its effects at http://bpdcentral.com, which definitely makes me want to read the book more!

8. Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship by Christine Ann Lawson

My mother’s not borderline, but I still found this book helpful even simply when flipping through it in the store – especially in its descriptions of different “types” of borderlines like the Queen, the Waif, the Witch, and the Hermit. It really helped me identify when people in my life were undiagnosed (as far as I knew) borderlines, and make different choices around them. I’d like to read it all the way through!

(The link to abuse, for new readers, is that untreated BPD often leads people to become extremely abusive, and that borderline personality disorder is very much caused by abuse and neglect.)

9. I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality by Jerold Kreisman

I want to read this because I have a copy and therefore I hope it will be good and useful… but I have my doubts. One review ended by remarking, out of nowhere, that “This clinically written primer leaves the reader with the impression that BPD syndrome is a catchall category.” Others commented on the fact that it leaves borderlines feeling hopeless because it was written before people knew about medication that could help – but surely by 1991 they knew about therapies that could help? and the book’s own description seems to claim that it will show people how to cope with and treat it. Sounds like it was groundbreaking at the time, when there were no other books on BPD, but hasn’t stood up well or been updated since. On the other hand, a lot of non-BPD readers said they found it very helpful in learning how to interact with borderline folks, and praised it to the heavens.

10. Sometimes I Act Crazy: Living with Borderline Personality Disorder, also by Jerold Kreisman

This is pitched as a follow-up book, published 15 years later. It got much better reviews; people who are borderline and people who love people who are borderline say that the anecdotes and personal stories in it really helped them identify with and understand the disease better. I’d like to read it because my main experience with BPD is as the victim of people who had it and had not begun healing from it, and it would be great to be able to understand the BPD experience from a compassionate place and have a better understanding of what helps with it.

11. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers

Another book I have and have not read. I love history, I love old-timey writing, and I love hearing about the history of the recovery movement; why have I not read this yet? Maybe because it was buried under a stack of magazines.

12. Bluebird : Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists by Colin Ross

I always think that the title totally plays into those FMSF lunatics who want us to believe that therapists are creating repressed memories and multiple systems. Specifically, that all cases of either are caused by therapists. Which is not true at all. Instead, Bluebird is an intensively researched book about government ritual abuse, using primary source documentation (that is, documents that come from the people who were doing this stuff, generally via the Freedom of Information Act) to expose and explain gruesome attempts at mind control by different governments. One reader adds that “Ross has an entire diagram of the MK-ULTRA projects and sub-projects, where they were, who ran them and where the funding came from,” which provides some idea of how detailed he is in his writing about these things and how much time he spends connecting the dots. I’ve read some of it; not nearly enough, but it inspired me to the level of research I used when writing about Project Monarch/MK-ULTRA myself.

13. The Addictive Organization: Why We Overwork, Cover Up, Pick Up the Pieces, Please the Boss, and Perpetuate Sick Organizations, by Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel

I have this at home, borrowed from someone, and I have to say, I flipped through it and I was disappointed. It’s a follow-up to When Society Becomes an Addict,
which of course I’ve written about here and here, but it looks much drier – written in more academic language, and, in my edition at least, also in much smaller print! But it is supposed to talk about the same principles and how they play out in organizati ons, which is important for anyone who works anywhere or does activist work… so I’m hoping that giving it an honest try will pay off.

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I’m on the verge of giving notice at my job, at a place I’ve worked for nearly nine years, the school I came to straight out of high school. I have been here for 12 years, my entire adult life.

This afternoon I am writing the documentation that is the last thing I have to do before I go, and then, “out of nowhere,” I remember what a peanut butter and honey sandwich on Home Pride bread tastes like, and I miss my mommy and want chocolate milk, with the Nestle Quik crystals not fully stirred up so when you get to the bottom of the glass, there’s powder that isn’t even wet you get to scrape up with your spoon.

I cannot actually eat any of those foods. Not a one! I’m lactose-intolerant and gluten-intolerant. I am a sugar addict and a peanut butter addict and a caffeine addict in recovery. I don’t want the actual experience of chocolate milk and a peanut butter and honey sandwich (nor, incidentally, do I want the experience of being with my mother); I want what those things did for me when I was a little girl, or what I thought they were doing for me. I want the comfort. I want the familiarity. I want the sweetness.

When my mom abandoned our family, I couldn’t run to her anymore. And it was much too painful for me to even think of running to her. I felt so sad and so scared, and I wanted her to come and comfort me, but I felt that way because of her, so the feelings built on themselves. I was triggered, and when I sought relief, I became even more triggered, in a seemingly endless cycle.

I loved my food, though. I loved it and it comforted me. I stood in front of the cupboard after school, looking at the bounty and furtively gathering my favorite foods. I took out slices of white bread and spread them with peanut butter, chocolate syrup, and coconut shreds. I smushed them into my mouth as fast as I could so no one would catch me. At the kitchen table, I ate bowl after bowl of cereal, adding more milk in between servings. I ate spoonfuls of sugar straight from the sugar bowl.

I did other things, too. I read books and I watched TV and I pretended outside as long as it was light out. I went to church. I petted cats. I listened to my records and cassettes over and over again.

The food, though, goes straight to the core for me. It is unmediated. It is direct and primal and central. You eat to live. You eat to survive. Nourishment. Sustenance. I needed to be nourished. I needed to be sustained, and I was.

There wasn’t a lot of love or tenderness in my life. I didn’t get a lot of the things a child– or any person, really– needs in order to survive. I couldn’t make anyone hug me or hold me. I couldn’t make anyone tuck me into bed or hold my hand. I couldn’t make anyone tell me it was going to be all right. But there was food in my house and I could get it myself. I could make a peanut butter and honey sandwich. I could mix chocolate into milk.

And now, I could easily do the same thing. I am powerless over peanut butter and honey and chocolate milk and white bread. If I didn’t give those things over to my Higher Power, it isn’t just that I could eat the sandwich and drink the milk, it is that I couldn’t not eat and drink them. What happens when I don’t comfort myself with food?

I get to feel the sadness and pain and discomfort of right now. What it is like to lose this place that has meant so much to me, these people with whom I’ve shared my life. What it like to miss them, to miss a place. How scary it is to go somewhere completely new. How scary to be independent, my own little self in the world. And I get to feel all the sad from back then that echoes now: what it was like when I was little to have everything I had known taken away, to be devastated and scared and comfortless and alone. What it was like to miss her. What it was like to wake up in an unfamiliar life, to wake up in the morning and for a few seconds be untethered, unsure of where I was, before I remembered with a whoosh, Oh, she’s gone.

(It’s not that the peanut butter takes that away, of course. The pain and the memories are right there, underneath, where I can’t get to them.)

There’s something else here, though, when I let myself feel: there is comfort. I can hear my Higher Power calling to me, holding me, sustaining me. When I don’t put something else in her place, there is room for the Goddess in my life, space for her to come in and comfort me, and an opening (and openness) for me to receive. It is bittersweet. I get to feel it all at once, the pain and the fear and the sad and the comfort and the sweetness.

I’m leaving this comfortable job, too, for what I don’t yet know. I get to feel what is under here, too. There will be sweetness in that too.

(with thanks to Jimmy Eat World for the title)