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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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!

Someone in our youth group at work asked me last week, “What do grownups do to have fun?”

It brought back vivid memories of having the same question myself. I didn’t care about or understand adult life when I was a kid, but as I faced young adulthood I started wondering. What did grownups do that was so special? Weren’t they supposed to get to have so much more fun and do such cooler things than kids? What was I going to get to do? When was I going to get invited to the party?

I think this is a huge part of the cycle of abuse and addiction. I mean, there’s even a whole 12-step program devoted to people figuring out how to have fun and joy in their life: Workaholics Anonymous. Basically, as I understand it, it works like this:

Abuse, and dysfunction, separate us from ourselves. We get separated from what we feel, and need, and want, when it becomes clear that those feelings won’t be respected by those around us or that those needs and wants aren’t going to get met, for whatever reason.

Where that gets mixed up with addiction is when we try to fill that hole between us and our needs/wants/feelings with something else: TV, work, drugs, food, sugar, sex, whatever. Our needs – and that pretty much invariably, in my experience, includes our need for fun, for fulfilling, joyful experiences – continue to go unmet. And on top of that, whatever we’re using instead is turning into an addictive spiral that puts more and more space between us and our feelings. Which makes it harder and harder to know what we actually want and get it.

I used to have the worst time figuring out what my hobbies were. I would look at all those online profiles, on dating sites or journaling sites or wherever, that asked me what my hobbies were. And I’d just draw a blank. I knew I liked writing, but that was about it – and mostly I wasn’t writing, anyway. And I didn’t want to put “reading” or “watching TV,” because even then I knew that to me those sounded like the most boring, passive “hobbies” ever. I mean, I liked them, but weren’t hobbies supposed to be interests that had some active part in my life? Maybe if I were MAKING a TV show….

And I just couldn’t come up with the time or energy or interest or know-how to do anything different. I was just marooned out there without a good sense of what I wanted or how to get it. Which is a pretty common stage of abuse or effect of abuse, I think. It’s a natural step after leaving the abusive situation – it’s the “So… now what?? Isn’t my life supposed to be different?!”

I thought I was going to make this a list of things that I think are fun. But I also want to write about how I got to the point of being able to identify fun things for myself and do them. So many choices! I’ll do them all eventually, probably this week, of course…. Fun things first, I think. I realized recently that I was looking at a free day and coming up with tons of things I wanted to do, things that were fun and interesting to me and which I actually try to do regularly now, and I thought: OH! HOBBIES!!  Here are some now: tune in later for the next installment of this story!

1. 1. Gardening: messing around in the dirt, watering, watching things grow
   2. Preserving: making stuff out of what is growing!
   3. Being in nature: barefoot usually, listening to birds, meeting trees, seeing crazy plants and animals and insects and places I never knew existed
   4. Cooking: all kinds of stuff, anything I ever wanted to eat and never believed I was capable of making – and things I invent myself
   5. Writing: like now!
   6. Painting: especially fruit and plants
   7. Drawing: whatever comes to mind
   8. Yoga: I like this a lot, and I was doing it about every day before I started this job! I am very bendy.
   9. Learning about abuse and addiction: and working on my own recovery, which is a constant string of mind-blowing realizations and discoveries and excitement
   10. Dancing: especially in my own living room
   11. Playing with my cats: they are each insanely individual, loving, bizarre geniuses. also: very very soft.
   12. Reading: yes, it’s true. and it seems more of an actual hobby, like, more ACTIVE than watching TV
   13. Hanging out with my friends: especially doing karaoke, playing board games, going out to eat, wandering around stores looking at shiny things, and talking about stuff.

Practicing what I promise, here’s how I’m doing on my list from last week so far:

2. Recreate the blog that I used to promote PeaceMeals

3. Ask all the wonderful people who linked to it when it was at the old address to update their links. Finding out who had it in their blogroll versus who linked from an old post is a little wacky; I went through my old comments instead and emailed all of those folks to let them know it had been hacked and was back up in a new place.

5. Find blog challenges to participate in to draw traffic back to it. Found Looking Nearby For Food, Fresh From the Farmer’s Market, Farmer’s Market Fare, and others I already know of like Presto Pasta Night.

10. Order free boxes from the post office.

I found that working on this stuff made me feel very excited and twirly, and also that I got really into it and maybe worked longer than I really needed to… but I felt so focused! Now it’s time to leave work and I don’t really want to stop! But there is always more time later.