People who suffered abuse in
childhood, however, tend to either remember things vividly, or have little
memory of their childhoods at all. I fall into the former category: clear and
vivid recall. Researchers caution us that very early childhood memories that
unfold in a cohesive pattern, like a movie, are most likely false because real memories
formed in the pre- or early verbal stage tend to be retained in “snapshots.”
They also say that females are more likely to have early recall (true recall)
that males but that is attributed to the way in which their mothers interacted
with them: normal mothers tend to more fulsome in their communication with
their daughters, thereby creating a more colourful, complete memory in the
child.
There is much about childhood
memory and memory retrieval that researchers do not yet know but one thing is
for certain: they have not done extensive studies on ACoNs, people who were
abused by their parents—and primarily their mothers—to determine how early
childhood trauma at the hand of their parents has affected the retention and
retrieval of memories. What follows is NOT scientifically validated
information, merely my personal speculations on the subject.
I often use myself as an example
in this blog because my case, my situation, is the one I know best. My mother
was a neglectful, physically and emotionally abusive parent. I have only one
memory before the age of three, and it has been validated by my father as a real
memory. I experience the memory in first person—like a dream—and it started out
as a series of snapshots. At first they were too fleeting to actually hold long
enough to explore. But over time I was able to “grab” a snapshot here and
there and examine it. Finally, after a few years, I presented to my father a
narrative, pulled together as an adult, made from those snapshots. And he said
that it happened and that the truck I remember he sold when I was around 2
years old.
For a while each revisit of the
memory brought a detail hadn’t noticed before—I knew, for example, that I was
in a truck—like a semi—but I had no clear details of either the interior or
exterior. Subsequent recollections of the memory revealed the truck was dark
blue, the upholstery was tan and textured like corduroy, there was a knob on
the steering wheel, and the air-horn was activated by a beaded brass chain that
was draped like a swag from the roof of the cab. The first part of the memory I
could access was me, both hands on the chain, my feet pulled up so I was
hanging on the chain, and the sound of the air horn. My father later told me that I
loved pulling air horn chain, I would ride with him to the sawmill when he took
logs in. That piece of information—the sawmill—suddenly evoked the smell of
freshly-cut lumber and the smell of pitch. Closing my eyes I saw a fat, round
little pot-bellied stove with a fire burning in it and beside it a pile of pine
lumber off cuts—the source of the pitch smell. None of the houses we had lived
in had pot-bellied stoves like the one I could see in my mind—but the office in
the sawmill did. In another recall of the memory I was riding in the truck,
standing on the seat, and saw a dead cow in a ditch and it was more or less on
its back, the body bloated, its legs sticking up in the air. My father specifically remembered that when I asked
him about it—he knew who owned the cow and said he had explained to me that the
cow would pop like a balloon if someone poked it, which I found rather gross.
Additional visits from the memory
brought added clarification because once I could access it without it
flitting away I could stitch together the various related snapshots and “see”
it long enough to examine it. I learned I was wearing corduroy pants—dark blue—but
never determined what kind of coat or shirt I was wearing. My father always
wore a plaid Pendleton jacket, so I may have just stuck that on him in this
memory. I realized the interior of the truck, the dash, was painted metal—grey metal—and
that this was a “city cab,” i.e., it did not have a sleeper. I remember my
grandmother’s house as it was then—with a chimney going up the side of the
house and no picture windows and that it was painted a kind of industrial
pea-green. All details my father confirmed. (We moved away from that house
shortly after I turned 2 and did not return until after the house had been remodelled
and the fireplace removed and picture windows installed on that side of the
house.)
It was many years after we left the farm that I started having
those fleeting little flashes of what I took to be either a memory or a dream (although I
was awake). It took over of year of trying to capture those flashes long enough
extract something my mind could hold onto for more than a fraction of a second.
Once I was able to do that, however, it became increasingly easier to stop one
of the snapshots as it raced through my consciousness. And ultimately, I was
able to present to my father a pastiche of these little snapshots, a collage of
memory fragments stitched together by reason, and get the shock of my life: it
was not a product of my “vivid imagination,” to quote my mother, it was a real
memory from the age of 2, shortly after my brother was born (I was 22 months
when he was born).
This was not a traumatic memory
and that may explain why I was able to access it at easily as I did. But when I
examined the detail that I was eventually able to capture, I began to realize
that I had very few memories from my childhood, most of them were bad memories,
and most of them were skeletal in scope. I remembered a dress that my mother
had sewed for me for a school pageant-type event, that I liked very much. For a
time it was my favourite dress and then it became relegated to the back of the
closet, I did not want to see it anymore, and I was glad to come home from
school one day and find my closet had been raided and the offending dress had
been give to the Goodwill. But I could not remember why that dress had fallen
out of favour. And try as I might, I could not raise anything other than a
sense of revulsion when I tried to examine what little I remembered of the
dress.
Then one day, years later (2009,
to be exact), I went out to my kitchen to make myself a sandwich. I made it,
took one bite out of it, decided I didn’t want it after all, and took a paper
towel from the roll and folded it around the sandwich in preparation for
putting it in the refrigerator. And suddenly I was 13 years old again, standing
in my mother’s kitchen and she had a sandwich in her hand—with one bite out of
it and wrapped in a paper towel—and she was screaming at me. In a matter of
seconds the whole scene flashed through my head—being hit, waking up on the
floor, being terrified of being late for school—it was all there like it had
just happened that morning. And I knew it wasn’t a fake memory because once it
was in my consciousness, I remembered the whole thing.
My first act was to sit down at
the computer and write it down. Fingers flying, I wrote as fast as I could and,
right in the middle of my reminiscences, another memory popped up. I wanted to
write about it next, but it slipped away. While I wrote that first memory,
perhaps an hour of typing time, half a dozen more memories flitted through my
mind, most of them little fragments of memory that needed capturing and
examining, like my memory of the truck.
As I finished writing The
Sandwich, another memory popped into my head. I had called the school nurse
to help me avoid getting marked tardy—something that would get me a beating if
it showed up on my report card—and having the nurse come to mind sparked
another memory, this one about a toothache. I started writing about that and more
tantalizing bits of my childhood emerged from hiding and swirled around in my
head, each one more provocative than the one before. Some were actual memories,
presented and absorbed in a single flash, others were fragments that needed
chasing and teasing out: all of them were pieces of my lost childhood.
Eventually I placed a notepad and
pen to the right of the computer while I wrote. While writing The
Toothache I was inundated with memories, almost as if a door into my
past had suddenly opened and a torrent of forgotten experiences came
flooding out. I would stop typing just long enough to jot down some key words—enough
to call the memory back—then resume writing on the current topic. Over a period
of a few weeks I recovered 46 memories from my childhood, 46 memories that had
been utterly lost to me until I focussed on capturing and examining that first memory
fragment.
I have given a lot of thought to
the process I experienced and discovered a few things I consider to be
important. First of all, even if we think we have forgotten our childhoods,
odds are that we have not—we simply do not have access to the memories. Why we
can’t access them is a question I cannot definitively answer, but I believe it
has to do with our emotional stability, our ability to revisit events that
involve a child in deep emotional pain and not break down. Since I went through
a couple of profound depressions that included suicidal thoughts (and two
attempts), I believe my subconscious mind kept these events from my conscious
mind until I was emotionally stable enough to revisit these events without
breaking down.
Another thing I learned is that
remembering these things is like a chain of events. The memories came back to
me in no particular order—in one memory I might be nine years old, in the next,
seventeen, and in the next, seven. They seem random until you realize that each
memory had something in common with the next—and that link was not necessarily
obvious. Writing about that toothache brought the nurse to mind and from that I
recovered several memories in which she featured. From this I realized that the
recovery of lost memories may be facilitated by taking a memory from your past
and examining it closely—the more details you can recall the more chances you
have of a link to another missing memory: each detail is a potential link to
another memory that, in some way, shares that link.
What I found that was most
important to me, however, was that in revisiting those old traumas, I became
free of their emotional power. I sobbed through the writing of virtually every
one of them and, re-reading them later, I cried again. And again. And then I
realized that, because I was safe while writing and re-reading them, because I
was not in the grip of the fear that characterized my interactions with my
mother, those tears were healing. I eventually got to the point where I could
read the memories from a semi-detached position: no longer feeling the pain of
that abused child but feeling pain for
her. It was a dramatic and therapeutic shift in my perspective.
I am sure a qualified therapist
might be able to come up with an explanation for this phenomena, and her
explanation may be very different from my own. But this is what I think: I
think that my subconscious mind protected me from memories that had the
potential to drive me to utter despair. When I no longer needed that
protection, it started releasing the memories, a bit at a time, to my conscious
mind. I think it is significant that the first memory to be recovered was 1)
not traumatic, 2) from an almost pre-verbal time (so the memory was largely
visual), 3) that the memory was literally seen from the eyes of the child (I
did not see myself, like watching a movie, I was a character in that movie and
could see things only from that perspective), and 4) it presented in
disconnected fragments that I had to apply myself to seizing and examining. I
spent nearly a year on this memory, piecing it together, confirming it with my
father, examining the details like colours and textures and even smells. And
then, because I didn’t know what to do to elicit more memories, the memory
retrieval process went dormant. Until I inadvertently replicated a pivotal
moment in the abuse I endured as a child—my mother knocked me unconscious and left me
on the kitchen floor and went off to work—triggered by the shared image of a
paper towel-wrapped sandwich with one bite out of it.
The value of links became
instantly obvious to me. Nearly fifty years had passed since the incident with the
sandwich but that image was iconic. It was the bridge between then and now—and the
key to unlocking the memory of that particular episode of abuse. And each
detail from each memory was a potential key for unlocking other memories.
Eventually memories just poured
out of me. I didn’t need links or prompts or triggers, they just came. I had to
make notes about each one so I could call the memory back when I was ready to
write it down. I had 46 retrieved memories by the time their release had
tapered off to a trickle.
So what does this mean for you? It
means that you can re-process the memories of childhood abuse from the
perspective of an adult who 1) knows she is safe from the abuser; 2) knows how
it ended—she didn’t die of shame or embarrassment or from an assault; 3) knows she
will not be hurt this time around; 4) can now see, objectively, that the child
is not at fault and who actually was. By revisiting these events today you can
be properly outraged at an adult who would abuse a child, allow abuse of a
child, encourage or abet the abuse of a child. You can see, from the more
objective perspective of an observing adult, that the child was victimized and
see how she was hurt and how those who did it were wrong. You can feel the
feelings of that time, sure in the knowledge of the outcome. You can find parts
of your childhood which are now lost to you by finding links from existing
memories and reprocess them so that those memories are no longer sources of
shame, pain, and terror.
Don’t expect to recover all of
your childhood, however. Some things were never properly encoded by our brains
in the first place and so they never went into long term memory storage. Some
things your subconscious may continue to keep away from you due to their potential
for causing you harm, even today. I, for example, have been terrified of
putting my face in water since earliest childhood and am still unable to access
the event(s) that triggered this fear. It could be the event took place so
early in my existence that it was never encoded for proper memory (pre-verbal
memories pretty much disappear before we reach adolescence) and since I cannot remember
ever not having this fear, that is a distinct possibility. I know, from stories
told me by my father and stepmother, that my father moved out of the family
home, at my mother’s behest, when I was eight. He was gone the better part of a
year—he had weekend visitation and saw me and my brother every second weekend
during that year. He moved back in and broke up with his girlfriend when my
mother decided to halt the divorce proceedings. And I have no recollection of
him being gone from the home at all. I have many other memories around this
age, but none of them include my father not living with us. Things were very
volatile between my parents at this time so maybe my subconscious is shielding
me from some devastating piece of information—and maybe my memory of this
period has been conflated with a memory from two years later, when my father
again moved out at my mother’s behest, took up with the old girlfriend, and
never moved back in. I remember that one—I remember telling a teacher that my
parents were getting a divorce, a scandalous thing in 1957, as an explanation
for my being distracted in class. This I remember: the first separation I do
not.
For me, the worst part of
remembering and reprocessing was the realization that, at the time of the original
events, I was so bound by fear that I could not make any choices other than the
ones I did. I was so thoroughly terrorized by my mother that I responded
mindlessly to that fear and made choices based on keeping information from her
so that I would not suffer further at her hands. In making these kinds of
choices I effectively victimized myself—not deliberately, of course, but those
choices put me in harm’s way more than once. Growing up this way, I continued
to make bad choices because I viewed myself as having only bad choices to
choose from and I had even more limited goals: all I really wanted was to feel
loved. And I made a lot of bad
choices in pursuit of that goal.
But I find that now, years after I
retrieved these memories and made myself journal them and process them, they
have lost the power to hurt me. I no longer shy away from them, squirm in
re-reading them, or even identify with that child. I am no longer that
terrorized child, afraid of everything and nothing, perpetually waiting for the
other shoe to drop. I wouldn’t even go so far as to hold myself up as a paragon
of healing from childhood abuse, but I would say that I have successfully
figured some things out, that I have moved forward, and that I have discovered some useful tools, like recovering lost childhood memories through seeking out
linking details in those things I can recall.
You might want to give it a try…
