Reprocessing the memories—even when you can’t remember

Many ACoNs have trouble remembering significant portions of their childhoods. Some of us have specific periods of time inaccessible to us, others have the details of a significant event unavailable—even the significant event itself may be shrouded in darkness. Researchers believe that most people remember very little of their childhoods before the age of 5 or 6 and memories from an earlier age likely fall into one of two categories: 1) “snapshot” memories, which are more like images than a full memory, and 2) false or created memories, often caused by having heard about an event and believing one is remembering it.

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…

Narcissists--where do they come from?

In the Nature v Nurture debate, we sometimes find ourselves wondering about narcissism. Some of us can clearly look back up the family tree and see abusive, narcissistic ancestors, people who abused their kids, giving them that “narcissistic injury” that trapped the child emotionally in the pre-logic years, creating a narcissist. But some of us cast an eye over the family gene pool and realize that our grandparents were loving people, good parents, wonderful examples that, for some odd reason, our narcissistic parent(s) did not emulate. How does that happen?

For each biologically inheritable trait you possess, there are two genes. You get one gene from your mother and one from your father.

There are dominant genes and there are recessive genes. Brown eyes are dominant over blue, for example, but a brown eyed person who had an ancestor with blue eyes may carry the blue-eyed gene, even though s/he has brown eyes and so do his parents and grandparents. That blue-eyed gene is recessive and it is the brown eyed gene that is being “expressed.”

But if this brown eyed person has a child with another brown eyed person who also has a recessive blue eyed gene, there is a 25% chance that they will produce a blue-eyed child.

Diabetes works much the same way: the gene for diabetes is recessive but if two people who have the recessive gene have a child together, there is a 25% chance that the child will be diabetic. Now, there are environment factors that come into play with diabetes: some people will be diabetic from childhood…Type 1 diabetes is where the pancreas ceases to function, which is typical of juvenile diabetes. Type 2 occurs when the body becomes resistant to the insulin the body produces. This resistance is usually attributed to obesity, improper diet, and even age. What is left out of most of the articles on this subject, however, is that obesity, improper diet and age are not, in themselves, sufficient to bring about the onset of diabetes. For that to happen, you have to have inherited that gene.

This explains why you may know people who seem to be a normal weight to you and they are diabetic and you also know someone who is morbidly obese and is not. It has to do with the genes. If you have the diabetic gene and you eat poorly, exercise little, and become overweight, given enough time you will develop diabetes. If you don’t have the diabetic gene, then no matter what happens to you, you won’t get it (unless something awful happens to your pancreas, like cancer or disease).

I think narcissism works much the same way. We know it runs in families…we also know that people from normal families develop it, much to the confusion and dismay of their families. My mother’s dysfunction was a cause of concern and confusion for her own family, and in later years, my father and step-mother as well. Her parents were normal, loving, compassionate, civic-minded people who, while acceding to the values of their society (gender equality did not exist in the 1930s and 40s for example), did not abuse their children. My stepmother, having met my maternal grandparents on numerous occasions, did not find them to be unusual in any way, my uncles report a normal upbringing in which my mother was spoilt by their father as the only girl, and my mother’s aunt reports that my mother was always, in her words, “difficult.” A picture of my mother, put together from my own experiences plus the reports of other who knew her in her early years, emerges of an entitled, headstrong, spiteful and wayward child who grew into a woman who retained all those qualities and more.

If neither of her parents were narcissistic nor were they abusive, where did my NM come from? I don’t know much about my great-grandparents, but I do know that my grandfather’s mother was notoriously difficult. She and my Nana didn’t get along, partly because GGM was bossy, tried to infantilize my grandfather, and refused to learn to speak English. GGM therefore had an excuse to carry on extensive conversations with other family members, leaving my Nana out because she didn’t speak German or Russian. When she came to visit, she tried to boss Nana around in her own kitchen, using her few English words to make it very clear to Nana that everything she was doing was wrong, pushing Nana out of the way to demonstrate the “right way” to do something, and generally pretending Nana didn’t exist or, at best, was a scullery maid at her beck and call. It’s not too big a stretch to think that GGM might have contributed a recessive gene for narcissism to my grandfather. On Nana’s side, her sister—the aunt who identified NM as being “difficult”—was a bit of a difficult one herself. Married multiple times in a society that frowned severely on divorce, and so focussed on having a daughter that she gave her three sons androgynous names and, once that daughter arrived, pretty much leaving the boys on their own so that she could focus exclusively on the girl, Auntie was known as the family “eccentric.” She so enmeshed that daughter that the child had a panic attack when it was time to separate from mama and go to school (she was kept out of school for a year due to it), and the daughter did not successfully go out on her own until after Auntie passed away. But Auntie was charismatic, with flaming red hair and grand gestures and a big voice—always the centre of attention and able to turn any conversation to herself, but in a way that made people love her—in small doses.

And so if Nana’s sister was an N—and Auntie had all the hallmarks of it—then obviously her own genetic heritage harboured the gene. And if Nana inherited one copy of the gene from her parents and Grandpa inherited one copy of the gene from his mother, and if their second child got two copies of the gene…one from Nana and one from Grandpa…then my mother would have born with two copies of the gene, which would activate it. And if my uncles got no copies of the gene…or even they only got one copy each, that would explain why they were so normal and their sister was so very, very different from them.

This, of course, is merely speculation. There is no proof that a gene for narcissism exists but if it does, this is how it can be passed down the generations and how a seemingly normal, perfectly functional family can produce a narcissist without any narcissistic injury occurring to the child. Nurture certainly has its part—I have to wonder how different my mother might have been if her father had not spoilt and indulged her as a child, reinforcing her notion of entitlement, and if she had been held accountable the same way her brothers were. But, knowing that my mother dismissed her coddling as her due and was furiously jealous of the freedom her brothers were allowed, it probably would have made little difference. Rather than take into account the social restrictions of girls in that time, my mother chose to perceive her parents as “favouring” the boys over her, and herself abused as a result.

There is a danger, if you believe narcissism is transmitted genetically, to back off and think “oh, the poor thing can’t help it!” That would not be true. Just as the Type 2 diabetic can eat right, exercise, and keep their weight down, the narcissist has control over the expression of the gene. Biology is not destiny, and narcissists fully comprehend what their society expects of them in terms of behaviour and are fully capable of displaying those behaviours, as they often do when it is to their advantage. Narcissists have no less choice than non-narcissists when it comes to behaviours: just as the diabetic can choose to eat chocolate or an apple, the narcissist can choose between lying and telling the truth. The difference is no more than a matter of desire: some diabetics choose to eat the chocolate even though they know they are not supposed to because they want the reward, the taste, the feeling chocolate gives them…and narcissists are no different.

Neither of my maternal grandparents were diabetic, but Nana’s father was…and so was one of her children. Neither my father nor my mother were diabetic, but I am. It is clear that the gene can be carried to the descendants of the diabetics by non-diabetics. I know that families headed by fair, loving, compassionate parents can produce a malicious, vindictive, selfish narcissist because I have seen it in my own family. And knowing how the gene for diabetes can “skip” a generation or two, it would stand to reason that if someday a gene for narcissism is discovered, it is transmitted in much the same way, so that parents who do not express the gene but carry it, may pass it down to their children.

It bears thinking about.

Boundaries are for us, too

We talk a lot about setting boundaries to make our narcissists respect us, to create limits to their behaviour, to manage them. But have you ever thought about setting boundaries for yourself?

One of the great difficulties we have with our narcissists is finding ways to limit their incursions into our lives and minds. We look for ways to encourage—or coerce—them to control or redirect their urges, to treat us with at least a semblance of respect even if they don’t feel it. But they aren’t the only ones who need boundaries…we need them too.

I am not talking about the kinds of boundaries that we set with others, like our narcissists or our children or even our neighbours and co-workers. I am talking about boundaries with ourselves, for ourselves. We, who are raised by people who overstep our natural boundaries at every opportunity and have none of their own, often find it very difficult to exert what others call “self discipline” when it comes to ourselves. Oh, we are often very respectful—even too respectful—of the boundaries of others, so much so that we don’t assert ourselves or, if we do, we do not do it appropriately.

You may not have thought about it this way, but when you learn to say “no” to your abusers and exploiters, you have set a boundary with them…but have you learned to say “no” to yourself? What boundaries do you set for yourself and how good are you at exercising and maintaining them?

When we set boundaries for others, sometimes it is difficult for us to make those boundaries stick. If you have a child who has learned that if he is persistent enough, you will break down and give in, then you have not made the boundary stick. If, after you say “no,” he continues to wheedle and beg, threaten or rage, your child is not respecting your boundary. And if you eventually give in, just to shut him up, you aren’t respecting it either. All you have taught your child is that you don’t mean what you say because persistence pays…he can get what he wants if he just nags you long enough.

Do you do that to yourself?

Going “No Contact” is a boundary that you set with your narcissists…you might tell them not to contact you anymore or, you might just fade away from their lives, but either way, you have drawn a line in the sand you do not wish them to cross. But that boundary is yours as well! It is almost inevitable that you will have to enforce the boundaries because your Ns will not respect either your wishes or your silence. But do you respect your own boundary with respect to NC? Or do you read their boundary-breaking emails, open the letters and cards they send, give yourself angst over the gifts and invitations they send? Do you violate your NC by listening to other family members tell you how hurt your Ns are, how much they miss you, or how selfish, cruel and ungodly you are being, cutting off contact with people who love you so much?

Boundaries work both ways. And often, when we set boundaries, we fail to realize that. Boundaries have goals…there is a reason you set the boundary…so if you set a boundary and then violate it yourself, how are you attaining your goal? Aren’t you actually sabotaging yourself?

We lack boundaries in many other ways. How good are you at stopping those voices in your head? Have you ever set yourself a boundary for them, a boundary like “When I start to tell myself that I am a failure, I will stop and say ‘shut up, Mom, and get out of my head,’ or ‘That’s a lie, Dad, and you know it. The problem is you and the fact that nothing, no matter how good it is, is good enough for you.’” Have you ever even thought about setting boundaries on yourself, for what you do or say or believe about yourself?

Do you have a bad habit, like smoking or nail biting or over eating? Have you set yourself a boundary to stop those behaviours? Think about it…when you set boundaries for others, you expect them to change their behaviour towards you…can’t you do the same for yourself?

When you set a boundary for a narcissist, what you are asking that narcissist to do it to control, restrain, or redirect her urges. This is not an unreasonable expectation but narcissists are childish and, like small children, often impulse-driven. But we expect adults in our society to control their impulses…it is part of the social order and those who refuse to control certain of their urges run afoul of the law. The courts really don’t care why a man fails to control his sexual urges and commits rape or paedophilia, they don’t care that it is easier to steal a phone or a car or a diamond ring than to earn the money to buy it. The law, which is really nothing more than a codified set of boundaries, cares only that we respect those boundaries in order for our society to operate smoothly, or we suffer the consequences for violating them.

So the law expects that we control our urges to rape, to steal, to assault, to kill. It pretty much doesn’t care about our reasons for not controlling them, and fully expects us all, regardless of colour, faith, gender or economic advantage, to exert the necessary self-control to refrain from those activities. Why do we think, then, that we don’t need to control our personal urges inside the confines of our own personal lives? It is, after all, just that mind set that allows narcissists to prey on us—they see no reason to control their urges as they have no respect for the feelings or rights of other people and, unless we set boundaries and provide consequences for violating them, we give them free reign. But aren’t we doing the same thing to ourselves?

Think about things you allow yourself to do that work against you: succumbing to irrational fears without taking the time to think them through, breaking into “fight or flight” panic mode without stopping to apply rational thought. Worrying over things you cannot control. Tempting yourself to break NC by keeping emails from your Ns on the computer where there are there, beckoning you. I’ll bet you can think of a thousand other instances in which your own lack of boundaries for yourself get you into painful situations.

You might want to think about setting some boundaries for yourself and see how that works for you.