It is very common for those who have gone through a traumatic event to repress any and all memories about the event. In some cases, those memories never resurface. Instead, they show themselves through the victim’s behavior, speech or thought patterns. However, in other cases, those memories do show themselves, and this generally happens because of a triggering event that occurs that brings everything flooding back.
In his book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk discusses repressed memories and how they relate to trauma. It might intrigue you to know that up until fairly recently, some of the top psychiatrists in the world did not wholeheartedly believe that repressed memories were even possible. In fact, most of them simply chalked them up to stories that had been fabricated for one reason or another. If you are someone who has experienced trauma in your life, you know that this is not true at all. Fortunately, additional research has been done that proves that traumatic events do often result in the mental repression of those events, and this can wreak havoc on the life of the person suffering with trauma.
What Causes Traumatic Event Repression?
There are so many events that can lead to memory suppression, and it’s important to keep in mind that everyone reacts differently to trauma. For one person, a traumatic event may have been something like being beaten up by the school bully in second grade, while for another person, it might be surviving a battle in Vietnam as you watch your friends die all around you. Memory loss is often reported in victims of kidnapping, torture, physical and sexual abuse. However, the most common instance of memory loss is reported to be in those who underwent sexual abuse during childhood.
To prove his point, Dr. Van der Kolk cites a study that was completed by Dr. Linda Meyer Williams. She was able to connect with 136 adult women who had been interviewed at a hospital after being victimized by sexual abuse. Approximately one-third of the women did not recall the abuse, or anything that was said in the hospital’s records. She Dr. Meyer Williams noted that the younger the children were when the abuse occurred, the more likely they were to suppress the events. Several of the women reported forgetting the events for a time, but then they recalled them later.
The Consequences of Holding on to Traumatic Events
While it may be normal for someone who has been a victim of a traumatic event to repress those events, it can do a great deal of damage. So many people are wrongly diagnosed with psychiatric disorders, given medication to calm their behaviors, or even dismissed altogether. Perhaps one of these three has been your experience, and you feel as though something is just not “right” but you can’t put a finger on what it is.
The moment those painful events resurface is often devastating for anyone, and if you suspect that you’ve been through a trauma, it’s important to uncover the event so that you can heal from it and allow it to become the right kind of memory. Working with a Trauma Therapist will allow you to do that in a safe environment.
