Repressed Memories: Are They Real?
By now, most of my readers out there have heard of repressed memories and perhaps false memories. Writing about both is the only way to clear your mind and the minds of many others of the worry that you may be making it all up because you have been told the things you remember happening never did.
This piece is meant to be educational weaving together information about false and repressed memory and how it is involved in dissociative identity disorder. It is important for you to remember that no one’s memories of the past are 100% correct.
Childhood Sexual Abuse
While there are a seemingly plethora of ways to abuse and neglect a child, the one this author knows best is childhood sexual abuse as a survivor of it.
Childhood sexual abuse is any interaction between an adult and a child where the child is used for pleasure by the perpetrator. Sexual abuse includes both non-touching and touching behaviors.
Non-touching sexual abuse occurs when the perpetrator tries to see the child’s nakedness or exposes the child to pornography. Touching sexual abuse is just as it sounds and includes fondling, the perpetrator trying and often succeeding in touching inappropriately any part of the child’s body. Unfortunately, touching sexual abuse also includes penetration.
There are many effects caused by childhood sexual abuse (or any overwhelming trauma), including the following:
- Anger
- Memories that do not match what others are telling you
- Phobias
- Anxiety from smelling, tasting, and hear certain words that remind one of their trauma
- Having a deep-seated fear of abandonment or being left alone
- Experiencing hypervigilance
- Panic attacks
- Not enjoying being touched or touching your body and those of others
- Sexual dysfunction
If you think the above characteristics of one who has been abused sound familiar, it is because many overlap with the symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
What are Repressed Memories?
Repressed memories, aka dissociative amnesia, involves trauma that the survivor cannot recall. These memories stay stored in our brains and negatively affect us in a myriad of ways.
It is believed that repressed memories are caused through experiencing deeply harmful experiences, such as sexual abuse. The reason they are formed is because the highly traumatic memories were too extreme for the child’s brain to process.
If the abuse occurs in very young children, they cannot cope with what they have just experienced. So their brain allows them to do a marvelous thing, they push the memory deep into the recesses of their brains.
As the child grows, their ability to handle traumatic situations and memories becomes stronger. The child, now an adolescent, experience difficulties because they are driven by the repressed memories of their abuse. A teen will avoid things that cause flashbacks and express their discomfort by engaging in high-risk behaviors.
False Memories
False memories involve having a memory that the person believes is true, but it is partly true or completely false. False memories are highly convincing to the one experiencing them but can accidentally become implanted when one meets compelling suggestions.
False memories are a danger of when you are recovering repressed memories. Although false memories definitely exist, research has found that they are rare, unusual, infrequent, but not impossible in those living with dissociative identity disorder.
Memory Dysfunction and Dissociative Identity Disorder
Dissociative Identity Disorder is usually thought of as only including alternate states of consciousness with these states often taking over control of the survivors life. Yet, one of the least thought of yet defining symptoms of dissociative identity disorder (DID) is memory dysfunction.
Repressed memories in someone who has dissociative identity disorder were formed when in childhood traumatic experiences became overwhelming. While I cannot show you a repressed memory, I have certainly experienced their effects in my life.
It is when the child becomes an adult that many repressed memories begin to surface involuntarily causing chaos and fear. In DID, each alter holds repressed memories that are directly related to the traumatic experiences their host identity.
The chaos that comes with recovering repressed memories cannot be understated. Suddenly realizing what happened to them and who did it is deeply unsettling and causes a great deal of anger and disbelief. There is nothing more unnerving than suddenly having horrific memories intrude into your adult life.
Because of the trait of having memory dysfunction and possible false memories, some mental health professionals do not believe that DID exists. This disbelief is incredibly harmful because a person living with DID can go on average, eleven years without a proper diagnosis.
Ending Our Time Together
I began therapy not because I knew I had DID, but because I had all these memories flooding my mind and I thought I was going crazy. Only after my therapist had observed me for several months did she give me the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder.
I know the chaos that is caused by repressed memories involved with DID because I have lived experience. The first memory to surface for me was that of a sexual abusive situation with my grandfather. I had turned off the light beside my bed for the night and suddenly was transported back to a time long ago where I was sexually abused.
If you are vomiting up repressed memories, please, don’t try to treat yourself. It is critical that you seek out a trauma-informed therapist and hang on for a bumpy ride.
The main focus of what I write about is the fact that you can heal. I have done a tremendous amount of healing and only wish to reach out to those who have DID and need information and encouragement.
I have more thing to add. If you are worried that you have made up the memories and the existence of alters, you are not. People who brag about or who have no worry that they are lying usually are.
If I can heal, so can you.
“I think repressing what happened is what saved me in my childhood. I was able to use my imagination to create happy events, but a little girl can carry only so much on her own.” ― Erin Merryn
“The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.” ― Sigmund Freud