Yes. People remember traumatic events differently than they remember normal events. Instead of remembering an event in a narrative way where you consciously know what happened, trauma shuts off this narrative memory and is instead remembered by a person doing certain behaviors or reacting to certain stimuli. This is why repressed memories are a thing.
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is an excellent book on the topic.
Absolutely yes. Just because memories of a specific event go away their impact doesn’t. In fact, a very common response to any kind of trauma (physical or emotional) is to either not remember it entirely or not very well.
yes
Yes. It’s even possible to be traumatized by an event you couldn’t possibly remember, ie. something in the first three years of your life. Before about three years old, the neural pathways for long term memory don’t exist, and yet trauma from those early years can define a life.
I remember reading about a case or two, where a little girl had extremely traumatic dreams about being sexually assaulted by her father, and then later everyone found out that those weren’t just dreams, they were actually memories.
And what’s remarkable, is that those memories were from when she was less than 2-3 years old, even if that shouldn’t have been possible for her to remember.
My understanding is that memories form at that age but accessing them becomes very difficult as certain higher order functions come online, language chief among them. It may not be that we can’t form long term memories (the fact that early trauma has long lasting effects is evidence that we can) but rather that we cannot access those long term memories on demand using our most common memory accessing techniques. That would explain why we see people accessing those memories in dreams, or through hypnosis, or in response to new trauma, etc.
I think that’s an excellent and accurate explanation, and that’s the conclusion I have arrived to as well.
Absolutely.
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It’s not clear but maybe. The satanic panic cult torture obsession of the 80s and 90s, where people with significant credentials were claiming individuals completely blocked out memories of experiencing torture rituals at the hands of satanic cabals was heavily reliant on the ‘recovered memory’ concept and all of that has been thoroughly discredited. Because of that embarrassment, there was an aversion to research on forgotten traumas for a bit. A more sober approach to researching these topics has followed more recently. Personally, with present evidence, I wouldn’t definitively come down on it one way or the other.
I can’t speak much on the cult panic (Amerikkka is a satanic country where it is frowned upon not to abuse one’s children, and conservatives are the foremost abusers), but recovered memory isn’t bullshit as far as I can tell (I also used to dismiss it). The book I linked in another comment goes into how memory for traumatic events works differently than it does for everyday things. The author and the Trauma Research Foundation he works for seem pretty reputable.
When I say recovered memory, I intend to refer to a specific therapy technique that is full stop no longer used by anyone at all credible in the field. ‘Body keeps the score’ is a very popular book for clinicians to recommend to patients, so while I haven’t read it I imagine it’s not promoting what I intended to refer to and likely isn’t especially controversial. Though, I would caution you that as it’s a book for popular audiences, the language contained within may not be the most technically precise—especially a decade plus after its first publication. With that said, I wouldn’t say my own perspective on memory and trauma is necessarily in opposition to what ‘Body keeps…’ is saying based on a quick summary I’m looking at.
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While not every single event or accusation from the Satanic Panic era was true, more recent evidence has come out that shows that a huge fucking chunk of the abuse was real, just swept under the fucking rug.
I’m 99 percent sure that the “hysteria” over the Satanic panic was a manufactured PSYOP meant to downplay, distract, justify or ignore actual abuses that were/are coming out at the time.
Again, while not every accusation was true, many of the cases were declared to be false, merely because the fascist Amerikkkan state said so.
And I’m not talking about recovered memory therapy, I mean the facts that alot of the claims matched evidence that couldn’t otherwise be known.
For whatever you may view the worth of this, as an until very recent psych researcher in a lab that focused on PTSD and specifically CSA—I finished grad school I wasn’t kicked out for my unorthodox beliefs or anything—I can tell you that is not the commonly held opinion by contemporary researchers and that those cases have not been meaningfully substantiated, despite the huge amount of evidence that would have to exist for the stories to be true, nor have similar events been seen in the following years—despite the Qanon movement’s popularity with local police forces which would seem to indicate willingness to accept these cases as possible and investigate them. My difficulty with accepting the satanic abuse at face value comes down to this, how are archeologists able to investigate and establish ritual sites from the megalithic era but no solid evidence for these major satanic rituals that occurred within the lives of many still living can be located, despite the significant public backing (including in the govt) that existed at the time and again more recently with Qanon to investigate?
Ultimately it’s not my place to say, but in my opinion, this theatrical stuff belies that the vast majority of abuse is committed by an individual known to the victim, not cults the victims and their families weren’t active members of, guys in vans handing out candy snatching kids off the street, or predators in online chat rooms.
None of this speaks to OP’s question about forgetting trauma, but the satanic cult abuse specifically to be clear.
I don’t view accepting the cases of sexual abuse as being anywhere equivalent to Qanon. It doesn’t make Qanon valid at all. And I agree that people have an unfortunate tendency to normalize non-ritualistic abuse of children, and I’m very aware that the vast majority of the time, abuse is committed by someone very close or close to the victim, rather than strangers or cults.
I’m not saying any of this in a “Hillary Clinton and comet ping pong codeword pizza!” type of shit, and I don’t think that every accusation during the Satanic Panic was true, but I think a huge percentage of them were, and the bourgeois state just swept them under the rug.
I stress that regardless, all children and human beings, and life/sentient life in general, deserve protection from abuse of any and all kinds.
And in alot of these cases, the authorities somewhat openly admitted to burying evidence.
And no, I don’t discriminate against Satanists or religious people in general.
