Remembering Trauma
I want to post about a significant challenge that I have encountered in abuse recovery. This is an excessively controversial subject in Survivor circles, and I do not doubt that someone will read this and disagree with me bitterly at some point in time.
So allow me to take a moment and say: I'm not like my brother, Calladus, who has posting rules about comments on his blog. I don't have any rules because this is my journal and I don't really intend to be fair. Lets face it, I post a bunch of personal stuff here, and I let everybody read it. So it is not a place that I'll accept a dressing down over an emotional subject- no matter how civil the dressing down may attempt to be. If you're a stranger or an unkind person and you post something overly confrontational, I'll just delete it. Feel free to ask for my email address and we can have a one-off debate or conversation, though.
Anyhoo...
The subject is about remembering trauma.
In my experience, I've come across about a dozen "group" forums that I have actively participated in, that were moderated by counselors, psychologists, or abuse survivors. These include no more than four web sites, two county-run group forums, a few groups that were created and moderated by survivors only, and a few groups that were created by violence prevention non-profits & women’s support centers.
Well over half of these, including all four of the web sites and one of the county-run groups spent a tremendous amount of time discussing how to recover memories of abuse that were "blocked out". This is also true of a book called "The Courage to Heal."
In this book and within these forums, I always felt like the "unusual exception". We are told: Some Survivors always remembered what happened to them, but many adults have completely forgotten the experience, then twenty, thirty, or forty years later something happens and they suddenly start to remember. Those are not my words, that's the exact wording from several of my Survivor group hand-outs.
However, I remember everything.
I remember it happening before I understood what it was, and before I had a name for it. I remember those horrible events no matter how much they were denied or ignored by my offender or my non-protective parent. I remember it no matter how much shame I felt, no matter how it affected my self-worth, or esteem. I remembered it no matter how much I feared being blamed. I remembered it no matter what consequences I feared if I spoke about what happened. I remembered even though I was isolated in my experiences, & no group of trusted people went through these experiences with me.
But these are all cited as reasons why children forget.
I believe that I am not the "unusual exception" after all. I have come to believe that most Survivors of sexual abuse are exactly like me in this respect. I believe that most Survivors of sexual abuse do not find themselves incapable of remembering their trauma- unless they were too young at the time of their abuse, or have suffered brain injury & damage.
In fact, I believe that most Survivors are also like me in that their problem with traumatic memories is precisely the opposite of what these forums attempt to teach. What really happens is that we remember too much.
The problem that I always had with my memories of trauma was their intrusive and unbidden reenactments in my mind. Even when I tried not to think about it, memories of the abuse would involuntarily monopolize my thoughts with graphic and disturbing images of my past.
I can't tell you how many times I've had to skip over chapters on trauma amnesia, or "sit out" in group therapies while the group immersed in exercises for "recovered memory therapy" and "hypnosis". All the while, nobody spoke of how to deal with remembering everything only too well.
And I'll tell you something else. I think it's a bunch of bullshit.
The authors of the book The Courage to Heal are not psychotherapists, doctors, or neuroscientists of any kind, and they do not cite any scientific study. However, their book makes an attempt to do a noble thing: They attempt to fill a void where there *should* be researched and helpful facilitation to the psychological health of the abuse survivor. Also, I must point out that the Courage to Heal has many comforting and healing exercises. For instance, their writing exercise titled "Giving Up the Fantasy" in the Courage to Heal Workbook is a very powerful tool!
So, I do not necessarily want to bag on The Courage to Heal authors, but the bias that they and others have regarding memories began to flood therapy sessions in the late 80's, and the misconceptions regarding memory are still observed today.
I am not any sort of expert on the human brain or its ability to recall. But I do believe in scientific study, which this book does not cite. There is another book called Remembering Trauma, by Richard J. McNally that could be much more comforting to an abuse Survivor.
Notice that I use the words "could be."
Here's the deal. Remembering Trauma has some very awesome stuff in it. Nearly half the book is filled with foot-notes and lists of the scientific studies that were cited in the writing of the book itself. Good to know. It's awesomely researched.
The problem is that Remembering Trauma is as dry as a sack of sawdust and reads like a tome of stereo receiver instructions. But this information shouldn't be like that!! People like me could really use this stuff!!
The average abuse survivor is going to fall asleep before they remember the definitions for hypermnesia, amygdala, and hyperthymesic syndrome. But there are a lot of Survivors like me out there that would derive a great deal of comfort from this book's conclusion that events that trigger overwhelming terror or trauma are normally not forgotten. That the notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories is psychiatric folklore that is not corroborated by any study or verifiable support.
The fact that you remember does not mean that your brain did not protect you. What a notion to ponder in a bullshit therapy session!! Can you imagine being in an emotional group session and considering that while other Survivors were spared having to remember their traumas through their adolescence or early adulthood- you were betrayed by your own brain!!
A Holocaust Survivor can recount their experience with amazing accuracy even well into their autumn years. Child survivors of disasters and war can do the same. Is it not odd, that repressed memories are only associated in therapy circles when relating to childhood sexual abuse? Survivors of abuse and other traumas suffer similar consequences in the form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We have therapies that work well for people with PTSD. Why are these therapies not more common in books and groups that facilitate abuse recovery?
I've often wondered about an experience that I have forgotten. I know from stories told by my mother and brother that my mother once held my abuser at gunpoint. She put down the gun when she saw me in the room. She said my eyes were very wide.
Why did I forget this? The only answer that I can think of is that there is a very real chance that I was not traumatized by this event. My mother and my offender were always in arguments, and he was never held to any consequences for his actions. It is very likely that I never expected her to fire the gun. My mother describes my eyes as wide, however I believe that it is likely that she assigned much more emotion to this event than I did.
But as I stated before, I am not any sort of expert on the human brain or its ability to recall. So I'm willing to accept the notion that we may not yet have all the answers about remembering trauma. Perhaps there are ways that trauma can be forgotten by some. But these occurances would seem to be anomalies and are certainly unresearched. Therefore, it is unlikely that there are any proven effective therapies for these anomalies. Recovered memory therapy would seem to be a very reckless form of counseling.
I would hope that group therapists and facilities might take a moment to remember why they started writing and facilitating in the first place. I would hope that they could consider a time before they heard about massive repression, and before the first time they denied such a thing as False Memory Syndrome. There was a time when these facilities wanted to help bring peace to survivors of abuse.
Truly, it is peace that we could all use.