Is It Better To Recover Memories Or Not?

[shell]

Recovering memories can be devasting, and confronting. It helps to be able to prove or disprove with external sources. My opinion is let sleeping dogs lie, unless they come up by themselves then don't go digging. It can be very difficullt to accept the truth, when the truth is ugly, painful and unacceptable, even when someone presents the evidence it doesn't mean that you accept it, for me it felt unreal.

 

[shimmerz]

for me it felt unreal.

I still get waves of this unreal feeling, even though I have documented truth that it happened.

 

[BlueOrange]

I think it's far more important to build the ability to cope with the memories than it is to recover them. There comes a point when you can only improve at coping through practice, which is the point where actively recovering memories can be useful. Memories will come back, regardless. Digging specifically for them is far more fashionable than it is useful.

 

[VioletButterfly]

My first therapist gave me my memories, along with my identity. Many of which, I assume are false. I don't know. It's a rough patch I try not to dwell on. She controlled me and abused me.

Please take your time and process them as your mind brings them up to you.

 

[Powder]

Forgetting doesn't make it go away. Like others said, it controls you more from the place where you're choosing somehow to not access it. Putting into the storage locker is what happened at the time for good reason, but leaving it there is not optional once healing begins because it's recordings of your history that want to return to their owner. The memories belong and are permanently connected to you, not by neurobiology but by "right."

Healing and integration is part of life.

Some kind of coherence adds to validation, but if you come from a PTSD family, you don't get outright validation, and when you do, you cannot trust those who have hurt and lied to you because they are inherently untrustworthy. Also, the extended family was always kept far enough at bay to not have any information to add. They were kept in the dark and only shown what looked 'good.'

When memories come up there should be no need for external validation after enough is known; in my healing, if I waited for that, like I did as a teen, I'd be worse off. Not to mention, validation from an evil or twisted person is just not validation. Validation from someone who also has not "false" memories, but somehow flawed also, is not the same as validation. We put the picture together the best we can, or it doesn't get put together at all.

Support is key, someone who is healthy and loving enough to show you back yourself and your best over time.

For instance, my sister has said that she thinks I tried to drown her, tried to kill her, several times. She remembers being smothered in her crib with a pillow and being drowned. So do I, but since I am the oldest, I never attributed these actions to her. I have always felt like "What!?" because I was always saving her from our parents. Her "false" memories are mere distortions and misdirection in order to Child Abuse Accommodation Syndrome, aka, keep taking money from her abusers. She is trapped in Les Miserables; I left.

I had a major flashback recently of our mother taking us to the river and taking my sleeping little sister out of the car at night and my fighting back by pulling on her and screaming. I don't believe in false memory because I understand why waking up to my mom and fighting over her was probably confusing to a three year old.
She mixed up who was drowning her and who was trying to save her because she just woke up, it was pitch black only lit by a half moon dark, raining a ton in Seattle, and we were on the surface of a freezing winter river. Even an adult would be confused if they woke to that. Mom's Hands were pushing her under and my Hands were trying to push her above water.

When I lost track of my sister, and saw that mom was holding her under, I tried to STOP the flashback, but it leaked through that I grabbed a river rock and started to bash my mom in the face and head to make her stop trying to kill my sister.

Recorded with the memory was shame and guilt for doing that. But as an adult, I now feel like, you know, I am actually a hero for being willing to hurt my own mom to save someone who needed saving. Now there are 'stand your ground' laws in the USA about just that. You have a right to stop violence with violence if there is no other choice available.

So now I don't try to push my violence down anymore. I only did that to save my sister and myself from drowning, and it worked. My mom gave up; she didn't expect me to fight so well for a 5 year old.

Is my memory perfect? No. But since none of those monsters who did this is willing to remember these events and have hidden them from everyone, then I have to take my sister's memories for what they are, as a kind of "validation" that it happened some way quite similar to how I remember.

Use the emotions to guide. I felt shame for doing the right thing, for saving a life. The emotion is raw, not wrong. It's pure, and it can be made to guide the thinking and understanding of how to feel differently about thing from today's perspective.

I have had dreams that mom tried drowning me as a baby, also, and then I repressed it. But then this would explain why I knew we were there and why I didn't want mom taking my sister out of the car in the rain at the river alone. I didn't "know" why we were there, only that mom was silent and enraged beyond speech. I knew something was wrong. I knew she'd done violence before.

Rather than ask for outside validation, look back at all the times you didn't need it to survive. I read that becoming self-validating is a major recovery tool. This is empowered, and it's never about being perfect or accurate or right. It's about being on your own side and standing your ground anyway.

Don't back down from your own memories when they come up. Don't listen to people who say you don't know things right. You got this. Fight the good fight. If you don't stand for yourself, nobody else will.

 

[Chava]

Your poor, hurting, traumatized inner child does not need to re-live those times

The problem seems to be that we relive those times whether we want to or not.

That's the whole point of therapy for me...gaining awareness of what I'm experiencing and making different choices. Crappy therapy would probably involve just sharing memories or having these re-experiencing moments without any help understanding them or finding new responses to them.

I have older physical and sexual traumas but I think the worst stuff for hanging on is the very early traumas. My mom was not mentally well and I was very sick and separated from my family a couple times for major medical problems. After a few years of therapy these earliest memories (age 0-2...I remember the stuff from around age 4) have not come to me in the form of normal or terrifying visual flashbacks. They also feel the most stuck. I can fear they will turn into those forms of memories or images. But they don't. They are powerful body memories and emotional-type flashbacks that I have all the time in response to sometimes seemingly unrelated triggers. So not remembering is not an option. I tried to tell my body that through a whole lot of vodka, but that didn't work well for very long. :meh:

In the right therapy setting we should be able to experience the memories in ways that help us integrate them and understand ourselves better, without being too overwhelmed. It's a tricky sort of balance for sure since overwhelm comes so easily.

I have many horrible responses to sensations in my body. Pain and feelings of no control over my body can throw me off the deep end pretty easily. I've wanted to cut myself up or set myself on fire just for having cramps sometimes. Disproportiate responses much? :eek: It's very challenging to have chronic pain (which is likely part of how my "memory" works). Most recently I was trying to rest through a pain attack and felt so sad I could die. But oddly you wouldn't know it because I could not even cry...so zero outlet for any of this. I felt like my body was full of lead and submerged in a shallow pool of water, nearly covered. I could not cry because I'd threaten my life...that was the feeling....I had to be very still and breathe as little and as carefully as possible to just survive. I found that subtle sound vibrations to my hand helped ease the inner lead feeling so I could cry a tiny bit and loosen some of that (silent, still crying, but a couple tears). My therapist thinks this is probably a very old body memory and I agree. My explaining of it here is not like a normal memory...I'm pretty sure I was never full of lead and submerged...but this fits my body experience, likely of not being able to breathe when really small and left alone to try to survive that. I HAD to shutdown. But now it's not so useful.

These experiences didn't go away by trying to not remember. I didn't have awareness of what was going on with me. For a few decades I seriously fled my body...in ways that just kept landing me in the hospital. To get healthy I had to learn to recognize and tolerate body sensations. It has been hard. But the sort of paralysis I described above isn't new. I shutdown over small hurts, regular pains, all the time. It helps to notice the disproportion here but also ways to not force myself out, but find comfort or safety I can access at that level and create a new pattern.

The later childhood memories I do have somewhat in "regular" memory can simply send me back to shutdown. The important thing for complex trauma (or any trauma) is regulation. The goal shouldn't be to remember and fully relive every trauma, at least not without lots of work on grounding and regulation first. That alone can take a long time. But the fact is that the memories are already acting on us. I don't expect to have a clear memory of every bit, but learning how to notice what is going on in my body and make supportive but different choices helps me "rewire" my responses and let some of the past reintegrate so that it is really of the past and being constantly re-experienced in the present.

If I had the ability to not remember or re-experience I'm sure I wouldn't be on this forum. Ditto @shimmerz...we don't have to go around digging up the memories. If they matter, they are already there, acting on us in really unhelpful ways. Implicit memories (body memories, re-experiencing) are supposedly more accurate than explicit ones anyway, but we think the explicit-type are the ones we are supposed to find because they are easier to put into words. So for me it's more about learning about my body and different responses to create new patterns. Re-experiencing is simply "memory" that was not integrated in a normal way. It's why having a therapist who understands early trauma has been helpful. Also helps me feel like less of a helplessly broken f*ck-up. There is reasonable context for my disproportionately bad feelings in present experiences...and ways to rework all of it (slowly, gradually, carefully).

Sorry, holy crap, pretty long response. But good topic. Thanks for posting @cupfish

 

[The Albatross]

I don't particularly use "emotions as my guide". I have ample evidence that they too are flawed... but, big BUT I have come to accept that it may/was likely my impression at the time. "...it's never about being perfect or accurate or right. It's about being on your own side and standing your ground anyway." Tend to disagree but I am a stoic.

 

[illusionist]

I agree with the The Albatross....I know of someone who feels deep rejection because her mum didn't stay at hospital while she was regularly admitted into hospital....the reality was that mum couldn't as she had another to take care of and wasn't allowed to stay over night due to lack of beds. She sees this as neglect?....understandable for a child to feel rejected but was not neglected nor rejected...it was just a situation a child didn't understand.

 

[Crow]

I spent years thinking I needed to recover memories. I finally found a trauma specialist - a very patient one. It took nearly eight years of her guiding me to somatic experiencing, trying to get me to give up the attempts to remember, before I got it. Late last year I gave up trying to match images and memories with what my body was processing. My healing is going at light speed now. I don't recognize my life some days. It's so much better. So now I simply track the feelings and sensations and I don't think of how/where it fits. Sometimes that info floods in, but I no longer force it.

 

[Tinyflame]

That's so wonderful @CrowFeather :tup: :hug: Yes I do think emotions or feelings (bodily sensations included) can be so heavily influenced by the past. It really takes a huge leap of faith to not give them credence as to assessing them as reflective of the present, especially if we can't recall another explanation (remember the past). On the other hand, intuition or gut or something 'other', ( than regular emotions, don't know a word for it?) seems like a different animal.

 

[Truthful_Whispers]

That is a pandora's box, I am not sure. I have years of repressed memories from when I was young. I would like to know what all happened to me, but, at the same time, they are repressed for a reason.

 

[Crow]

I'd highly recommend you work with someone trained in Somatic Experiencing. It approaches all this from the understanding the body, the muscles and tissue and cells and organs, hold our memories and trauma. When our fight or flight is interrupted bc we're too young or trapped, that energy goes somewhere when it cannot be released. Into our bodies. Resulting in ptsd. The therapy modality is quite remarkable.