She said that it is possible that I never associated. I didn't think this was possible, since the memories *have* to be there somewhere.
No they don't, as your therapist is correct.
Not all memories are recorded, and especially traumatic memories are not because most people lose focus, panic, dissociate and so forth during a traumatic event, thus the brain actually stops recording what is going on around them and is recording what they are doing.
Police are extremely familiar with this, asking eyewitnesses to an event to describe the car, often getting many different responses back. If a witness was holding a childs hand and the child was talking to them, yelling at them even, then their brain may actually be recording that, so they interpret events around them, not actually record them, as their brain didn't record what went on around them as the person was focused elsewhere. Some people can stay present, ie. highly trained persons, military, police, etc, who are specifically trained to not go into fight or flight mode, instead they're trained and rehearsed at becoming aware of their surrounding in which to make accurate decisions and obtain correct data on what is happening around them. Then they determine the course of action taken. Civilians do not have that training, thus they duck, turn away, run, etc, hear things that weren't related to the event, ie. hear 4 gun shots when only 2 where fired.
The brain records all five senses, though it interprets what it remembers based on the emotional significance. Higher emotions are recorded, lesser emotional events are not.
An underlying theory of memory which has much merit to it to date, is the memory is in three stages, being the first is stuff going on around you, present tense... then you have the second level where you memorise things that you use often such as phone numbers, birth days, etc... then you have the third level, being storage of long term emotional events, such as something from childhood, a year or two ago. You don't remember every aspect of the event, but you remember what you have chosen to remember.
Where therapy goes wrong is when you or another try and lead to rebuilding a memory, literally making things up that you don't have in memory to begin with. Even visiting a location, things have changed. Tree's may have been cut back, chopped down, a house renovated, etc etc... an endless list. It may trigger some memories, it may not, simply because they were not recorded at all.
End result, you work with what you have, not with what you want to have in memory. If memories exist, they may come back later in life, they may never come out because they may never have been recorded.
You can read some very interesting studies on this exact situation of memory, where they put all the people from a bank robbery in a room and interviewed them, obtaining their perspective. Then they showed them the actual video footage to prove memory distortions to the person of what they interpreted vs. what they actually viewed. Many people attempt to fill in the blanks in such interviews, instead of just saying the truth about what their actual memories are. Some have already convinced themselves what actually happened, and are in disbelief when they see a video of the event, citing the video is false... that is how much some people can convince themselves of something in such a short space of time, even though it is completely false to the reality.
Memory... it is a very tricky subject, and we don't memorise everything we see, feel, touch, taste or smell.
