“I have a poor memory”
Systematized versus generalized amnesia
“Lebois noted that the existence of dissociative symptoms and dissociative disorders is often doubted, and people are rarely asked about them.” -Lauren A.M. Lebois, PhD, Dissociative Disorders and Trauma Research Program at McLean Hospital
There have been, and still are, many indications in my life that I was traumatized as a child. These indications (or symptoms) of mine are so many and so clear that anyone who understands developmental PTSD could have told me that I had been traumatized, including sexual trauma. Anyone who understood dissociative amnesia could have told me that I had dissociative amnesia. But nobody did.
Lebois noted that the existence of dissociative symptoms and dissociative disorders is often doubted, and people are rarely asked about them."This doubt in the lay and medical communities fuels a vicious cycle: New generations of clinicians aren't educated about these experiences; these symptoms are misunderstood, stigmatized, and underdiagnosed; and funding isn't prioritized in this area of research." Consequently, people who suffer from these symptoms and disorders caused by childhood trauma don't have access to existing mental health interventions. "It's a global ethical issue—children are abused or neglected, and then on top of that injustice, they can't receive treatments that would help them as adults," said Lebois.
Not many psychologists understand trauma and dissociation, and even those who have some knowledge often won’t tell a patient or anyone else they have clear indications of developmental PTSD and amnesia. Many even consider it wrong, bad practice, to diagnose someone with these conditions. In a YouTube video the therapist Emma McAdam expresses this view:
They [therapists] shouldn’t suggest you experienced abuse that you don’t remember based on symptoms . . . What I am condemning is the practice of pushing someone to remember memories or suggesting that if something is forgotten or missing that that’s a sign of trauma.
I agree that no therapist should push someone to remember memories, but I believe therapists can and should diagnose developmental trauma and dissociation based on symptoms and other indications. But since they can’t be depended on to do that, many of us will come to an understanding of our own history and condition only from reading the accounts of others.
For myself, the aftereffects of a trauma-filled childhood include anxiety and other emotional pain, an inability to navigate college and career, and an inability to manage relationships. Other aftereffects—even clearer indications of trauma and dissociation—include suicidal ideation, recurrent puzzling dreams and nightmares, compulsive and abusive sexual fantasies, compulsive sleeping, compulsive daydreaming, and abnormal interactions with my family.
Not everyone who was abused as a child suffers from these particular aftereffects, and some suffer from other aftereffects including drug abuse and other addictions, criminality, chronic pain, autoimmune disorders, and self harm.
But perhaps the clearest—even unmistakable—indication that someone has dissociative amnesia (and thus was traumatized) is a poor memory for their childhood. I explicitly push back on those who say that a notably poor memory is not a good reason to suspect trauma and amnesia. A poor memory is amnesia.
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Dissociative amnesia is caused by both extreme chronic stress and by specific painful experiences, i.e., trauma. ‘Trauma’ might be defined here as an experience so disturbing you can’t assimilate it within the normal schema of memory. And if you live in more or less constant fear, as many children do, your brain will be chronically flooded with neurohormones like adrenaline which suppress and damage the hippocampus. You may have amnesia for years of your childhood and possibly a poor episodic memory as an adult.
Surprisingly, for a child under stress, another possible outcome is that their memory is better than average. Up to a point, living in a dangerous environment increases attention, a useful adaptation. Increased attention to the facial expression, posture, tone of voice and, of course, the words and actions of a previously abusive person prepares one to avoid, defend, placate, manipulate, or submit—and thus possibly save one’s self and others from harm.
Increased attention may lead to a more detailed memory. So it’s possible, paradoxically, to have both a good memory and some form of amnesia.
Sylvia Fraser, a Canadian journalist and novelist, had amnesia for sexual abuse in childhood, but she had a remarkably good memory for the rest of her childhood. In 1987 she published a memoir, My Father’s House, containing scene after detailed scene from her life. She put the memories of molestation (as well as relevant dreams) in italics to indicate that she didn’t remember any of the abuse until her forties, while the rest she had always remembered. She was sexually abused from about the age of six until she was in high school. Her book was one of several that helped me to come to the belief that amnesia is real, and that it can thoroughly veil every episode of abuse (episodic memory) along with the knowledge (semantic memory) that it occurred.
Fraser combined that remarkable memory with what is called “systematized” dissociative amnesia. That is, amnesia only for the trauma and for incidents in adult life that are closely related. For instance, Sylvia Fraser couldn’t remember her wedding night, the first sex she had as an adult.
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It’s understandable that someone like Fraser wouldn’t suspect that she had dissociative amnesia until memories started intruding later in her life, but why does someone like me not realize it? Often throughout my life I noticed that others remembered far more than I did. When I was 16, I wrote in my journal that I wished I had written down my thoughts when I was younger because “I have a poor memory.” Maybe I compared my memories with schoolmates’ to come to this conclusion, or maybe someone pointed it out.
I decided then to write down everything I could remember starting with my earliest years. The few memories I came up with were mostly brief images—snapshots—and all were of something occurring outside, nothing inside the house my family lived in until I was five. After only a paragraph, I stopped writing my list. Why?
If I had continued, I would have noticed that my memory was as spotty after the age of five as it was before, that I didn’t even remember birthdays, holidays or teachers. I would have noticed that I remembered scenes and characters from (the delightful, nourishing) books a teacher read to us in third grade much better than any real scenes or people I knew—including that teacher.
I would have noticed that I had virtually no memories for my sister Susan even though I shared a room with her between the ages of five and eleven, and that I also had hardly any memories for my brother Mike. Though I remember that I cooked and cleaned with my sister Cindy, I don’t remember any details, not even what we made and ate. My clearest memories of her are from when we were outside.
I have memories of our parents fighting verbally, but I don’t remember if they hit each other and very little of what they said. They divorced when I was eleven, but I still don’t know why or remember any of that process, except a spotlit moment of hearing Billie on the phone telling someone about the coming divorce.
I might have noticed that I don’t really see anyone in my memories, there’s only a “sense” that someone was there. I don’t see their faces or their bodies, their actions, their hairstyles, their clothes, their voices. I don’t remember their words either, with a few exceptions. Even today I can just barely bring to mind visuals or the speech of anyone, family or friends, from decades ago or even a week ago.
If I continued, I might have noticed all this, but I didn’t. I only noticed I had a poor memory and couldn’t remember even special events and teachers. Later on, my therapists didn’t point out to me I had a lack of memories though I know now that they knew I had amnesia. Only in my fifties did I continue with the project of investigating memories I started at 16.
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I spoke recently to a man—a highly-educated researcher—who told me he couldn’t remember anything from before the age of 16. I asked him why he thought he couldn’t remember, and he said it was probably because he wasn’t paying attention when he was a child. I suspect his family gave him that explanation when he puzzled over his lack of memories.
Perhaps it’s true that he wasn’t paying attention. Maybe he dissociated his way through his entire childhood. But why? You might expect someone who made his living as a researcher—asking questions and seeking evidence—to be more curious about the extraordinary fact of not remembering anything from his childhood.
The strangeness of his reasoning is, I’d say, typical for a person with dissociative amnesia. It is extraordinarily difficult—utterly counterintuitive—for any of us to believe that we could have been beaten, tormented, or sexually assaulted and not remember it. It’s also difficult to believe no one in our family would have sat us down and told us about it. So we come up with other reasons for our poor memory—if we notice it at all—ones that make no sense but don’t require any painful psychological effort to unearth.
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In my first post I wrote: “Amnesia is strange because it presents as an absence rather than a presence, so it’s the hardest to see, to understand—even to believe in. Even stranger, it pushes against understanding, an active agent actively hiding itself.”
How does amnesia hide itself?
Its first tool might be called laziness or boredom or lack of interest. We either don’t notice the gaps in our memories at all, or we don’t turn our minds to investigating what those gaps mean. We accept the limitations of our memories unthinkingly, just as we usually accept as true what we’re taught by families, teachers, and friends.
Then someone tells us something different, or we notice contradictions or discrepancies, and we start wondering. I did this when I was sixteen with memories, and I also did it around the same time with my religious beliefs. Raised a Catholic, I noticed contradictions. I decided to make a serious attempt to figure out whether Christianity was true. As soon as I tried to do that I felt anxiety.
Of course! I feared that God might send me to hell if I questioned the religion I’d been taught. I didn’t think it was all that probable—I wasn’t sure I even believed in hell—but just the possibility of something so terrible as eternal damnation can be enough to stop us in our tracks. Why take a risk? Maybe our conscious mind is willing, but often our (mostly subcortical) fear system isn’t, and unless we’re highly motivated, we let the fear stop us.
With religion I managed to convince myself that no being worthy of the name ‘God’ would punish someone for questioning the truths of a particular religion, and I continued with my investigations.
But I didn’t do the same thing with my memories, probably because there was just way more fear involved—boatloads of fear, a bottomless pit of fear. I may have felt some of this fear, but not necessarily. Most fear is unconscious, just systems in your brain and procedural memories guiding you this way and that. It’s only if you step out of line or you’re triggered that fear rises to the surface. Then you feel it in your body, ranging from unpleasant boredom, through tension, anxiety, agitation, dread—and maybe on through to panic, nausea, terror.
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Fear—whether conscious or unconscious—is how dissociation actively hides not only memories but also the condition of dissociative amnesia itself. It stops us from investigating. The fear is of two somewhat separate things.
There’s the fear of the memories themselves which are at the least painful and disruptive, containing unprocessed emotional and cognitive dissonance of many sorts—including betrayal by the people we love. At worst, they contain horror. It’s possible to remember a visual or verbal memory without feeling any of its emotional or somatic content (or vice versa.) But it’s also possible for the pieces to come together so that one relives an unbearable (or nearly) experience in its entirety. So we are phobic of our memories.
The other fear is the fear of punishment for remembering. Not every family threatens or punishes their children for speaking about what goes on in their homes, but the worse the goings-on, the more likely and the more extreme the punishment for speaking. This could be exile from the family or shunning— sometimes even murder; often the threat of murder. Psychologically, remembering and speaking (telling, accusing, blaming) are closely entwined. In my psyche they seem to be identical. I believe even a look of anger on my face—indicating that I knew and didn’t accept what had been done to me—was met with punishment and threats.
Hence the phobia of the memories themselves and the fear of punishment if I remember. These two became the very structure of my psyche.
Whatever the particularities of your memories, if you have a poor memory for your childhood, if you can’t relate stories the way other people can—or if you can but you can’t remember much of anything about a particular person or people—or you can remember school but not home life, remember being outside but little from when you were inside—then you have probably repressed/dissociated unbearable memories. And along with those memories, you’ve cut off and abandoned much of your life and self.
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See my Resources page for links to more information about dissociative amnesia.