Like, say someone experienced some type of abuse as a child. Is it possible for them to repress this event so strongly they don’t remember it in their adult life? Just feel the effects of unexplained mental illness? Or is this just a thing in the movies?
In: Biology
Fun fact, you can actually go blind from seeing something so traumatic but your eyes still see. Your brain will still recognize things put in front of you but you won’t be able to see.
Yes, but often not purposefully. This is why victims of traumatic events often don’t remember exactly what happened, when it happened, or how it happened. This is also a part of why police sketches are flawed, as people forget details, and this can lead to false convictions.
Yes. Your brain is like a little machine. It gets overwhelmed and if it does that, it can sense you cannot deal with so much negative emotions at once, so it puts it into a drawer and hides it/does not let you open it in a normal state.
That is why meditation, therapy, breathing work is very useful. It essentially helps the brain learn to cope, developing pathways and the “key” to that little drawer so you can process it and learn to deal with it.
I got into a really bad car accident, as a passenger, that messed me up pretty bad and I don’t remember it at all.
The weird thing is that I don’t even remember the 15 minutes leading up to it or the 6 hours after despite being concious and talking. The 6 hours after can pretty easily be explained by the severe concussion… But the 15 minutes leading up to it? And the accident itself for that matter? I’ve always assumed I repressed it.
Even sitting here 20 years later, none of those memories have ever come back. I can’t picture any of it in my mind. I figured some of it would come back someday but here we are.
Apparently, at some point during my seventh birthday, a female work acquaintance of my father slapped me across the face. I don’t mean a backhand to shut me up, either. Something about me being mean to her child. After that, I ran back to my home and cried under my bed until my father found me. He wasn’t present at the time and demanded to know who had hit me, but nobody would tell him, likely because he’d have probably beaten her into a hospital bed.
I say “apparently” because I have absolutely no recollection of that night, other than the fact that there might have been a bonfire. My father brought it up one time when I was around fifteen and I got a hollow feeling in my chest and my blood started boiling, but no memories surfaced at all.
Yes. Nothing “movie traumatic” has happened to me, but though I’ve sought therapy specifically to deal with the trauma I do have and know about, it has frequently made me remember more. Obviously nobody remembers everything but there’s a number of years where my memory is like a tape that’s had big chunks erased and is just “blank” to me. To recall mundane details (e.g. what year I took specific exams or moved house) I have to piece it together from physical evidence or reason backwards from later milestones.
This might be different from person to person though, depending on how they deal with their trauma and what help they get to do that. I’d say I’m quite a repressive person, burying things like that is a defense mechanism – a maladaptive one. it hurts to recall them so we “learn” to stop doing that, and they stop being part of our normal mental processes (thoughts, memories, etc.) Obviously people with truly awful horrors in their past have all the more reason to develop that defense quick and hard.
ETA: this doesn’t mean the trauma/inaccessible memories don’t affect the person though. They can manifest in all sorts of ways. But in the case that someone has truly repressed the “root” of a feeling or behaviour they have (if one could be identified and singled out), they simply won’t be able to connect the two, no matter how obvious it appears to an outsider with all the context. How receptive they are to being led to or told the potential connection varies, probably based on how distressing the thing is to them (I’m not a psychologist, but that seems the most obvious factor).
The brain receives outside stimulus (messages from different sources) and is in charge of putting it together in ways that tell you (itself) what’s going on. It can interpret the information however it wants, but usually has patterns and connections it learned and/or always had that it uses, which is how most people experience being alive.
It can forget any source of stimulus by having physical intervention (getting a bad owie) or by itself to protect you (itself) from getting hurt, on the inside (your conscious existing being) or from remembering inside or outside (your/its body) things that hurt.
Yes it’s absolutely possible and also very common. Especially with early trauma. This is, to risk stating the obvious, due to the stage of brain development children are at – it’s just too much for the mind to process. A defence mechanism called ‘dissociation’ (we can all dissociate to different degrees but this form is rather different) is used by the mind, this is where in order to cope with the processing overload it can ‘switch off’. Children often talk about bad things happening to other children that really happened to them, or even that it didn’t happen to them at all, we call this ‘denial of realisation’ or ‘phobia of inner experience’. In severe cases there is a diagnosis called ‘dissociative identity disorder’ where in order to cope with repeated developmental trauma the mind creates alternate sub-personalities, so for example when the trauma occurs another personality is created who holds all of the trauma memories and then this personality leaves when normal life resumes.
A very common phenomenon is that when people leave home and begin having adult relationships, particularly sexual experiences, this defence can get reactivated and people become aware of it and also the original repressed trauma.
But this is often a long, messy and confusing process with lots of denial and uncertainty (‘did it really happen? Am I just imagining it?’).
So in answer to your question, yes it absolutely happens, it can be quite common, but how severe the lack of memory is depends on the individual and lots of individual factors.
Another really common phenomenon is that the body remembers what the mind does not. So lots of trauma survivors often have lots of medically unexplained pain or can develop illnesses that are relevant to the traumas they do not consciously remember.
I’ve hidden away many a situation from my youth, that only heavy contemplation can bring back. I’ve actively ignored them until they just faded away. Only someone mentioning something very specific can trigger those memories.
I totally forgot a traumatic experience for a good ten years. Basically my mother had these really bad manic episodes when I was 9, and it wasn’t until I was 18 that I remembered them. It was like I just hadn’t thought about it at all for years.
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