Can you actually forget/repress completely a traumatic event?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.