I think I always knew that I had repressed memories from my childhood. Somewhere in the back of my mind something nagged at me. I had a pretty rough childhood. My dad was an alcoholic and my mom was a co-dependent alcoholic. She drank just to tolerate my dad’s drinking. That meant that a lot of my childhood was spent taking care of my parents or myself.
My parents got divorced when I was 15 years old. It was a Godsend. My dad got sober and my mom, while traumatized by everything, eventually stopped drinking too. But the early days of my childhood were confusing for me.
After I got raped everything in my world changed, including my memories from before I got raped. I couldn’t remember large portions of my childhood. I couldn’t remember things from high school, good or bad. It was like when I got raped I became a completely different person and those memories were no longer mine. It was very frustrating when my brother or my parents would talk about experiences we had when we were kids, good or bad. I rarely remembered them. I would run into childhood friends and they would start talking about a sleepover or a pool party and I would have no recollection.
I will be sharing my experience with EMDR and repressed memories on Episode 24 of “Shining Light on Shadows: A Candid Conversation About Mental Health” Thursday, February 27 at 6pm CT / 7pm ET. Neil Parekh will be the host. I'll be the guest. You can watch the live show or the recording on Facebook, Twitter*, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram* or Neil's website.
*We won't know the exact urls for Twitter and Instagram until we go live. These links go to Neil's Twitter and my Instagram.
Whenever my husband and I have a conversation about his childhood I can’t relate. I have to talk about my children’s childhood as a reference because nothing resonates with me.
Because I really wanted to know what it was that I had repressed as a child, I decided to have EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy. This is a process where eye movement and talk therapy are combined. In my case sensory tools such as hand tapping were used during these sessions. Bits and pieces of information from my childhood would come back to me every session I attended. Each session brought me closer to what I wanted to know. Unfortunately for me, I never got to the root of what I was looking for.
Eventually my therapist said my brain just didn’t want me to have that information.
It wasn’t long after those sessions that I had a series of flashbacks that led to my understanding of what happened in my childhood and I was able to process that information and heal from it.
I often mourn the memories that I no longer have. I have very few pictures from my childhood, so most of my life before I turned 21 is pretty empty. The good thing is that I have all the memories after that time that I get to cherish. I have learned to understand that trauma takes a HUGE toll on the body. Your brain equips you with the power to protect yourself from things that are too painful to deal with at times. It lets you put traumatic experiences on a shelf. That’s why triggers are so huge for people who suffer from post traumatic stress. We tend to house our trauma away in our brains so we can function on a daily basis. It is really fascinating to think about how we protect ourselves from the things that can harm us the most.
A lot of people take their memories for granted and don’t realize how special it is to recall things throughout your life. Memories are very precious. You don't realize how important they are until they aren’t there to tap into anymore. If you can cry, laugh, smile or be angry about something in your past consider it a gift. Even the painful ones are better than nothing at all.
