Tools of Recovery: Repressed Memories
Repressed Memories
A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse
by Renee Fredrickson, Ph.D.
Fireside/Parkside, 1992
As with anything psychological, or medical, or indeed anything in the world, “the more you know about what to look for… the more you find.” Fredrickson’s first client came to her to deal with fourteen years of rape by her father. Her 1970s education as a psychotherapist had not made a single reference to sexual abuse, and she set out to learn more. Eventually, she says, “the appalling lack of available resources for treating sexual abuse influenced me to specialize in this area.”
She found that what she learned working with “very young children applied to adult survivors as well.” As the years wore on, she established clinics in St. Paul, Minnesota and Dallas, Texas, and became a consultant on child abuse to the U.S. Army. This book is one result of her eighteen years of experience in working with sexual abuse survivors around the United States.
Repressed Memories is a tremendous gift. Renee Fredrickson takes on an issue which often seems incredibly obscure, unclear, and mired in political claims, and explains it clearly and directly. This book is an oasis in a desert of wild claims and accusations.
A Sampling
She begins by explaining the phenomenon of repressed memories in a non-sensationalistic way, answering many of the assumptions and questions that people have about repressed memories. I’ll present a few of her ideas here, in question and answer format.
- Recall Memory: These are “normal memories.” Your memory of what you did yesterday – assuming that you remember what you did yesterday – is a recall memory. They are memories that you feel like you experienced directly, vividly, which come with images and feelings and thoughts about the experience. This is the only kind of memory “that requires maturation to be of use” – that is, it’s the kind that people are talking about when they say we can’t remember things that happened before we turn two or three. The other kinds are, actually, accessible to infants.
- Imagistic Memory: These are memories that come in the form of images. They can come as visual flashbacks, slide shows, or flickers of images. The U.S. Army has actually done studies of Army personnel with PTSD who experienced intrusive flashes related to traumatic events, which found that the things they were seeing were always directly related to what they had been doing in the disaster that caused their post-traumatic stress disorder.
- Feeling Memory: These might better be called emotional memories, because that’s the kind of “feeling” involved – as opposed to a physical sensation. Depression and anxiety disorders are often “feeling memories;” it is rare for people to have emotions that are truly coming out of nowhere. Feeling memories also often take the form of a wave of seemingly unrelated emotion, like feeling rage way out of proportion to what is going on around you, or fear at the sight of something seemingly mundane.
- Body Memory: Everyone’s favorite! Body memory comes in the form of physical sensations. They are often confusing, because we may have no way of knowing whether something is a physical illness or injury or whether it is a memory. I have a friend, in fact, who had what appeared to be seizures and was diagnosed epileptic despite not having medical indicators besides seizures. He was put on anti-seizure medication and banned from driving for many years before his seizures slowly disappeared. Later he discovered that what he had been experiencing were body memories from violent electric shocks in his childhood. Fredrickson also notes that “Even when there is little physical pain or intrusion, body memories can occur. Nausea is a frequent physical reaction to sexual abuse. Infants will sometimes spontaneously vomit on their perpetrator, even though they are not being physically hurt by the abuse.”
- Acting-Out Memory: As the author explains it, “Acting-out memory is a form of unconscious memory in which the forgotten incident is spontaneously acted out through some physical action.” She gives the example of a two-year-old who had been physically abused and then adopted into another family, who would hit herself on the left ear whenever she got angry. One of the few things they knew for sure about her abuse was that that ear had been burned with a cigarette when she was only two months old. Acting-out memory can also take the form of survivors blurting out or suddenly writing things about which they had no conscious memory so far – just like any other flashback, except with an eerie “automatic writing” aspect to it.
- Why would people repress memories of abuse? It seems like that’s too big a deal to not remember it.
Perhaps the most important fact she offers in this area is that “the traumatic and the trivial are the two kinds of information your mind represses.”