Repressed memories.. are they real? Anyone had them?

[bippo12831418943]

I've been in therapy for a while due to a couple of mental health problems and recently started EMDR. At one point this very random memory of a person's house that I used to go to popped into my head. I had even forgotten I used to go there sometimes and I've no idea why I had this memory while thinking about other childhood stuff.

Anyway my therapist said it could be a repressed memory and that if I wanted to I could explore it further, but I feel a strong aversion and fear to doing so. Then I also started thinking what if my mind just invents a memory to help explain my problems, so even if I did "remember" something happening, how would I know it really did?

Has anyone every been through this? How can you tell a so-called repressed memory is real when you remember it, and not just imagination?

Simply put, you can't. Memories are not reliable so, sometimes, we will fill in the blanks with imagination. I remembered, with absolute clarity, wearing my favourite blue dress on NYE 1970 (when I was six). Except photos from that date show me in a red dress.

Even as an adult I would have sworn blind that I first went to the USA for a 3 week holiday in 2004. This trip included New Orleans just before hurricane Katrina hit. In 2005.

If there's aversion and fear in your mind (possibly) associated with this house it's far more important and productive to reassure your subconscious mind that any danger is long gone and that - as a adult - no one can harm or control you.

I would urge you to be very careful in how you proceed.

yes it’s very possible to dissociate from trauma memories, and we see it quite frequently in my work (with survivors of sexual abuse). As noted above, peripheral details are often incorrect but the ‘gist’ is often accurate.
when we are very shocked or afraid, our pre frontal cortex, which usually processes and stores/discards memories, can be flooded with adrenaline and cortisol.
this can mean that the event is not stored as a ‘normal’ memory in our long term memory store.
instead, it has a very different feel - sometimes like a video with very vivid colours, smells, emotions….

it can be very distressing and disorienting to access these memories. If you choose to look closer, make sure you have lots of support and are otherwise really well resourced- not stressed, tired etc.
there’s some good videos which explain trauma memories, ill have a look in a bit.
The Healing Honestly blog has support and info.

ideally, if you can, let the memories emerge if they do, but don’t go ‘digging’.
practice grounding and mindfulness to help you keep one foot in the present and, as said above, reassure yourself that you are safe now, that you are an adult, that that was then and this is now.

Thanks for the advice. It's just like instinctually my mind says I don't want to think about it any further. But the logical part of my brain is more curious about why this random memory suddenly came to mind. It feels very strange to imagine having blocked entire memories. I'm not sure I even believe that I'm capable of that.

Don't assume that they are blocked memories or that something majorly untoward went on in that house. It could be that the owner at the time was odd/scary looking or had a fierce dog or something equally random. If you've read To Kill a Mockingbird you'll remember that Scott was terrified by the Radley house for most of the book, but by then end she could see that it was a normal house and couldn't understand why she'd been so scared about it.

Yes I've blocked things in the past that have come back (partially) when retold to me. It was something not nice but a long time ago. I didn't feel better or worse for knowing. But everyone's experience is different

Repressed memories are certainly a thing, but so are false "memories". Memory in general is notoriously unreliable - I wouldn't upset yourself unduly worrying about something that's likely not even accurate.

There is a bit of controversy within psychology over whether repressed memories are real, although when you dig into it you find that money is involved (people get paid a lot of money to testify as expert witnesses in the US to say that in their opinion the plaintiff was or was not abused by their parent as a young child and therefore deserves $10 million).

And of course we all have non-traumatic memories that are somewhere in the back of our mind that we get reminded of by random cues, like Proust and the madeleine cakes.

But in general there's no reason to believe that people can actually forget major (bad) things that they were conscious of at the time, in such a way that only a skilled helper can bring them out. There have been some huge miscarriages of justice related to this.

Also, OP, the consensus among psychologists to whom I've spoken seems to be that EMDR is just exposure therapy — a well-respected treatment — with some added gimmicky eye movement stuff to justify the patents, copyrights, and monopoly on training that comes with it. If EMDR works for you then great, but regular exposure therapy might have done just as well. But that's another story.

(Can I ask if your therapist is a chartered clinical psychologist? You don't need to be. The term "psychotherapist" is not regulated in the UK. There are some very good non-psychologist therapists and some very bad ones who are chartered psychologists, but if people are trying to make claims about stuff that is within the domain of research-based psychology then it's generally preferable that they have some training in how to approach the literature.)