Still have big chunks of memory missing from abusive childhood

[stillhungry]

Not sure if this really belongs in relationships but not sure where else to put it.

Over the past 3-4 years I have spent a lot of time and done a lot of hard work in recovering from and healing from my abusive childhood. I have had a lot of previously locked away memories come back to me.

But there is still a big, significant chunk of memories missing and I am wondering if and when these will ever come back to me.

They relate to the time when my siblings were born. I would have been 5 when the first sibling was born and 7.5 when the second sibling was born. I do have other memories from this time, but absolutely none in relation to my siblings being born, them and my mum coming home from the hospital, them as babies, toddlers etc.

I know this time would have been very difficult for me as I already by then had a very bad relationship with my mother who did not bond with me throughout my whole life. I know I must have felt, as a 5 year old, confused, worried about whether I was still loved after the arrival of a new sibling (there would already have been issues as to whether I felt loved even before the arrival of any siblings due to the lack of bond between me and my mother and these issues would have been made much worse by the arrival of my siblings), dealing with the reduction of attention from my parents, coping with seeing how loving and attentive my mother was with my siblings whilst feeling she was cold and always irritated by me.

It must have been a time when I felt a lot of pain, sadness and lonliness and rejection. And I know that at the time as a child I locked away my feelings as a survival mechanism because they would have been too painful for me to cope with then. But I am wondering why the memories from that time are still completely absent when I have spent so much time working on processing issues from my childhood.

Do some memories from an abusive childhood stay locked away forever? Is there anything I can do to encourage these memories to surface? Without those memories, I feel like there is a part of me missing IYKWIM. I have dealt with so many other painfuol areas of my past, but this period of my life is still a complete blank.

I know how frustrating that is! Congratulations on both acknowledging the issues arising from your childhood, and on having the courage to deal with them

Every expert source says it's a mistake to try and 'force' memories. If your mind doesn't 'feel' ready to accept them, then trying to squeeze them through the layers of protection your mind has put in place can only insult your mind, as it were. Any recollections that resurfaced, due to your efforts, would most likely be reframed somehow (and therefore not so useful).

Like many others doing 'inner child' work, I have rediscovered the feelings from many of my missing years, plus one or two actual events. This came about through doing exercises like those in Lucia Cappachione's "Recovery of Your Inner Child" workbook. You can 'look inside' on that Amazon link, to get an idea of what's involved - it's quite fun!

Grace, thank you for your advice and I know it makes sense. I suppose those memories and feelings will come back when they are ready. Those years are just such a total and complete blank though. It always strikes me when chatting to friends and how easily and readily many of them can recall things from when they were the same age and yet I can't remember a single thing. Not a thing. I do have memories from that time of friends and school, but anything to do with home and family is totally absent.

I am slighly worried about how bad the memories must be for them to still be locked away after I have done so much work on myself already and have dealt with what I thought were some of my most painful memories.

I can identify with this. I too had an abusive childhood and I remember very little. The abuse I remember is mainly from my teenage years with the odd memory from pre teens. Yes I do have the odd nice memory but what is strange is that I just don't remember being cuddled, read to, loved etc

I have a troubling memory of possible sexual abuse as well but it is so vague I doubt it. Having read about false memory syndrome it puts me off trying to force it like Grace said.

Like you stillhungry I just have this feeling that memories will come when they are ready but I worry they are quite painful and may reveal definate sexual abuse.

It is hard dealing with an abusive childhood and I feel for you

Roseability - I have exactly the same as do my siblings. Our father was very violent and controlling and I have almost no memories of my childhood. My sister through voluntary work has spoken to specialists who say this is very common. If a child is exposed to violence it actually ends up changing the memory part of your brain so you don't remember as much.

I also have a memory of possible sexual abuse, but it is vague and I don't want to remember any more.

Stillhungry - To be honest, I am grateful for my memory loss - I think there are some memories I just don't need. You may find your memories return, or you may need some more support to regain them.

Thank you Rose and Chrys for your responses. I know as a child my brain suppressed the feelings I had at the time which must have been very painful and too hard to cope with for a 5 year old child. But I want those memories to come back and to process the associated feelings. I know it will be a painful process to endure, but I have already gone through a lot of pain on this journey and whilst the pain is awful, the feeling of liberation and happiness afterwards make it worth it.

sorry, thank you westlondon too. I personally don't believe in hypnosis as a method for dealing with these kind of issues. But thank you for the suggestion.

It could be that there ARE nbo painful memories from this period, and in fact nothing much of any interest happened at all, which is why it didn't stick in your mind.

I recall very little between the age of 7 and 10, for example. I didn't have a very abusive childhood, and the nasty bits are the bits I remember most strongly, so I doubt I'm "blocking" anything, and youmight not be.

I find it helpful to focus on the future rather than dwell on what may or may not have happened in the past, unless you are sure something happened that you could now affect.

I'm loving the crass advert at 17.35. Yes they accept PAYPAL folks! Yes we're really SENSITIVE! Yes it's a great idea to show up on a thread like this to start PUSHING PRODUCT!

(yes I've reported it)

it was a bit blatant, wasn't it!

Colditz, I can't speak for the others but the point, for me, is not what events I could now affect but how those events are affecting me. I appreciate it's hard to grasp if you had an okay/good childhood. The adult I am was shaped by the childhood I had - it's not like I can just decide to be emotionally healthy & confident; I never developed the skills for it! Trying to rectify the damage, without knowing what the damage was, is pretty damn frustrating at times.

It could be that the damage is from what you remember.

I clearly remember my dad dragging me up the stairs by my hair when I was 9, locking me in my room, kicking all my furniture over and breaking it, and screaming in my face to "Get that cleared up before you even dare come out!"

And I wasn't able to even tip my bed back to it's proper position, so I jumped out of my second story window and was picked up by the police at 10pm that night in a village 8 miles from home.

It did damage my relationship and my personality - my lovely non-violent boyfriend waved his dressing up war hammer (long story) at me and I physically cringed. he was aghast - but he didn't caused that with his hammer, my dad caused that 20 years ago.

But I don't think I'm repressing ANYTHING because this memory is stark in my mind.

However I accept that you may already KNOW that you are a represser, so in your case you might be right.

I would, then, suggest hypnosis, as others have done, a it helped a friend of mine revcover and deal with something awful from her childhood, and it might help you

Ouch, Colditz!
Horrid thing to happen to you.

Sure, I was thrown against a wall, and/or knocked across a room every day, from before I could walk to 17. Obviously I don't remember all those incidents, it'd be pointless. I wouldn't describe any day of my childhood as too boring to remember, though; I never actually felt bored of being beaten, humiliated, etc.

I'm kind of flogging a dead horse here. Somebody on another thread came up with the old "stop blaming everyone, just get over it" line and I'm still seething. Sorry if I seem to have over-reacted ... and diverted stillhungry's thread

Hypnosis can work well for recovery from specific traumatic incidents. It's very limited in use with extended traumatic situations. Otherwise, you could just hypnotise kidnap victims & war survivors, and they'd be fine.

Agree with colditz that if you had an abusive childhood, not remembering bits doesn't necessarily mean they were bad bits.

But even if they were, I think accepting that you may never remember everything is part of coming to terms with it. I don't want to go into too much detail here but - I know my childhood was abusive and I remember a lot of what went on, but there are certain reactions I have to certain situations that make me think there must have been abuse that I don't remember, but that affected me deeply (and I also know that this was likely because of the type of stuff I do remember, IYSWIM).

But, I don't now feel a need to remember it all in detail. I think it also works to understand that it was bad, it affected me and I can deal with it in certain ways, without it all having to come to the surface. After all you would never know if there wasn't another thing you hadn't remembered, so you can't pursue this endlessly. I don't think there has to be part of you missing - those parts of you are all there, if that makes sense, but your mind may not want you to have to relive them all.

Agree with everything you wrote there, MI. If nothing else, that's the only way to try & handle it! I feel fairly sure there was sexual abuse of which I have no memory at all. The reasons I 'feel fairly sure' are to do with half-remembered remarks, things which happened to my sister but she no longer recalls, and that sense of "It happened but what happened?"

I wish I did remember. I suspect I will after my mother dies (I have a reason for thinking so). It'd just be easier to deal with a known fact. But, hey, we have to work with what we've got ...

Itsgrace again I am going through the same sort of thing, only mostly remembering - briefly - and then forgetting again, so that I start to doubt myself to the point of convincing myself i'm making things up.

It's around abuse and to be honest I think it's my mind's way of dealing with it as it has been trained to do - block stuff out and not trust my own memories/judgement. As a child i was never believed when I tried to tell people and I think that makes it so hard to believe myself now so my mind just "forgets" stuff. It's very frustrating.

However in myself, and my reactions to certain things, i do know deep down what the memories are about even if i forget the actual images, if that makes sense? It's a deep feeling rather than a clear picture.

I've found counselling really useful as a way of storing the memories by talking them through with my therapist - she reminds me of things I've forgotten!

It could be that there are no painful memories from that period of my life, but judging from the other parts of my life that I remember vividly, I somehow doubt very much that the absent memories are not painful. Particularly as I can remember other things from that period, happy times with friends mainly, but absolutely nothing about my home life with my family. So it's the fact that only certain memories are absent that is significant and all my other memories involving family are sad and painful and so I have no reason to think that the 'missing' memories are not also sad and painful.

I don't feel frustrated about the absence of these memories, just puzzled or curious, as it is quite a large chunk of my life and it is a complete blank. I have memories from before and after that period, all sad and painful, which came back to me but those particular years remain a blank.

I am sure that they will come back as and when I'm ready to deal with them which clearly is not right now.

Could it be that that period in your life, although not particularly happy, was less misery-inducing that the rest of it - maybe if your mum had a new baby she simply didn't have time to be as godawful as normal?

I hope you find some answers.

I have very few memories pre 7 year old - about 4 actual things I can recall - due to bad experiences at a primary school where I was bullied and victimised by a teacher. When it was discovered and I was sent to another school, I had also forgotten everything I had learnt previously (how to read, count etc)

I've often thought what it would be like to have memories of before the teacher but it's not something I have sought out

I have been left with low self esteem but have gone over 40, not sure it would be in my interests to go looking for those memories

People I have opened up to, don't believe I don't have those memories so it's reassuring to see others are in a similar situation and it is possible to remove a large chunk of life from your memory

Have had some more thoughts about my memory blank. I think that although I don't have any memories of actual incidents that happened during that time (between ages of 5 and 8) I think that many of my emotions and feelings from that time are being triggered by events in my life today.

DD is 6. She has a group of friends at school. That group of friends also socialise together outside school, but DD is usually always excluded/not invited to the outside school social events. DD herself genuinely does not seem in the least bit bothered if she finds out that her group of friends all did something together at the weekend and she wasn't asked along. But when I find out about such things, it cuts me like a knife. It happens quite often and each time I find out about something I can feel the pain inside me. And yet, like I said, DD, who is the person actually being excluded, genuinely isn't bothered, even when I ask her in an indirect way.

It has taken me a while to work out that my feelings of pain at DD being excluded must relate to my feelings as a child of being excluded from things that my mother and siblings did. I am sure that right from when my siblings were born, I developed feelings of rejection, being unwanted, excluded. Because even though I can't remember much between the ages of 5 and 8, I can clearly remember at an older age, feeling very hurt at realising, always after the event, that my mother and siblings had gone off somewhere together eg a movie, without even asking me if I wanted to go as well.

Perhaps I can remember the feelings and events from when I was a bit older, and was left out of things, because perhaps it didn't hurt me as much when I was older as I spent more time with friends. Perhaps there is a complete blank from ages 5 to 8 because those were the most painful years when the feelings of exclusion and rejection were strongest. That makes sense as my siblings were born during that 3 year period and I know my mother would have been even more irritated by me during that time than she was before my siblings were born. She hated spending time with me anyway, and then when my siblings were born, she would have hated spending time with me even more as it meant she would have to drag herself away from my siblings whom she absoltely adored and loved and with whom she was besotted.

She wouldn't have tried to include and involve me in doing things with my siblings, because she didn't want me involved. She wanted me out of the way so she could focus all her love and attention on my siblings. She didn't want me around, making demands and wanting her attention, because I irritated and annoyed her and she didn't love me. As I got older, I did indeed, get out of my mother's way. I practically moved in with my best friend and her family. And that suited my mother down to the ground. She was a lot happier with the difficult child out of the way, so she could devote herself to my siblings. I think my mother forgot she actually had 3 children. I think she thought she only had 2. I was just this annoying extra/stray child who kept coming back home every evening and just would not go away. That's how she made me feel. And that's all that counts really. Whether she intended to or not.

Perhaps DD being the same age now as I was then is what is making me think about all this now and making all these feelings resurface. I don't think it matters if no actual specific memories come back to me from that time, because I certainly have a very good idea about how I felt during that time.

Just kind of 'blogging' on my own thread.

I have thought a lot about this again. And I have come to the conclusion that during the years where i thought I had a memory blank, I was actually searching for memories similar to those I have from other parts of my childhood. During other parts of my childhood, I experienced incidents that caused extreme emotions because they were so terrifying/hurtful/upsetting. When my memories stated coming back to me in the form of flashbacks, it was memories of those extremely emotionally charged incidents that first returned. I am quite sure now that during the years from when I was around 5 to 8/9 there were no 'extreme' incidents and this is probably why I think I have a memory blank during that time as I have no flashback memories from that time.

But I do have some memories from that time and I am beginning to realise it is not a complete blank as I had first thought. It is simply that the memories are of a different nature. And I do have a fairly good idea now of what life was like for me during those years. Those years were relatively 'calm' in the context of the other parts of my life which was very turbulent and unstable and insecure. Even though there were two major events during that time ie my siblings being born, I had stability which came from outside my family in the form of close friendships which I can see now I had formed precisely as a survival mechanism and a way of coping with the fact that my needs were not being provided for at home.