Is this normal?

[Gracee_]

So as I’ve gotten older I’ve had these moments where memories from my child have popped into my head, driving or laying in bed at night or mid way through watching a movie, and they are of some traumatic moments from my childhood. Often it starts with things I remember but then moves into part of the memory I haven’t previously remembered. It isn’t always the whole thing either, it’s like there’s holes or parts missing but I know it belongs to part of that memory and I know there’s gaps in it. An example is tonight I remembered my suicide attempt while in high school, I haven’t thought about this in years or any part of it and then all of a sudden I remember putting on my school uniform on Monday morning as if nothing happened on Friday night and I didn’t spend all weekend in hospital. But then I don’t remember what came after that other then I remember one psychologist appointment 2 weeks after the attempt and then blank again. I then just sit there and question how I could have forgotten that? It was obviously such an awful time but it’s like it was wiped and then just popped back up tonight. 

I guess my question is, is this normal? Does it happen to other people because it’s only really started happening this year to me. 

[Eagle Ray]

Hi Gracee_

I know from what I’ve learned that memories that are stressful or traumatic encode differently in our brains than other types of memories. So instead of being stored neatly and episodically in our biographical memory they can remain largely blocked from conscious memory and then come to us in fragments at times in the forms of images and sensations. Because the memories haven’t been processed and fully integrated like other memories, it can be hard to even recognise what the images and sensations are about. Other times, as you are describing, you have some sense of what the memories are about but it’s fragmented with blank parts as well. I have certainly experienced this in relation to past traumatic events I’d blocked from memory, not consciously blocked but automatically blocked through dissociation. I’d get something like a sensory image and wouldn’t even know what it was about at first, then later I would realise the connection.

There is a good book by Peter Levine on this topic called Trauma & Memory: Brain and Body in Search for the Living Past. If you like to read, it may help understand the experiences you are having. Do you currently have anyone to work with such as a psychologist or counsellor? Sometimes I think these memory fragments surface at a time where our system is feeling ready to process them. This has certainly happened for me and then I’ve been able to work through the experiences with my psychologist. We have done this using somatic approaches which has been quite successful for me. It’s important that if you do such work that it’s with a psychologist that’s a good fit for you and you feel really comfortable with. Interestingly it’s only with my current psychologist that some past issues surfaced and I was able to tell her about them. With previous therapists those memories reminded buried as it didn’t feel as safe for them to arise.

The somatic work I do with my psychologist is not about fully reliving a past trauma but tapping into it gently in order to get a sense of what needs to resolve internally in order to process and integrate the memory. This involves what’s called bottom-up processing, working with what are called procedural memories in the body that we experience as feelings and sensations. In various instances my body has then been able to resolve conflicts and difficulties it couldn’t at the time and then the procedural memories that were implicit in the body become integrated. We have largely used an approach called Somatic Experiencing but there are other somatic approaches, as well as specific technical approaches like EMDR for memory integration. I haven’t done EMDR myself so I can’t share any experiences of that.

I’m really sorry you had those tough experiences in childhood. It sounds like you really went through a lot. I hope overall things are much better in your life now. Perhaps something in you is currently trying to process the past. I do think that the experiences you describe are quite normal. Your nervous system may be trying to sort and resolve those past memories.

Take good care,

Eagle Ray