People Usually Do Not Repress Traumatic Memories

Contrary to popular assumptions, people who were sexually abused as children rarely block out the event entirely, most memory researchers and clinicians agree.

Do we forget our worst memories?

Some psychotherapists believe that when children are hurt — especially if they are sexually abused — they may “dissociate,” blocking out any memory of the event to protect themselves from pain. In theory, “recovering” the details of the original experience will help adult patients with current problems. The idea is that the blocked-out memory is still somewhere in their mind and still affects them, showing up in anxiety or anger about other matters decades later.

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According to the American Psychological Association, however, there is “little or no empirical support” for the concept of repressed or dissociated memories of sexual abuse. People who were sexually abused as children usually do remember some or all of the event, although they may not talk about it or see it clearly.

The “recovered memory” movement, which surged in the 1980s, seems to have been a backlash against 40 years of denying true accounts of sexual abuse. According to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, all children might fantasize about sexual relations with their parents. To Freud’s credit, he also pointed out that memories of sexual abuse could be correct.

But his American followers came to routinely dismiss accounts of incest as fantasies. That idea held sway in U.S. courts, and worked against any women or children who accused men of sexual abuse, the late Richard Webster argued in an influential 1995 book, “Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis.” Clear memories of sexual abuse were dismissed as fantasies, he said.

Then the pendulum swung and the bias was reversed. Psychotherapists were then urged to see any hint of a memory — or any of a wide variety of psychological symptoms — as a sign of early sexual abuse. As Frederick Crews wrote in “The Revenge of the Repressed,” in the New York Review of Books, “a single diagnosis for miscellaneous complaints — that of unconsciously repressed sexual abuse in childhood — has grown from virtual non-existence to epidemic frequency.”

Why would so many patients sign on to a painful idea if it wasn’t true?

Evidence suggests that people who report childhood abuse are more likely to suffer from sleep paralysis, when you mentally awaken from sleep before your body is able to move. Sleep paralysis can include tactile and visual hallucinations, often of threatening intruders in the bedroom. It’s possible to interpret these hallucinations as bits of old, unclear memories. People who suffer from sleep paralysis are also more likely to have emotional issues, including depression.

Richard J. McNally, PhD, a professor of psychology at Harvard who has extensively studied adults who report childhood sexual abuse, reports another possibility: Some children do not understand that anything notable was happening at the time but, when they recall the event later and see it through adult eyes, they suffer “intense distress,” he writes.

False memories are well-documented in legal history. We are vulnerable to what psychologists call “suggestion” and can innocently construct false or “pseudomemories” of events that never occurred, if they are encouraged by someone we trust.

One disturbing study found that, when people recalled sexual abuse in childhood during therapy, their account was less likely to be corroborated by other evidence than when the memories come without help. The phenomenon continues. A French survey of more than 550 therapy patients reported that six percent said they had recovered memories of abuse in therapy that were new to them.

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