When You Can't Remember Childhood Trauma

Because of this, I often get emails or comments on my videos from viewers who are frustrated because they can't

remember

anything from their

childhood

or parts of their

childhood

. And not

remember

ing it is very frustrating. There's a deep sense of stagnation for them, it's like you ever have to sit down and write a story, but you don't have a frame of reference or a place to start, and it feels like you can't. Figure out where it's going to go, since you don't have a start. And I tell people that we are all different. I have clients who range from remembering everything in their childhood to missing large timelines of their childhood or missing some smaller spaces.

But there is something I notice in my work with those who have some memory loss, that I would really like to tell you from the beginning. And what I notice is that

trauma

survivors assume that discovering or finding a lost database of memories is the only way to heal, and until they discover those things, it's like they're in the gutter. That is not true! I tell clients that it really doesn't take a lot of memories to uncover or work through childhood

trauma

. I also notice that clients with memory problems assume that they have no real knowledge or awareness about how bad their childhood may have been,

when

that is also not true.

You know more than you think and you may be doubting your knowledge of your own family system. Being aware of the family system you grew up in is different than dredging up childhood memories, but it's just as helpful, if not more so. And the question of memory is not like seeing the forest through the trees. Survivors are often too focused on the missing details of their childhood, and don't step back and look at the entire system in which they grew up. And I'll come back to that later in the video. I've had clients report that they can't remember much, but they can identify problems present in the family, such as having a very difficult or abusive father in the present, or having siblings who don't do well emotionally or with intimacy. in the present, or the family is very entangled or estranged in the present, or their parents have, like, a loveless or conflict-oriented marriage, or worse, a type of marriage that avoids conflict, and they have repression problems in the present. present, or simply a father who is not involved or refuses to be involved in the family in the present.

So some clients can report everything going on in their family system, but have a hard time identifying tangible trauma from their childhood. And in my experience, if those problems I just mentioned are prevalent in a client's present, then they were probably there in childhood too, unless family members have gone through some intense therapy, or the entire family has gone through some intense therapy. therapy, and that's very rare, if they did. So all of those current issues are all a client really needs to know to conclude that they probably grew up in some type of childhood trauma.

And I tell clients that those current problems are good enough data to go back to childhood, to discover things, rather than remembering childhood completely. In addition to focusing on the current family system,

when

clients begin working with me, I tell them that their childhood will become more real to them, which happens by: Talking about the family system in therapy sessions. Working backwards starting with what I do know is that, as I just mentioned, working with your triggers and your body memories can help you uncover that system even more. Working with our inner child, who often has more access to childhood situations and emotions than our adult self.

And all that does not mean achieving something like total recall. But this helps us not to be so dissociated from our history, because we never told it to anyone or immersed ourselves deeply in it. And regarding memory issues, clients can have a variety of reactions to the therapy I do, like some may become more aware of the abusive family, but they don't remember the big lost chunks of their childhood, and that's actually Alright. . Some have intense flashbacks or situations that are new to them, but that tends to be rare, but it does happen in sessions. For some, the more they talk and process with me, the more content emerges as we go because they are no longer dissociated from their own story.

I've had clients in their third year of working with me, talk about situations they've never mentioned before, and it's not like a big revelation to them; They often thought they had mentioned it to me, which makes me wonder. or if it is a sign, that they were dissociated from their own history. And some go from a vague awareness that the family was really bad to having real mastery over the mess they grew up in, working backwards with me and starting from what they do know. So in this video, the goal is not to implant memories or suggest things that didn't actually happen.

Nothing of that. In reality, in therapy the goal is not to recover these memories. The goal is more to educate us on how to grow up in an unhealthy family system, as it relates to our current mental health issues and situations. If you're drawn to my videos about childhood trauma and dysfunctional family systems, you're probably not too confused about some level of dysfunction or the abusive system you grew up in. But if you're only here because you clicked on the title and you feel like you had a pretty good childhood, but you can't resolve your mental health issues, this video may not be as helpful to you.

As a side note, I find that unless the person grew up in, say, something like adoption, foster care, or extreme abandonment, most clients are more aware of their family system than they realize. And even if someone grew up in all that extreme attachment trauma, I don't think they need to know the memories in order to work through that trauma. We already know it was bad, just from an attachment point of view. So if you're new to me or new to the channel, welcome! If you like this video, feel free to press some of the buttons on the screen.

You can't miss any of the buttons. And if you think these videos are helpful to you and your recovery, you may consider supporting the work being done in these videos on my Patreon. I don't take on any paid third party sponsorships on this channel, because I think it ruins things for the viewer. Additionally, you can visit my website to take some childhood trauma e-courses I offer there, including a recent webinar on shame, which discusses how to work with shame triggers through an inner child exercise called dialogue. You can also contact me through my website, and you can connect with me on my Instagram or my TikTok, and I'll have all the links in the description of this video.

So, as a reminder, as trauma survivors, we struggle to know what is healthy and what is not, and we often question our experiences and intuition. Childhood trauma is really trauma to our perception. Like we don't trust what we already know about our families, because we don't have a frame of reference and clients need a lot of help with that. It's almost as if as survivors we begin the healing journey, as if to say, "it was my family, it was my experiences, my life, but what do I know about that?" This helps explore what a healthy family system looks like and get some psychoeducation and validation about toxic family systems, something I try to do a lot in my videos.

So clients also tend to think that if they can't fully remember a chain of events, then they have no reason to explain how bad it was or what their parents were like, or worse, that they aren't going to be. believed. That kind of thing breaks my heart. And as a side note, it's important to think, if you're a therapist looking at this, to at least be aware that if clients don't remember their childhood, that doesn't mean their childhood trauma is irrelevant. It's important to think about where they might have learned their survival strategies, like fawning, freezing, fighting, coping?

Where did your intimacy problems come from? And where did they learn to deal with their feelings the way they do? It is important not to dismiss trauma because they cannot fully remember childhood, but they can list that the family has major current issues, especially if the client feels questionable things are coming to the family. So let's explore this idea of ​​what clients already know by looking at a family system through something called a genogram. A genogram is a family tree of dysfunctions. I have all my clients prepare one for me at the beginning of treatment to get an idea of ​​what their system was like, past and present.

Here's a hypothetical genogram I put together, and I thought about different clients I've had over the years who struggle not to remember, but can somehow talk about the system in a pretty good way, when we start working together. . So here you have a family map. The squares are male, the circles are female. If a family member identifies as LGBTQ+, we may use a triangle or some type of symbol that feels appropriate to them. We are looking at three generations, from grandparents to grandchildren. The family on the top left in dark pink, had a girl and a boy, and the boy became the father of, say, the client dressed in white, who, in quotes, "tried to be a good boy." Let's call him Ben, and he struggles with not feeling like he belongs anywhere.

That boy's mother came from a nuclear family of five people dressed in light pink, and they had three girls, and the family was just a very academic and motivated family. That's all Ben could know about his mother's side of the family. There really aren't any big bells and whistles in this family system, such as the client in bold not reporting any type of domestic violence, chaos or poverty or extreme mental illness in parents or siblings. As a side note, clients who struggle with memory may come from extremely abusive family systems or they may come from calm and complicated family systems.

Ben's family is what I would call a complicated family so far. So in this hypothetical case, Ben reports that the mother had an eating disorder and that she made the entire family go on a diet or do extreme calorie monitoring, through a family diary. And the mother was also very distrustful of the behavior of her two children. In the present, Ben reports that his mother is calling him to make sure she is doing right by her employer just "because." It would seem to me that the mother does not see the goodness of the client and she would take it as a fact.

Ben's parents were not close. The sister acted out, she was always in trouble, specifically with the mother, and Ben reports that he was always trying to be a good kid, in the context of that. Let's say Ben reports that he doesn't remember anything before seventh grade, but he's able to report these general family dynamics. He says that he can't understand it all, but he can say that it was hard to see his sister and his mother have such an unpleasant conflict in their teenage years. And while they were just trying to be good kids. I'm probably thinking about how Ben didn't have a relationship with his father, who never acted like a father, because he was an alcoholic.

He was absent, but there, more or less... And that's how some clients usually start, and he's pretty good. And all they need to look at is how they were raised. But my clients come in thinking they need to have a stash of solid memories to figure all this out. The client and his brother grew up in a complicated family, with parents who needed their own therapy. Ben might say in the session that he expects me to tell him that he's not traumatized enough to see me, and that's a shameful expression, it's a little hard to hear.

As a childhood trauma therapist receiving this information in the first session, I would wonder: could the lack of a protective father present and the mother's obsession with food have been overwhelming? Where parents were almost like playing house? Was the sister's behavior some kind of red flag about home life, that her behavior was appropriate, given that home life? in family therapy, which is infuriating and an abusive aspect of toxic families like this, I would also be thinking about Ben's lack of memories, from early to seventh grade because there is no real connectivity in the family, no reflections. , experiences are not shared.

You might ask what family events are like in the present, and this might be a “Looks good on paper” or a “Ships in the Night” family of my seven types of toxic family systems. What if Ben could say that vacations or reunions are terribly empty or painfully long, because the family doesn't know what to do with each other and everyone is in a kind of quiet desperation. What would that be like for a child? And I repeat, these things are not usually new. If I ask him what a Christmas meal is like in the present, Ben might report that the father occasionally leaves the gathering to go drinking in the basement and, as expected, the mother is very concerned aboutdiscuss or control food.

Sometimes I think that a family like this for a child is like living in a vacuum, where you are in a system, but you are abandoned in that system, because the parents are not emotionally at home. That's what I would be thinking in an admission, and I would tell Ben that they have enough awareness and don't need the keys to the missing memories to know what's going on with this family system. Lastly, the trauma here in Ben's case has to do with being disconnected and potentially overwhelming when he was a child, due to parental things to the point of being oppressive and lifeless.

Was the mother like an energy vampire regarding food and the father abandoning him in all that? Ben could describe the family system that he might think of as complicated, but as I've gotten to know him more, there's often a much broader picture of the type of mental illness of the parents. Alcoholism and eating disorders with a lot of mistrust can lead to some important pathology, I mean for parents. I have had clients who were able to report what their family system is like, but expressed doubts about how bad the family system was, due to lack of memories, say before the seventh grade, as in Ben's case.

Let's do another one. Let's say this client's name is Anne, she's about 30 years old and she's downstairs with the bandages and the circle there. Anne struggles with intimacy, depression, anxiety, and boundaries, like not setting boundaries. Anne can report these details about her family in her intake report. Like many clients who come, they know the family is out of place, but again they might doubt themselves, because they don't remember big gaps. Let's say that Anne doesn't remember anything about her parents' divorce from when she was three years old until about her third year of high school. She also has trouble remembering several moves and what weekend visits with her father were like during her divorce.

What she can remember in the present is the nagging issue that her father was bipolar, due to very erratic mood swings that lasted for days and even up to a week. She vaguely remembers the early violence between her mother and her father. She remembers two other stepmothers, one of whom was someone she really loved, but that person couldn't control her father and disappeared from her life in just two years. Let's say Anne also talks about a brother who can't control her anger every time she Anne and her husband invite him over. She remembers that the brother became very violent at the end of his high school years and that he had to repeat the eighth grade twice because of his aggressive behavior.

In her current life, Anne tends to try to take care of her brother who gets into trouble, and she also takes care of her mother, who never remarried and is depressed, and Anne feels immense guilt when She doesn't call her mother. weekly. But she absolutely dreads those calls. She feels immense guilt and anxiety about having to take care of her brother, whom she describes as a "time bomb" when she visits him. And Anne knows something is coming for some trauma work, but she doesn't trust her memory for most of her childhood. She says in passing that her mother recently told her that in the early stages of the divorce, she left her and her brother with her father for, say, six months.

That was when Anne was three years old. I would be thinking that the parent's moods, or untreated mental health issues, are frightening enough for children to dissociate, shut down, and not retain memories. Especially under the stress of being a toddler or late-stage child, not seeing her mother for six months, and her primary caregiver being someone who is untreated and potentially bipolar. Again, the client is able to describe the family and general history in some way, but the client struggles with the missing memories and having them would put everything on display, when we already have it all on display.

In my opinion, she may even apologize in that session for not knowing more. So in those two examples, which are actually like clients that I've had over the years, and that you might relate to, you can see that focusing on lost memories isn't that important. The two clients we've talked about have enough to know that they didn't see healthy intimacy in their childhood. They weren't safe when they were kids, just in different ways. They did not form lasting memories, either because they did not have healthy adults to share those moments with, or because the stress of that childhood caused them to dissociate from the present and think about moving on from childhood, instead of assimilating it.

When she worked with her inner child, she would ask them to dialogue with the left and right hands, in a session, to get a deeper idea of ​​what it was like for them to be a child in that house. With Ben, she would ask him to ask her inner child, how do you feel about Dad? How was he with mom and the food? What kind of child did you feel you were? Notice how the questions are open-ended questions. Often the inner child will respond with memories or situations that the adult has been away from for years, and that is a very powerful experience.

Some clients get it back by simply talking over time about what they know. I had a client in his 50s who started working with me and they couldn't really tell me much about his childhood, but they could tell me like in one of those genograms. And during the three years that I was working with them, as we progressed, more and more memories, more details and situations emerged. And there's a process in the work I do, where I tell clients that childhood will become more and more real to them as we continue the work. By the third year, I was coming up with situations and scenarios about their abuse that I had never heard of from them before.

And also when we talk about family systems and compare what their family system was like, compared to healthy family systems, that also helps us process and get a better view of the forest for the trees. Additionally, your triggers will also help you know what your story is. Let's say Ben comes to a later session, really angry and irritated because his partner is accusing him of something he didn't do. Let's say Ann comes in and tells me that every time her partner goes camping with the kids for the weekend, she gets extremely depressed and shuts down. Let's say Ben walks in and notices that when he prepares a meal for his roommate, he never measures the portions correctly.

And there are usually never enough seconds. And preparing food is very stressful for him. Let's say Anne comes in and talks about a toxic coworker, but I notice that when she talks about it, she talks about it in an emotionally unaffected way where other clients might have gone straight to her HR department. . I'm not judging. I am simply noting the way in which her affect or her triggers are related to her present, or in other words, to her closure. So, in those four assumptions, can you identify with them? But can you also correlate what you know about the person's family history with the trigger they mentioned?

Can you put those two things together or where might they come from? Leave a comment if you think you can. So I think the best resource is to find a therapist or healing arts person who understands you and can help you process your family system. That's the first place, but I know that finding someone like that is very difficult, let alone allowing them. So when I start with clients, I ask them to do a genogram for me. I have an e-course that tells you how to make a genogram. Additionally, there are three other e-courses on my website that are helpful for processing childhood or the family system, including a talk I did on shame, which includes a worksheet on how to dialogue with your inner child.

You could also journal about what your family system is like now, to begin with, and think, working backwards, about the system as a whole. Below are some questions for everyone to reflect on based on the present. And again, families without significant therapeutic work don't really tend to change over the years. So here are the prompts for journaling: How does my family respond when I question the abuse or problems? How did my parents fare with their partnerships and intimacy in life? Do my parents really see me for who I am? How and why to that? Do they present themselves to me in the form I need?

Who is running for who else? The how and why of it, how to write about it. Do I feel like I'm an alien in my own family system? How and why? How does my family system handle the current conflict? Is it mature? It is healthy? How does my family talk about my childhood? Are they defensive, or do they not remember themselves, or assume normality, because their basic needs were met, such as food, education, shelter? Does your family say things like "you were good!" or "you were always the problem"? Or "I wish I had never met your mother," or "what do you want?

I had to work!" "What do you want? I needed grandma's help!" That's the kind of thing you might be looking for in this diary, about the last question. The memory issue is a big problem. But when clients come to me, I know we'll be able to process it in a good enough way to have a clear enough idea of ​​what it was like for them. And I think you too can process and get a good enough image. We just have to let go...we're attached to this idea that we need these memories, which, again, is not true.

We are not totally stuck if we cannot remember the situation or the details. Please see the description of this video for more additional notes that were too much to include on memory issues. It will be the description of this video. And I hope this video has been useful to you. And as always: may he fill you with loving kindness. Be fine. May you be at peace and at ease. Be happy. And I'll see you next time. Take care.