Notes on Memory Repression

This is what I looked like the first time I was raped.

I was missing teeth. My body was tiny.

This precious 8 year old had her body, her only home, invaded by her father, the man she was supposed to rely on for safety and survival. He was instead her apex predator, an ever-looming lethal threat. The act of child rape is horror, through and through, and I’m sure that’s easy enough to conceptualize as a reader. Yet if it hasn’t happened to you, I’m not sure if you can imagine what it’s like trying to conceptualize this as an 8 year old. It’s beyond horror. It’s unfathomable. It’s so unfathomable it cannot possibly fit into reality. You don’t have the words for it, first of all. But you also don’t have the context. You don’t have a single example of context where an event like this might be placed. Sex-ed is years away, as is “the talk.” There are no words and no stories that can even begin to help you hold this event.

All you’ve got is the primal terror that floods your body. A kind of terror that annihilates your nervous system like an atomic bomb. It’s a kind of event that doesn’t qualify as a normal memory, certainly not one I could carry with me into every mundane day of elementary school. Certainly not one that could fit in my miniscule pink roller backpack. Certainly not one I could try to explain to my friends on Monday when talking about our weekends. This was a memory that couldn’t fit. It was one that needed to be scrubbed entirely, surgically removed. The sharp pain of his invasion. The psychotic grin that spread across his face. The cruel words slung at me just before. The threats that came after. The sounds. Those disgusting sounds. Was I supposed to carry those with me each day for the rest of elementary school? All of it needed to be scrubbed.

I prayed to forget. I prayed actively. I prayed to forget until the day I was strong enough to return to it all. And that is precisely what happened. Memory repression is simple to understand if you have enough empathy to put yourself in the shoes of a child this is happening to. A child does not have the emotional, mental, or physiological bandwidth to carry this material that even you, dear reader, will likely never have the capacity to carry. Imagine what it’s like for an 8 year old. Repression was the only option. I pretended it never happened until that became my reality. I scrubbed my memory clean.

It pains me to write this because I am tired of turning myself inside out in an effort to make these matters understood. But these days—and I can’t tell you why—there seems to be a new wave of denial encroaching upon the topic memory repression, resembling the backlash of the 90s and the ridiculous organizations that once created an entire fake diagnosis, “False Memory Syndrome,” all for the sake of writing off this reality. Don’t ask me why certain “progressive” academics have suddenly declared this a topic they want to come for in clickbait thinkpieces. They don’t know anything about it. It’s hard to conceptualize in absence of experience, and it hurts their psychiatry-worshipping brains, their personal epistemologies too shrunken and shrivelled to imagine possibilities beyond their scope of understanding. It makes me sad. It makes me scared to talk about this openly for fear of denial and disbelief.

and I have decided to host an educational event all about memory repression and structural dissociation to better inform the public about these two highly stigmatized and misunderstood survival adaptations.

I dearly hope you join us.

It’s on Saturday August 29th at 10am ET / 1pm PT.

Register here.