Childhood Abuse and Memory: Believing it Happened
Im a survivor of incest. Well, to be fair, I’m a survivor of a lot of shit. One of the hardest things — in all the domestic violence, the rapes, forced prostitution- is believing it happened. Ever since I was little, I was made to feel that my reality was false. Oftentimes in the field of psychology this will be referred to as “gaslighting”.
Our brains have a phenomenal ability to protect and preserve themselves. When my ex would throw me against a wall by my neck and strangle me, time seemed to slow down. My presence in my body, my perceptions of space and time melted away and it was like I was watching myself be murdered in slow motion. Now anyone familiar with psychology knows that the brain does this deliberately as a means of mental and physical survival. Particularly when these near death experiences are recurrent and one is having to live in a constant state of hyper vigilance. Our brains deliberately skew and disembody reality for us so that we can continue to live with that threat when we cannot outrun it.
Most people are aware of the concept of “flashbacks” but usually associate them with a kind of very literal right-brain linear memory. This isn’t how flashbacks necessarily work. Time does not exist within the memory. It is not a trajectory in the way that the memory of my first date is, for example. For years I denied my memories because they didn’t fall into this same category of memory. I don’t have any complete memories of my childhood abuse in this way. I have a hodgepodge of brief snippets of visual and auditory memory, but more than anything my memories come in the form of feelings, smells, tastes and nightmares. So if you were to ask me, are you SURE you were abused, then I would assume what you mean when you ask that is do you have a story with a beginning, middle and end of the abuse that occurred? And I would say no I do not. I would also say that most survivors of recurrent abuse, like incest or domestic violence, do not hold “memory” in this way either.
For years I sought outside validation that I had been abused as a child. I always got it, but for some reason that never satiated my need to have my reality validated. This was because I was taught as an abused child that whatever bad feelings came about as a result of the abuse were because of my perception of reality and similarly I learned that any pleasurable responses my body had to the abuse were also because of my own perversions and defects. Let’s be real- this is why sexual assault survivors can potentially have such a contentious relationship to our bodies; because we feel like our bodies have betrayed us by “enjoying” the abuse. So many of us punish our bodies for the rest of our lives through drugs, alcohol and anonymous sex because, hey, fuck it- we’re damaged goods anyways right? To be clear, I’m not saying any of those things are inherently destructive, but often times us abuse survivors utilize them in a means that is destructive.
We need to stop defining what memory means to abuse survivors. I can not “remember” the whole story of every act of abuse which took place yet my abuse still happened because I have somatic memory (proven in the field of psychology to be more reliable than intellectual memory, just FYI). My reality is valid. If you’re an abuse survivor or just think you might be, I want you to know your reality is fucking valid and I believe you. If you even just think you might have been abused, then chances are you have very good reasons for feeling that way. Fuck what the world tries to make us believe about the validity of our own experiences. We know who the fuck we are. We’re survivors, god damn it.
