Please don't apologize for posting...all questions and posts are welocome (unless someone is being mean to another member of course)

I was abused from 8-12 and forgot everything by the time I was 13. The next time I remembered was when I was 44. The memories came back as flashbacks and I denied it as much as I could. The thing is, the memories that come back are so horrific its not possible to make it up.

If you don't want to believe the memory then believe your feelings. Feelings never lie and horrible feelings that are caused by abuse also cannot be made up.

Are you working with a therapist?

After going thru it myself and therapy I can honestly say Yes there is such a thing as repressed memory.

Yes I meet with a counselor 1-2 times weekly. It's just such a struggle because I can't imagine this happening. we are working with emdr and he says everything is significant. I just hope I'm not blowing up my past.

I had all the same doubts. Id say to my therapist "I must be making this up" to which she would reply "why would you do that?" And I had no answer. There is no way anyone could make this stuff up.

I didn't want abuse to BE my past but I had to accept the truth of it all. I WAS abused. What you are feeling is normal but as you keep working you will move into acceptance too. At your own pace, in your own time.

Hi there. I have a similar history to you and struggle with the same lack of memories and self-doubt. Whenever I talk abuse I feel like I'm lying, and my therapist always tells me that's normal.

I finally decided to make loyalty to my child self more important than being overly concerned about the truth. So while I still struggle with the idea of what happened to me, I put my doubts on hold and state my loyalty to my inner children, whatever they might tell me. At least, that's what I'm saying today!

wow this is eerie how so many people are thinking the same and asking the same questions. I don't remember everything, but I remember enough to know it went on for 3 years. The question is how much do I not know, and do I really want to know all the details?

I subject maybe counseling .http://pcssummit.org/. They are great .

I would be glad to help any way I can. Not sure whether i have more questions or answers, but plenty of experiences.

These people are correct for the most part but if you have any doubt of it happening you must analyze it further with councling. Your mind can play tricks on you especially when you deal with certain psychological problems like depression which is something I suffer from so I'm not trying to say anything negative. I wish you well and hope you can put these troubling times behind you.

I'm overwhelmed by support. I hope I can find rest in not knowing, but idk what to think. With the hx the present makes sense, without it, it just simply doesn't. My counselor has said this also. But why the repression? It's like I can't really remember much of being young at all. Would anyone be willing to share a story about repression with me?

Hi. Read my post. Will it ever go away. It's my story. I remember some of my abuse in the later years 12-14 but always thought it didn't happen when I was young. I thought I was done had dealt with it all till the last 6wks or so. I'm back to getting a flood of flashback and nightmares about when I was much younger. I'm 42 now I hv repressed it all these yrs

Hischild77

A story of repression.

The incest, and sexual abuse went on for many years...from crib to age 14+. We were all abused. When I was 18 my younger sister approached me wanting to talk about it. I just turned on my heel and walked away. I look back now and realize I was not ready to deal with it. It would take the death of my father when I was 40 years old to feel safe enough to let the feelings and some memories in.

The awful irony was that though I had buried (repressed) the memories of abuse I was still acting out--I was "moderately" promiscuous. I say moderately because I was tethered by the belief drummed into me by my aunts that "good" girls did not sleep with a man until married. One of their favorite lines was to tell me, "Why should a man buy the cow when he can get the milk free."

Yet, the false beliefs created by incest and sexual abuse also had an influence. I believed, back then, that my only worth was as a sexual object. My solution was to sleep with men I was engaged to though on occasion I would stray when I was between engagements.

Since I had buried the memories of abuse I could not figure out who I was, what I liked, or what I wanted to do with my life. I just thought I was some awful flaw--and that there was something horribly wrong with me that I could not put my finger on.

I was sad and depressed throughout those years and wrongly concluded that I must have liked being that way since I went there so often. (When we bury the memories we come to believe that every hurtful, painful thing going on in our life is because of something we've done.)

I do believe it's critical to listen to ourselves and also to what our bodies are telling us and then to move forward when we are ready. It's also important to discover and replace the programming we were subjected to--in my case I was programmed to believe that I could not say no to the sexual advances of the men in my family.

Finally, Hischild77, have you answered the question for yourself of your reasons for making it up? I thought the same thing when memories began to return. But, why would I make things like this up? Why would I put roadblocks like these in my own way? How would it serve me to make these things up?

I now believe that I had to accuse myself of making things up in order to protect the needy, little me who was once so desperate for love--because if I'm making this up that means I wasn't really abused, but loved. That's my conclusion.

But, of more importance is your own conclusion.

xx
SuzA

Hi there. I was abused regularly between the ages of two and eight years old. My go-to coping mechanism was to just shut down mentally, to "go somewhere else" in my head so I didn't have to focus on what was being done to me. To this day, I have a scary ability to compartmentalize.

I repressed everything. I can count on one hand the number of memories I have of my life before the abuse stopped. After that, on some deep, fundamental level, I knew something had happened to me, but my mind absolutely refused to go there. It wasn't until I was in my 20s that a therapist suggested EMDR to recover memories of the trauma so they could be dealt with.

And digging up those memories was absolutely necessary. Even though I couldn't remember anything that had been done to me, I was still living with self-destructive behaviors caused by the abuse. And, until I dealt with the abuse in therapy, I maintained an absolute fear of men in positions of authority.

Through EMDR, I started remembering more and more of what was done to me. I would frequently ask my therapist how I could not be making that up, because seriously, who does that to a kid? It seemed outrageous to me that I could claim someone had done those things to me.

Eventually, my therapist convinced me that it's precisely because of how nasty the memories were that I could trust them. After all, who could possibly make up things so twisted and horrible? That was the major breakthrough. Once I fully believed I was a victim, I was able to fully devote myself to the business of stopping thinking like a victim.

The bottom line is, if you know or suspect on a deep level that something happened to you, even if you can't remember what it might be, you should trust your gut. The fact that these things are starting to come up for you now is a sign that you're ready to confront them head-on and put them in your past. I highly recommend finding a therapist who can use EMDR with you to recover your memories and help you put them to rest.

Good luck!