I recently wrote a blog entry entitled Is it Possible to Have Been Raped as a Girl and Not Remember?. After this blog entry published, I received emails from readers asking me to discuss this topic further. This is my first installment. If you have specific questions or issues you would like for me to cover, please email them to me or post them in the comments to this blog entry. You can find my email address on the About Faith Allen page. I will not use your name unless you ask me to.
One reader wants to know more about the situation of remembering some sexual abuse incidents but repressing the memories of the rapes. This was my situation for about a year. I first entered into therapy after I began recovering memories of being sexually abused by my mother. (Before this, I had no memories whatsoever of sexual abuse.) As I dealt with those memories, more memories surfaced of other forms of sexual abuse, but none of them involved vaginal rape. I kept telling myself that I could handle the memories as long as I was never vaginally raped. As I continued to heal, I reached a place when I had to face that this, too, had been taken from me. It was incredibly painful, but I needed to remember to heal.
Why did I remember multiple other incidents of sexual abuse but not the rapes? My guess is that I found the vaginal rapes to be the most traumatizing. Different people are going to have different memories that they consider to be the “worst of the worst.” For me, it was vaginal rapes. For my sister, it was animal rape. For others, it is mother-daughter sexual abuse or other forms of abuse. I think we often save for last the memory that we fear will break us. We ease ourselves into remembering the worst.
I have talked with child abuse survivors who have always remembered some forms of sexual abuse but not others. My observation has been that those whose sexual abuse began after age six appear to be more likely to remember some of the sexual abuse but might have dissociated the accompanying emotions or some of the more traumatizing incidents.
I know one sexual abuse survivor who remembered being raped hundreds of times by a family member. Because she had these memories, she did not believe that anything had been repressed. She was wrong. Through therapy, as she healed from what she had already remembered but had refused to “feel,” she started recovering memories of other abuses that were even more traumatizing than the memories she had always held. She took this very hard because she thought that what she remembered was hard enough. She felt like she was losing her mind as more memories of even more traumatizing abuses surfaced.
It is normal for people who have endured trauma to repress the memory. It is possible (and common) for child abuse survivors to have memories of some of the abuse but not others.
Photo credit: Hekatekris
I liken it to an automobile accident where a person may not remember what happened before during and after and it may or may not come back to them and are not linear.
I think that memories are not repressed in that it is not a conscious decision. I feel they are stored in the reptilian brain. The reptilian brain does not have a conscious understanding of time or order.
So the memories do not come back in the order of the conscious mind rather how the reptilian brain orders things which is influenced by the now.
I have memories that came and come into my consciousness due to the length of light in a day. It is not say that the memory comes back at Thanksgiving rather when the days are than length. My conscious mind thinks Thanksgiving my reptilian brain does not.
Note: This is well not that a person does not have repressed memories rather the reason is not choice it is as involuntary as the person in a car accident. Keeping them from the consciousness can be somewhat voluntary for me it is at my peril. With repeated trauma the memories are stored in the reptilian brain more readily and differently that with out repeated trauma.
I agree that the age of the trauma makes a huge difference as does the first instance. A child that experiences additional trauma at age six will not have the same memory or experience it the same way as if they did not have the prior trauma.
Faith, I am in this place right now. I’ve dealt with some of the sexual abuse and now the experience of rape has come up. I worked so hard before to believe the other experiences really happened. I didn’t want to believe, yet I also knew, from a deep place, that it was true. Although it was hard, it was actually just a choice to stop denying the truth that I already knew.
Now, with rape, it feels different. This is very new information for me and I have no memory of it (at this stage an alter has just ‘told’ me of it). You wrote “I kept telling myself that I could handle the memories as long as I was never vaginally raped.” Right now I feel that such a memory would be intolerable. How did you overcome this hurdle for yourself? Did flashbacks force you to see the truth, or did you have to accept the truth before the memories came? How did you convince yourself that you actually *could* tolerate the pain of remembering the rapes?
Thanks so much for writing on this topic and welcoming questions.
Dawn
Hi, Dawn.
It was a process that lasted for a few months. It started with me having nightmares of having consensual sex with other men. I would awaken in a cold sweat because my memory was only of having intercourse with hub and not anyone else.
As I came to react less violently to those dreams, they moved to being raped in adulthood. Again, I would awaken in a cold sweat with my heart racing. I would talk myself through, telling myself that I know that did not happen.
As the dreams continued, I shifted to telling myself that, even if something like this had happened to me, it wouldn’t change my value. I applied what I had learned with other forms of sexual abuse and applied it to the dreams. However, this was just to calm myself down … I still did not believe that I had been raped.
The final stage was reading the passage in “Safe Passage to Healing” about the hymen regenerating. I don’t think it is a coincidence that I read it in the presence of a trusted friend. As soon as I read it, I just “knew.” I had a sickening awareness as the pieces all fell into place.
For three days, I was inconsolable and did not believe that I would survive it. Then, I integrated my host personality (the only part of myself that didn’t know about the rapes), and I lost my status as someone with DID.
The memory feels intolerable because you are viewing it from the perspective of the host personality. Once you choose to accept that this, too, happened to you, you will likely no longer have a need for a host personality. You are on the brink of experiencing amazing internal healing that you never dreamt possible. Also, once you choose to stop fighting this truth, you will experience an amazingly deep peace because you have put down your arms after holding them up for decades.
You are in an exciting place in your healing — scary as hell, but exciting, too.
- Faith
I”m wondering if you could address the following issue – sorry if you’ve already covered it somewhere in your blog. I’ve read the entire thing, but might have forgotten if you had:
Is is possible for an abuser to forget the abuse that he or she did, or to forget the abuse that he or she enabled?
I know the victim can forget – can the abuser(s)?
This question has been bothering me as two of my abusers act perfectly normal and loving around me. It makes my mind spin. I can’t tell if they are accomplished actors and liars, in absolute denial or if they…don’t remember what they to me for years, from before I was old enough ride a tricycle.
It makes me feel like I”m insane or something close.
Hi Lilo,
I totally relate to what you are saying!
and hi Faith,
I too would appreciate it if you would consider adressing the topic of ‘the abuser that “forgets” in your blog.
I know my T doesn’t believe this to be true in my case (that my abuser forgot what she did), but I think it might be possible if she has dissociated through the events just as I did.
But then again, she would remember at a certain time, now, wouldn’t she? The only thing she admitted some years ago is that there was a certain sexual tension between us (mother-daughter), but that’s a huge (HUGE!) understatement.
So can an abuser have ‘forgotten’ or is he/she manipulating people in believing that (s)he is completely innocent (and we, the victims consequently crazy) and is (s)he just lying/denying all the way?
Chloë
Hi, Lilo and Chloe.
Yes, I will write a blog entry about this topic. I do believe that this applies to my mother. I know that she remembers on some level and will get into it on my blog entry about this. However, in her day-to-day life, I truly do not believe that she carries a conscious memory of the abuse and is truly baffled by my refusal to interact with her.
- Faith
Further to the abusers who ‘forget’. I’m think my abuser might have been in some kind of dissociative state some of the time he abused me, based on how his face and eyes looked. However, another possibility is that abusers who seem to ‘forget’are sociopaths – who don’t feel empathy and so wouldn’t have any internal conflict about knowing they’d harmed you and then behaving however was useful to them to behave toward you.
If it suited a sociopath to appear to be loving, they would appear to be loving. I’ve been reading about sociopaths lately, as I think my abuser is one. It has been a relief to make this connection, as it makes a lot of things slip into place. This book in particular was helpful in clarifying how sociopath’s behave. http://www.amazon.ca/Predators-Pedophiles-Rapists-Other-Offenders/dp/0465071732
Thank you for responding to my posts, Faith. I’ve been reading your blog for close to a couple of years now, but have been able to post only lately.
Another topic I wonder if you might consider blogging about:
Internal scarring/physical evidence of childhood sexual abuse? How common/likely would this be, considering how well kids heal physically from cuts, scrapes, minor wounds etc? (I don’t have external scars from the beatings, despite the bleeding welts.)
Much of what I experienced was quite brutal – I always wonder if there’s any internal scarring (but have not gone to get it checked out). How brutal would it have to be to actually leave physical evidence 10, 15 years later? Apologies if the last questions is offensive (please feel free to delete or edit my comment) – it’s just something that I really want to know.
Hi, Lilo.
I don’t know the answer, but I will see if I can find out. I, too, am curious about this topic. I endured years of infertility treatments and have never succeeded in getting pregnant despite trying numerous methods, including over 25 inseminations and two surgeries. My doctor was baffled because he could not find a reason to explain my inability to conceive with medical assistance. Internal scarring could explain this.
- Faith
Maybe the infertility is caused by fear. You might not be getting pregnant because of an unconscious fear you will turn into your abuser aka or cause that level of pain.. its psychological… just a thought but i believe a good one. I dealing with bein raped by a friend but so drunk i blackd out but i know i was and all evidence proves it. However it was in december and i oly now put the pieces together and the guy who heard it i have no clue how to find.. geeat blog
My abuse happened almost 40 years ago and I’ve always been afraid to ask about vaginal evidence. I’ve chosen not to ask as if there is no evidence of scarring then it becomes even easier for me to go into denial.
It has taken me a while to find the courage to read this and I too wonder if my mother actually forgets or “forgets” as a form of denial which are different in nature.
Thanks again,
CC
Hi CC,
I did finally get the courage to ask my health provider to tell me if there was any scarring and it turns out there was. (I wrote about it here: http://sworddancewarrior.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/warrior-victorious-in-pap-test/ and also about the process of finding a sympathetic professional to ask. ) Since women sometimes have scars from childbirth, she knew what to look for.
My scarring was on my vulva, and looked like faint white lines. They were hard to see hunched over with a mirror but once she pointed it out to me, I was able to see them more easily by taking a digital picture with a flash and then looking at it. She looked into the vagina and said she didn’t see any scars inside, but from the scars on the outside, it looks like there would have been tearing there too at the time. I think because the vaginal walls are a mucous membrane that scar tissue might be harder to see if it still exists.
I’ve read that often vaginal wounds on young children heal without a scar, although these were in cases where there was medical attention at the time. These are known cases of vaginal or vulvar damage where there were no marks at all after a few years, so lack of scars definitely does not mean nothing happened. I’ve got a link to more info about that on my blog in the links section I think, that I found helpful.
If you can find someone sympathetic to ask, I recommend finding out about scar tissue. It’s been very validating and helpful for me in setting boundaries with family members.
SDW
[...] my blog entry entitled Remembering Sexual Abuse Incidents but Not the Rapes, readers posted the following comments: Is is possible for an abuser to forget the abuse that he or [...]
When I was in the 6th grade a friend of my fathers started living with us. There was this one night where he cooked dinner for us and I remember feeling extremely tired after dinner. I slept through the entire night and fell into a very deep sleep which was unusual for me to do. The next morning I woke up and I was really sore down there and I noticed my bedroom door was open a little bit even though I am OCD about making sure it is shut when I sleep. I also remember waking up and feeling really groggy and remembering him come into my room but I couldn’t fully remember what happened and I was unsure if he actually had come into my room or if i just made it up in my mind. I have always just shrugged it off but lately i’ve been wondering if something may have happened that night and if its possible for me not to remember it? I am 18 years old now and I started having dreams about being raped when i was in middle school. Since then the rape dreams have become more frequent. I know its probably nothing but I was just wondering what you thought?
Hi, TJ.
I saw this topic covered on a talk show about a year ago. Yes, this does happen. The perp drugs the child with a “date rape” drug, does things with the child, and then the child awakens with no memory of the incident. The combination of feeling pain “down there” and the open door is concerning.
- Faith