Hi! I'm curious about your thoughts/opinion on like. Rediscovering/recovering "lost" memories. Do you think it's possible, or worth it? Or is it better to just accept you can't remember everything and try to deal w symptoms?
I think there are dangers, and it isn’t really necessary to begin healing. In the 1980s there was a really common school of thought that I’ve heard the “psychic pus” theory--that bad memories are a boil that needs to be lanced and drained, that you’ll never heal if you don’t find out what they are and re-experience all of them. This often ended people up in endless therapy, because they’d spend all their time digging up painful memories, and it would be re-traumatizing and painful and never actually begin work towards healing.
A way of seeing trauma recovery that I find really useful is Judith Herman’s three-phase model:
Phase 1: Safety and Stability
This means both finding a way to get clear of actually traumatic circumstances--for example, leaving an abusive relationship or getting stable housing--and achieving a measure of emotional stability. Living with trauma can often feel really chaotic, where one little setback can ruin your entire day, and this aims to reduce the chaos in really practical ways. This can involve ways of calming your body’s basic tendency to freaking out, whether that’s through medication, mindfulness-based stress reduction, yoga, DBT skills groups, biofeedback, or any of a number of other techniques.
It’s okay if this process takes months or years. Some traumas just aren’t ready to be worked through yet. The most important thing is for you to feel in control of your life day by day. This might involve a grieving process for the life you had before the trauma--accepting yourself as having the symptoms you have can be really hard. It can take a long time before you move from “I shouldn’t have these symptoms, this is stupid,” to “This is really where I’m at right now, so I’ll make the best of it that I can.”
Phase 2: Remembrance and Mourning
When you’re stable enough to dig into the difficult emotions without it making hard to live day-to-day, then it’s safe enough to do the more active trauma processing. I find that instead of speculating about what might be in periods you don’t remember, it’s usually best to follow the chain of what you do remember. It’s unfortunately easy, when speculating about the past, to manufacture memories that were never there before. Meanwhile, there are usually different ways into the past--for example, someone might not have direct access to a few years of memory when they were a child, but they can remember what house they were living in that year, or what books they read during that time, and talking about those knowns can help bring back other memories. No, you might not ever remember everything--there are some events that your brain literally just didn’t hit “record” for--but if you work with a good therapist, you can find a way to form some kind of coherent narrative out of the pieces that you have access to.
This is often painful and difficult work, and it can really help to do it with a process like EMDR that will help make the re-experiencing less traumatizing, as well as in conjunction with everything you did in Phase I.
Phase 3: Reconnection and Integration
Then, ideally, you won’t be stuck in that traumatized place forever. If you talk about it enough, the trauma might even begin to feel boring, and you want to focus on something else, like the world around you. As more gets processed, you might find yourself looking with renewed interest at people and events of your daily life and eager to get on with living. You can learn to accept your new normal. You’ll never be the person you were before the trauma, but you wouldn’t be them by now even if nothing had happened--time has passed, and you’d have grown, experienced things, learned things, and changed by now anyway.
With the trauma being less painful to talk about, it might become easier to talk about it socially, or come back into society with “trauma survivor” as one part of your identity, but not one that completely dwarfs all your other attributes.
So, I hope that helps!
