this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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Therapists with specialties seem to dislike it when their client doesn't fall under that umbrella. I had a therapist whose specialty was child sexual abuse. I told her I didn't experience any and she defensively snapped "Are you sure? Maybe you don't remember it!". I did not stick with her for long.
when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail and stuff
"are you sure it's that you just weren't a hot enough kid? "
"how does it feel to know your parents/relatives didn't find you sexually attractive enough to abuse you? "
"how does it feel to know your parents/relatives didn't find you sexually attractive enough to abuse you? "
Story of Mr(s) Garrison's life.
I swear some therapists exist just to teach you to stick up for yourself by being lousy at their jobs.
To be fair, black-hole-ing a traumatic memory absolutely happens to people. That said, that reaction is absolutely not how to go about resurfacing that kind of thing. If anything it needs to be handled with way more care than self-reported trauma.
Nope. This was mostly a psychological fad in the 1980s that led to many ruined lives from false accusations. Even the Wikipedia page starts off by saying the phenomenon has been largely discredited. Many people still believe in it but the vast majority of cases of "repressed memory" cannot be independently proven outside of the patient and therapist and in many cases are actually contradicted by externally verifiable facts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory
aka all the 1980s/1990s lit on alien abduction was based on this crap and using 'hypnosis' to 'reveal' it.
it makes for good story telling, which is why it became a staple of TV dramatizations.
Are you sure? Cause mostly I hear the idea of repressed memories being bullshit.
See the Satanic Panic where a bunch of people suddenly "remembered" being forced to do Satanic Rituals at daycare
I have repressed memories, but that was intentional on my part and its not like it undoes the C-PTSD. Just means I don't wake up in a cold sweat anymore like I did when I was 10, the memories are there and can come back with the right trigger but they are luckily rather scarce.
I just wish I could do that to the embarrassing shit I've done over the years, and there's one happening right now FUCK. It's like I have a cursed version of Nenios ability to forget in Pathfinder wrath of the righteous.
I have very few memories of my dad being abusive to me, family has told me stories and I remember none of them but I know they happened.
It's a thing. It's because Traumatic™ memories are stored differently in your brain than normal bad memories. Essentially the part of your brain primarily responsible for digging up memories doesn't have the connections it world normally use to call up the memory, but the connections within the sensations and experiences of the memory still exist. That's why a person can "unlock" these memories.
You have to be super careful trying to dig these things out though, because it is absolutely possible to accidentally lead a person into false memories.
Information on episodic memory are stored in different parts of the brain and recalling episodic memory also involves the emotion centres but I don't think a happy memory and a traumatic memory are necessarily stored any differently.
How does PTSD fit into repressed memories?
Apparently Traumatic™ is different from traumatic with no emphasis. I am not a neurologist but it's my understanding that you can sit people in fMRI (or other brain activity monitoring systems) along with other monitoring systems and watch the difference between a normal memory and a flash-back. Like the Traumatic™ will function differently in ways you can measure. I learned about it from The Body Keeps the Score but I haven't read further than that. If you have resources that aren't too technical let me know. Some of what was in that book was pretty soft science, but the Traumatic™ memory stuff was pretty hard as far as I could tell.
What do you even supposed to say to that.
I'm pretty sure it never happened but I guess I could have forgotten, I guess, if you want.