Survivors of child abuse often doubt our memories. Part of this is the pushback of abuse culture: saying that we abused is often met with a reaction that maybe we misinterpreted events, maybe our child minds couldn’t understand that our parents had our best interests at heart. I’ve written before about the expectation that survivors are held up to 100% accuracy in our memories, or else people feel free to doubt that we’re telling the truth or that we know what happened to us.
But there is also the element of memories that are often confusing because when they happened, we didn’t know what they meant. Like rewatching a childhood movie and finally understanding all the innuendo that went over your head. Except that we can’t rewatch our memories in the same way; often how we saw things then remains how we see things now, especially when the memories aren’t in our head like movies, but in our head like repetition; like two plus two, we no longer have to think about to accept as true.
And this can be reinforced by abusers who told us what happened to us. People often think of abusers telling their families what lies they should convince other people of; I don’t know if people outside of abuse understand that many times, your abuser is telling you how you should see events. It’s often a cliched trope that sexual abusers make up strange stories to convince a child to go along with the sexual abuse, relying on a child’s ignorance and trust to believe that this is what is happening. But this is what abusers do, and not just with sexual abuse. Abusers tell you they have reasons for hurting you, reasons for doing what they’re doing. Couple that with repressed memories, and abusers can exploit a child’s confusion and lack of memories to rewrite what happened to you. “You got that bruise because you tripped and fell” isn’t just an excuse to tell anyone who asks. It’s also often a way an abuser gives their victim a story when they recognize their victim is confused and can’t recall what happened.
When we are missing pieces, or when we haven’t yet grasped the full implications of a particular memory, it can be easy to doubt ourselves. We remember an abuser hurting us, but we’ve been told, interpreted or even lied to ourselves about every bruise; telling ourselves that that was because we fell, we were clumsy, and then tell ourselves because we have no memory of bruises, our memories of physical abuse must be inaccurate or it must not have been “that bad” because we believe we have no recall of anything else but these memories that seem disconnected from our other experiences.
But then sometimes we finally recognize what a particular aspect of our memories was. Sometimes that comes with reexperiencing this or that; for me, it’s being in my first sexual relationship that is making so many things make sense. We have a similar experience and it’s the closest we get to a rewatching of our memories; we finally recognize the implications, the meaning, behind what our abuser did. We finally are able to say, “No, this particular thing was related to the abuse.”
I’ve been dealing with that this week. It relates to things I’m not sure I’m ready to write about, but it was one of those moments where I finally had to acknowledge a particular memory I’ve been carrying around my whole life was related to the abuse. And from there the dominoes fall: if that memory is true then it means the memories I have of the sexual abuse are true because they connect so seamlessly. And if those memories are true then my triggers are true, and all of a sudden everything lines up perfectly. All my “I think this happened” are in even sharper light when I realize that these other memories confirm exactly what happened. Survivor memories like this are like a puzzle where we’ve been convincing ourselves all the most horrifying puzzle pieces belong to another puzzle, with another context that makes them benign. And then we finally snatch up one of those pieces and see how easily it connects, how clearly it forms the picture we’ve been secretly believing could never be true.
This is what connector memories are. The memories that tie the rest of our memories together, the memories that are kept separate, either as our brain’s way of protecting us, or as part of the lies and confusion of our childhood. And in keeping them separate we live in this space of denial and mistrust, our memories of being abused feeling as though they are on a separate track, running parallel to our other memories. Saying, “I was abused” has never had the same impact when I could also carry the doubt, and therefore the hope, that I was a liar, that I was making things up, that as some point I could find a line of reasoning, a context that would explain away my memories of abuse as something else. But realizing that not only did something happen, but that I can trust my own memories as accurate is its own realization. It’s the difference between believing and knowing. And now I have to contend with the knowing.
Speaking When the World Sleeps 