It could be argued that science and research can often never account for the power of personal experience. If repressed memories are so unreliable, why take them seriously? There is a large number of cases where other family members or people involved have come forward to back up the recall of victims. The one type of trauma that has substantial evidence backing up people ‘forgetting’ then correctly remembering later in life is sexual abuse. The other person, with no experience of violence and a high value of peace, might remember two men trying to kill each other. Two people might witness a fight, and to one of them, who grew up in a violent household, it was just two drunken men pushing each other a bit. Even conscious memories are not always ‘fact’, as they are one person’s perspective of a situation, coloured by their core beliefs, values, and previous experiences. Then there is the very nature of memory itself. This of course can leave someone very vulnerable and damaged. It can do this by combining pieces of real memories with suggestions made by others.Īnd that is another danger of the concept of repressed memories – sometimes, sadly, we can be manipulated by others to believe something has happened to us when it hasn’t. Unless many other people come forward with the same memory of a situation, it’s possible your recall is instead a false memory created by the brain to manage reality more effectively. The brain is a highly complicated and intelligent network. Repressed memories are also very difficult to prove as factual. And proving the phenomenon by research is tricky as it would involve monitoring people for years of their lives. They are not something, for example, a brain scan or microscope can pick up. It’s very difficult to prove that repressed memories really exist. The controversy around repressed memories If you went to therapy, you might discover your family was not so happy or that you have ‘forgotten’ your father’s violence toward your mother. ![]() So you tell yourself it’s just ‘timing’ and ‘bad luck’, and keep living a very lonely life. ![]() In your ‘memory’ you come from a happy family. ![]() If you can’t understand where such feelings and reactions come from you might just make excuses for them and continue to suffer in life, year after year.įor example, you might have terrible difficulties letting other people get close to you and lack any long-term friendships. But you will still be living with the results of the ‘forgotten’ situation, such as complicated emotions and strange behaviour patterns. You might not consciously have access to your memory of traumatic events. But the brain does indeed favour some memories while repressing others, albeit in a far more complicated and not completely understood fashion. Neuroscience has also made it clear there is no such ‘lockup room’ in the brain where all our difficult memories are kept in cold storage waiting to be discovered. Few therapists think that repressed memories are the cause of all issues an individual has, although they are important and need consideration. Of course nowadays psychotherapy has moved on a bit. He felt that it was necessary for clients to work with an analyst who was trained to help one ‘dig out’ and process such repressed memories. The concept of repressed memory is that when something happens that is very shocking or hard to handle, the mind decides to block it out.Īn automatic process, it differs from suppression, where you can decide to no longer think about things because you don’t like them.įreud developed the idea that repressed memories were delegated to a part of the mind called the ‘unconscious‘, and based psychoanalytical psychotherapy around the concept that what we hide in the unconscious is behind any struggles we have in life. Repressed memories are an important yet controversial topic in psychology.ĭo these memories really exist, do they matter as much as some people think, and how are they best dealt with if so? What are repressed memories?
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