Trauma Memories: Is it possible to experience, forget, then remember?

Is it possible for people to experience trauma, forget it, and then remember it later, even decades later?

Although clinicians have long known and witnessed psychotherapy clients spontaneously or over the course of therapy remembering being abused, it wasn’t until researchers began to study this issue that the science explaining recovered memories was uncovered.

An early researcher and clinician in the trauma field, Judith Herman, MD, offers a sensitive description of the struggle of trauma survivors to know their history and reconcile intense physical and emotional distress and their fragile memories:

"The conflict between knowing and not knowing, speech and silence, remembering and forgetting, is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. This conflict is manifest in the individual disturbances of memory, the amnesias and hypermnesias [inabilities to forget], of traumatized people.” (Herman, 1995) (Hopper, 2011 (revised))

Trauma survivors not only forget and remember, they often are in conflict with their own memories, and are unable to stop their mind from racing and obsessing about their traumatic experiences. Their remembrances of trauma experience(s) repeat themselves often and with an intensity, at times, making life unbearable.

Like the ongoing debate in the world about whether recovered memories are real or not, the trauma survivor themselves ask the very same questions.

Did this really happen to me?

How could it happen to me?

It’s not possible, is it?

Why can’t I remember anything?

Could this really be true?

These were the questions researchers sought to answer over the last two decades.