What if You Don't Remember?

[Kitty Tantrum]

Without going into detail just yet because it's laborious to dredge it all up and lay it out all at once: I have suspected since I was pretty young (don't recall precisely, but probably since I was 7 or 8) that I was sexually abused as a very young child, in some way, by someone. But I have no memory of it happening.

 

There are a lot of things that point to the possibility, and the more I learn about the common factors and long-term effects of sexual abuse in childhood, the more likely it seems. It would explain a lot of things. My earliest suspicions stemmed from the fact that I've had an INSANE libido... since I can remember existing and thinking. Actually my decision to remain chaste until I'd found the father of my children was at least partly something of a denial/defense mechanism. I remember reading that abused children are often hypersexual, sexually precocious, go on to be promiscuous, etc., and I more or less decided (as a child, maybe 9 years old), that my sexual self-denial/reservation would prove that I was never abused.

 

For many various reasons I've never talked about it or written about it, but rather shoved it to the back of my mind for the past ~25 years, until just in the last few weeks when the thought forced its way back to the surface and I decided to do some research on the subject.

 

But I don't remember it. Which makes me question if it happened.

 

And even if I assume that it DID happen, and that IS why I have these various... bits of baggage, quirks, hangups, fears, whatever you might call them, which would be easily collectively explained by such a thing - what can I really DO about it if I don't remember it? How do I process something I can't remember - and furthermore, what if I'm wrong?

[salparadise]

It would explain a lot of things. My earliest suspicions stemmed from the fact that I've had an INSANE libido...

 

Unless you have a lot more to inform this than merely being hyper-sexual, I'd say you'd be much better off to accept this aspect of your sexuality as natural.

 

Didn't you say in another thread that you had a tough childhood? Not being loved enough and accepted as inherently valuable can also affect children this way. Young girls who aren't receiving unconditional parental love can learn pretty fast that they can receive attention and acceptance by sexualizing their interactions.

 

If you really feel you have to get into it, hypnoses might be a consideration. But even if something came up that way, you'd still not have any real evidence, thus it would only be a stronger suspicion rather than resolution.

Edited September 21, 2019 by salparadise

[Veronica73]

I’d suggest finding a good, female therapist who deals with trauma. It can be difficult to find such a person. Do you have health insurance? If so, what kind? I have PPO and the people that they will pay for seem to be quite good.

[preraph]

You have to be very careful. I am not even sure I recommend therapy unless you do start remembering. You don't want to make something up.

 

I will tell you that when dealing with the subconscious, there are times before you remember something when you may have an ominous feeling. Many times, you will deal first with trauma through dreams. You may get a fear feeling that something bad is coming. And it will be a memory bubbling up.

 

But here is the catch. Sometimes the ominous feeling you get is way worse than what actually happened, the recovered memory! I have had that happen myself. A feeling of dread and then very anticlimactic when it finally surfaced into my consciousness.

 

So you indeed may have had something happen that shamed or humiliated you later or at the time, but it might not be a huge event.

 

You may have some certain feeling about whoever did it, like that you are convinced they are not a good person but you don't remember why. Could be a playmate, a friend's dad or brother, your own dad or uncle or stepfather or neighbor. So think about if you have some unexplained bias toward any of those people. And let that sit for awhile. Don't rush things. Don't jump to conclusions.

 

Sometimes people are in their 30s when they start to put those things together.

[Big Aus]

Please forgive me for being blunt, but you really don't want to go there.

 

Seriously, just don't.

 

I'm not sure of the real reason(s) you feel led in that direction, but you need to get past it.

 

Otherwise you are literally self-creating a mountain of hurt.

 

Is your libido creating problems for you? Are you unsatisfied, and perhaps feel guilty?

Whatever it is, just deal with you Libido, and please don't go down that rabbit-hole.

 

If you suspect (without any evidence) that you have been abused, then the next logical step is to start suspecting who might have perpetrated the abuse.

 

Then of course you will be driven to try to remember. Snippets of vaguely recalled nightmares will be extracted and scrutinised. "Do I remember something? Or do I just think I should remember?"

 

If you convince yourself you were abused, then an inability to remember will feel like a failure, so you will try even harder to remember. Well-meaning therapists, if told that you were abused, will try to help you deal with the abuse (that may or may not even be real.)

 

The "best" case scenario is that you think you remember. So then you have all the pain, and shame, and humiliation, and anger, and empty hatred, and fear, and distrust. And it may not even be real.

 

Trust me, I would rather forget.

[LivingWaterPlease]

I'm with those who say don't go there. I've seen people focus on something that didn't happen until they actually believe it and blame an innocent person, believing the innocent person is guilty.

 

You could ruin your own life and someone else's by falsely accusing someone. Then live the rest of your life with the fallout from that.

[Kitty Tantrum]

You have to be very careful. I am not even sure I recommend therapy unless you do start remembering. You don't want to make something up.

 

This is exactly what I've always been afraid of, and why I've always shied away from therapy.

 

Also, I wouldn't accuse anybody even if I was pretty darn sure. That's not the goal, or something I'd want to do at all. It's not even about wanting to remember so much as it is about wanting to "get over it" in the sense of moving past inner limitations and roadblocks.

 

I'll elaborate on some of these things later when I'm at an actual keyboard (just wanted to START the thread while I had the nerve), but there's a LOT more to it than having a precocious/high sex drive, that was just the first thing that made me wonder when I was little. The libido itself is the least of my concerns at this point because I have a healthy outlet for it.

 

I guess what I'm wondering most of all is this: I know there have to be people who know, factually speaking and based on real evidence and testimony, that they were abused as children - and experience the effects of that in spite of not remembering... right? And if you understand the general NATURE of the trauma, couldn't it be worked around, healed from, etc. WITHOUT having to recover the actual memory?

 

Thank you all for your input so far. It is much appreciated. <3

[preraph]

I mean, everything is possible. I think in most instances it's probably best, when possible, to look squarely at what happened to us and absolve ourselves of responsibility if it happened when we were not an adult yet or we otherwise had no control over it.

 

There is a statute of limitations that vary by state, but if you did find out someone still living was, for example, a child abuser, to prevent any more of that happening, you'd want to bring it out to everyone in danger (or their parents) or report it if it was still within the statute of limitations, which may be decades for this. But you can't do that unless you remember what happened.

 

If you think someone else knew about it, you might ask them what they remember.

[anika99]

I have actually wondered the same thing OP and for one of the same reasons. I have been masturbating and having orgasms as far back as I remember which is back to about the age of three. When people talk about having their first orgasm in their teens or even later I just don't even participate in those conversations because they make no sense to me. I can't remember my first orgasm because I was such a little kid, probably around 2yrs old.

 

So I've also wondered how I became sexual at such a young age and speculated that perhaps I'd been sexually abused. I know my mother was very irresponsible with me when I was a baby and had no problem leaving me with strangers so she could go have fun. My grandma told me a story once about how when I was a baby she had to go get me from some strangers place because my mother had just abandoned me there. My grandma said it was a filthy house full of lowlifes and one of the women who lived there said she hadn't seen or heard from my mother for weeks. My grandma took me home with her. I wish she had never told me that awful story but it makes me realized that there is a strong possibility that I was abused.

 

However I realize that there can be other explanations for my sexual behavior. For one thing I've read that children are sexual and can be orgasmic, especially girls, and it's not all that unusual for very small children to pleasure themselves. I have also always had more testosterone than is average for a female. I used to get sick of hearing people say that girls don't need to be worried about getting bulky muscles from using heavy weights because that simply won't happen. That was bull for me. I can easily build large bulky muscles. When I was in my early 30s I was totally into lifting weights and boy did I bulk up. I'm very short but I had those bulging neck muscles and shoulders, big biceps, etc. I looked like a little bull dog, lol. Even without using weights I had a naturally athletic build with somewhat of a tomboyish figure and I had a ton of body hair on my legs and arms that I had to remove on a regular basis. So I do wonder if testosterone played a role in my being so sexual at such a young age.

 

I don't really want to know if I was abused as a child. I'm in my fifties now, my mom is not going to be around for much longer and I just don't want that information to sully my life now. If it happened then that would explain a lot about me, not just sexually but other aspects of my life too. However I got through life, managed to survive and I'm happy now. I don't want to dig up the ugly past.

[anika99]

Unless you have a lot more to inform this than merely being hyper-sexual, I'd say you'd be much better off to accept this aspect of your sexuality as natural.

 

Didn't you say in another thread that you had a tough childhood? Not being loved enough and accepted as inherently valuable can also affect children this way. Young girls who aren't receiving unconditional parental love can learn pretty fast that they can receive attention and acceptance by sexualizing their interactions.

 

If you really feel you have to get into it, hypnoses might be a consideration. But even if something came up that way, you'd still not have any real evidence, thus it would only be a stronger suspicion rather than resolution.

 

Exactly this! I have enough crappy experiences from my childhood that I clearly remember and that can adequately explain my issues, I don't need to go digging around for more.

 

Therapy is always a good thing but use it to get help with the issues you have right now, not to go digging up memories. It's been proven time and time again that people can create memories that are 100% true to them, yet totally false. A therapist who believes in recovered memories will have you creating all kinds of memories in no time but they probably wouldn't even be real memories.

[major_merrick]

As everybody else has said, just don't go there. I know a lot of what happened when I was young. I don't go exploring other memories because I know what I'd dig up would be unpleasant. After dealing with being drugged and assaulted this week, I figure that I don't want to remember whatever happened while I was blacked out. It just isn't good.

The mind has some self-defense mechanisms so you can keep your sanity. Your mind will totally forget some incidents, or warp some incidents into something better than what actually happened. This is a good thing. Leave childhood and adolescence behind you. Those are usually crappy years anyways.

[Veronica73]

Kitty: I’m not an expert by any means whatsoever. But if you are a well-adjusted adult who doesn’t have problems with connecting and trusting people, don’t have recurring issues in intimate relationships, don’t have substance abuse problems or anxiety or depression or whatever....in general that you are happy with yourself and how your life is going....then I wouldn’t dwell on it. Actually, I wouldn’t dwell on it in any case.

 

But it seems like a lot of people who were sexually abused as children have a lot of problems as adults. Something to do with the things they learned and the ways they coped as children to survive, doesn’t work as full-functioning adults. So we have problems eventually.

 

I don’t see any reason to delve into all that stuff if you think you are doing great. But if you have issues, it might make sense to go to a good therapist who deals with that kind of stuff. I doubt that you would need to “recover” memories or delve into all that crap or whatever. It just might give the therapist a lens to view whatever it is you are going through and make them better able to help you. With my therapist, who I have been seeing since the beginning of the year, we covered the basic incidents, which I remembered, on the first visit. Since then we have been dealing with my issues (a big one for me is learning how to set boundaries). We don’t talk about the actual abuse much at all.

[Big Aus]

Kitty,

It's not about accusing anybody.

It's about stirring up crap in your own mind.

 

No don't get me wrong. I'm a great believer in truth. In confronting it and trying to deal with it.

The problem is that from this point anything you come up with will not be.

 

I think I understand what you're getting at. You feel there are issues and you want to deal with those, and you're suspecting they may be rooted in abuse.

I would never advocate hiding the truth. But you're not an outsider looking in. This isn't some victim that may be reluctant to discuss what happened. You're not trying to get to the truth, you already know the truth.

 

My point is, you should just deal with the issues, without trying to impute some hidden meaning. Telling yourself that you might have been abused is only going to create more hurt for you, and will hinder your ability to deal with it.

[divegrl]

Hi,

 

You don’t have to cognitively remember the abuse in order to heal from the trauma. Everything experienced in your life, even as a baby, is held in your primitive mind. There are certain mind body patterns that abuse creates and are easily recognized once you learn the signs.

 

I highly recommend reading The Body Keeps Score. It will help you understand how trauma is stored in our mind/body/spirit. And it will give you suggestions on how to heal.

 

Have a beautiful day my friend.

[flyer6]

Hi,

 

I'd suggest reading or listening to the audio book of "The Body Keeps The Score" and making a decision whether or not you want to go there.

 

It helped me a lot to understand my own trauma. People saying don't go there, I get it, but also any real growth is challenging and painful especially this kind of stuff. I'm personally glad I went there, its been one of the hardest things I've done and am doing but its effected and triggered change in just about every aspect of my life, even in subtle ways and with things I didn't know could be better or were affected by said trauma.

 

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Body-Keeps-the-Score-Audiobook/B017MW3O4C?source_code=GPAGBSH0508140001&ipRedirectOverride=true&gclid=CjwKCAjwibzsBRAMEiwA1pHZrqffuVGhJebxxJWlYbM9ZeZ3n8vJd-lXjUA9Tc-Wlr85n237fdy9VhoCH6UQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

[Kitty Tantrum]

Thank you both for the book recommendation. I'll give it a read/listen.

 

My gut tells me that understanding the general nature of where my "issues" come from will help me deal with them, even if I never recover any actual memories or get definite answers - by drawing on the body of information regarding what has helped others with similar issues from similar traumas find healing.

 

I understand how it might not be helpful to really go digging, but at the same time I ALSO don't think it's helpful to continue to dismiss/disregard/deny the very real possibility/likelihood that something like that DID happen. If I'm not willing to touch that possibility at all (which is what I've been doing for more than two decades - "nope! not me!"), that would tend to preclude (and has precluded, for many years) seeking any sort of help/resource that is known to be helpful in treating the issues that I do have which are known to be associated with such abuse.

 

I'm not really talking about digging for truth here, so I'm not sure why so many are harping on that issue; I'm talking about finding healing WITHOUT memory/knowledge of the actual truth.

[major_merrick]

Unless there's some retribution you can get that will make you feel whole, then you should accept that it is for the best that you've forgotten. Like I said before, the body and brain have defense mechanisms to keep you sane. Focus on the good that you have now...I know it sounds cliche. But if you can forget, you can also forgive and move on. Usually it happens in reverse (easier to forgive than forget.)

[Kitty Tantrum]

An interesting thing happened, not too long after my last post on this thread, actually, and I've been digesting it since: I came across the suggestion somewhere (don't even remember where now) that sometimes children abused at a young age will remember an instance of abuse as a "dream" with real details swapped out for fanciful ones.

I immediately snapped back to a dream that I had when I was really little (couldn't have been more than three). I had to go back and dig through a couple of old journals to make sure I was remembering correctly, and I was: that dream was always remarkable to me in that I could never recall going to sleep before having it, or waking up from it. So much so that I made note of it every time I wrote it down (I made a few feeble attempts at dream-journaling over the years; this is one of the most vivid dreams I've ever had, so it's been put down a few different times in a few different places).

Reading my account of that dream now is a bit... well, from the perspective I have NOW, it almost reads like something that would have been fabricated AS a "childhood abuse remembered as a dream" story. But it's a very real recording in my memory bank - verified by written accounts from long before I would have thought to make that association.

It's so strange.

I'm beginning to understand the "rabbit hole" nature of this internal questioning. Pretty sure I've decided not to get any therapists involved. I may need counseling for some things one of these days, but rest assured LoveShackers, there will be no forays into the field of memory recovery for this gal.

I've got this growing sense that I know what I'd find in there if I really dug for it. My mind intuits an awful lot of things without my asking. I've got this feeling deeeeeep in my gut that I know who this comes down on. And it's kinda like... I'm not shocked. You know? But I could be wrong, I guess? There's no way for me to know without confronting the person in question... and I don't think I care to do that. Perhaps I shall someday, but that day is not today.

There IS a part of me that wants to know the truth - but I suspect that confirmation can only come from one person. I feel like it's something that I would definitely want to know if I could KNOW without... that person knowing that I know - that I remember. Does that make sense?

[major_merrick]

I get it.... and if I were you, I'd let it rest.  You don't want to talk to that person about it.  And frankly, not knowing might be the best.  I've remembered some new things the past couple years about what I went through when I was young.  Stuff I forgot or my mind blocked out for my own good.  I'd rather have left it forgotten, since I already have enough to deal with. 

I think the "creative" dreams are some of the worst part about trauma from the past.  The mind takes memories and warps them, and you get to relive what you've been through but with new twists.  I don't dream much, but there are sometimes that I wake up in absolute terror.  My husband has dreams like that too (PTSD?) and so usually I just curl up in his arms.  I haven't slept alone for years, and I'm glad I don't have to. 

[Kitty Tantrum]

I'm fortunate in that I don't have many nightmares these days - though one thing that strikes me is that after that one "dream," I had nightmares for years that were very much tied in to my fear of the first "dream" repeating - and it did, not exactly but in a similar theme. In all my nightmares thereafter, however, I could always wrench myself out of it before it got to the "bad part." That first time I couldn't, and I remember crying, and flailing, and pain, and then everything was kinda blurry and then it was over - as opposed to waking up with a start and my heart pounding.

In a weird way, it's almost like I eventually trained myself NOT to dream. Or maybe just to suppress the recollection of those dreams? I've never dreamed much as an adult - but I also haven't had one of THOSE dreams in just as long.

I've got LOTS of the signs of PTSD, but it seems to affect me in subtler ways. No screaming night terrors, but I'm a bit crippled when it comes to relating to others.