Could You Be a Victim of Abuse and Just Not Know It?

There is an ongoing debate in the mental health field over the accuracy of repressed memories. Repressed memories are memories that cannot be recalled in response to a traumatic event . In essence, someone will forget the event ever happened. For years someone can live and have no idea that something of such degree as child abuse took place. The abuse could have been acute, or chronic. The memories will lie dormant to be recalled at a later time in life, or perhaps they will remain repressed forever.

These repressed memories can be brought about spontaneously through a smell, touch, or image. A victim can be sitting there with their own child, years later, and when they look at their child the memories come flooding back. Or perhaps they smell a perfume, or see a picture, and are attacked by the memories of their abuse as children. Often these memories are also brought out in therapy.

A therapist may try and recover memories from a patient they think exhibits symptoms of someone living with repressed memories. These symptoms may include low self esteem, an introverted personality, nightmares and sleeping problems, sexual dysfunctions, panic attacks, head-aches, trust issues, drug and alcohol abuse problems, eating disorders, and inexplicable body pains.

Therapists may use techniques such as hypnosis, sodium amytal (truth serum), age regression, guided visualization, and other such psychotherapeutic methods they may find helpful. A patient can recover these memories they have hidden to protect themselves. Now therapy can be utilized to help them deal with the previously repressed memories.

The ramifications of these revealed memories are major. The victim will now have to deal with these new memories. What they remembered as a previously happy and normal childhood has been turned upside down. There is also the impact on accusing the perpetrator. Laws that would usually hold a statute of limitations have been amended to extend the allowable years of charges to account for this time the memories were repressed. The victim can now seek justice.

But what if these newly found memories aren't real??