Discussion → Blocked Memory Theory
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Statement: I disagree with that theory, yet I believe that brain injury incurred during a sexual assault might result in loss of memory of it. In my own experience, several friends, male and female, claimed to have had blocked memories of early sexual abuse, and they seem more healed -- why? I ended up not treated in therapy for actual teen abuse (not forgotten) and three other friends, all male, who had never forgotten sexual abuse of them in childhood by men, remain more troubled over it than the blocked memory cases do in life. Every blocked memory case I encountered related to L.S.D. in some way. There is more to say, but I have to leave for the afternoon.
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This is too complex and overgeneralized to even to begin to respond to except to say that every trauma experience is completely unique and it is nearly impossible to generalize effectively and accurately from one to the other. Our brains, memory formations and coping mechanisms are far too complex to find one cause.
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Dr. Garfunkel, you didn't answer the question: Why are the blocked (acid-trip) cases so much more healed than the actual victims of past abuse? I'll be back at 8:30 p.m. CST
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I have never come across that literature. I am also a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, neurologist or psychopharmacologist and would have absolutely zero expertise to offer in relation to that question except that research results can be deceiving, statistics manipulated and don't believe everything you read that claims to be "research." But you know that already.
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My sample are live humans I stood by through various stages of hysteria, addiction, and lapse of good manners. One was the immediate patient in therapy of John Bradshaw. In childhood, her parents had sent her to Europe for her safety against abduction threats. In college, at eighteen or nineteen, she felt unready to have sex and went to Bradshaw for therapy. Bradshaw induced blocked memory in her of incest at the hands of her middle sister and sister's boyfriend and their grandfather. Later, her middle sister was diagnosed with bipolar as, later, was she. The middle sister was by then the only mother among the three daughters, no son. The acid trip was that of my friend's middle sister and her sister's boyfriend, during which, as Bradshaw explained to my friend in his office, they did heinous, heinous things, too heinous to retell. Even the word "heinous." People who have been abused do not use that word, but blocked memory patients do. If Bradshaw was right, then why was my friend hysterical for two years fourteen years later? Why is she living free of diagnosis as a therapist now? There are four or five more friends' stories like that in my immediate circles from the past. One of those became a lesbian mother with her partner of three boys they gave birth to after insemination by turkey baster at home. She earned a Psy.D. degree as did her partner. Her abuser was the Lutheran parochial school coach who beat her feet during practice. That, she could remember. That she never forgot. Her dad was the town lawyer. In fact, both of these women friends had lawyer fathers and Jewish grandmothers. These two women never met or even knew of each other. It was an accidental acid trip at the Lutheran summer camp. That friend thought she was taking an aspirin. I was her same-age 18-year-old listener and believed because of her report that acid looked like an aspirin. She had a bad trip, ran through a field, and her sister ran after her and collected the heinous, heinous, too heinous to retell details of what the coach had done to my friend unawares. My friend's boyfriend then was her father's best friend and was 54. It went out in rings from there and spread through the lesbian community of the north. In the South, where I lived in Texas, gay was something innate or inherent, not the result of abuse as it was in the north. There was abuse in the north, not all of it blocked or based on acid trip reports by teenagers. Yet acid (L.S.D.) was a pattern. Guilt? Were the girls feeling guilty and angry about their precocious experiences? And what about the man whose acid trip at fifteen led to his memory of being orally raped at gunpoint by a Houston cop? And his diagnosis with bipolar then. These were non-medication-compliant bipolars who bucked diagnosis.
Acid trip is not my story or the reason I wrote fiction or memoir fiction or philosophical fiction.
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The brain is complicated. What do I know?
Group Description
This is a group for trauma stories. Writers often feel like no one wants to hear about it. How do you write about trauma without re-traumatizing the reader? How do you make it a gift rather than a burden? Think of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Trauma stories can be told and retold, each time from a different distance and perspective. Writing about trauma can be healing for the writer and the reader, though it has to be carefully, meticulously revised and revised and crafted so it is not just a "spill." Post as many stories as you want. This seems to be a very slow-moving group.
This is a public group.
Anyone can see it and join.