Who gets the final say on recovered memories?
This essay is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of existing literature on trauma and memory. The research I cite is for the purpose of reflecting on who gets to be the arbiter of truth on the matter of recovered memories.
Note also that because my book-specific quotes are drawn from non-enumerated PDF copies, I am unable to provide exact page numbers. However, in every case I have provided direct links to the PDFs in question, wherein the quoted text is easily searchable.
For many of us who know ourselves to be sexual abuse survivors, memory is an unruly animal. Sometimes, memory is a dull background static that suffuses our day. Other times, it is a knifepoint pain that cannot be relegated to the back of our minds.
And in certain cases, some believe that memory can lie dormant for years. It waits there quietly, ready to mobilize and shatter a person’s understanding of their life the instant something triggers it. In those cases, when the memory comes back, it comes back like a reckoning.
The neurobiological processes surrounding memory are numerous and complex. The basic contour of memory-making is that we first encode memories (through a process of perceiving and interpreting a stimulus), then store them, and ultimately retrieve them as needed. These processes are fundamental to navigating ourselves and the world around us.
When trauma occurs, however, the shock of it unleashes a slew of biological responses that interfere with our ability to create and retain memories. First, stress and fear push a panic button in the part of our brain called the amygdala, which is involved in processing emotion. The amygdala then sends out a flood of stress hormones to other parts of the brain. These hormones impede the brain’s hippocampus, which is primarily responsible for memory.
When the hippocampus is impaired by stress hormones, it is reduced to encoding a few sharp details — “flashbulb memories” — of the trauma experience. However, much of the coherent narrative of the trauma experience is washed away. This is why a survivor’s recall of their trauma is often distorted, fuzzy, or disconnected. Dr. Rebecca Campbell likens it to placing a hundred post-its around a desk, many of which are blank or illegible — then coming back hours later to piece them together into a coherent story.
In much of the existing research on trauma and memory, it can be difficult to situate survivors who had little to no memory of their trauma until years after the fact. For these survivors, memories may first show up physically. As trauma psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk writes, “We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.” This imprint can look like feelings of unsafety in one’s body, chronic pain, endocrine and autoimmune problems, and more.
In “Trauma and Recovery,” trauma psychiatrist Judith Herman writes that not only are these “persistent somatic symptoms” common in dissociated trauma — there are behavioral indicators, as well. This is especially true of self-destructive behavior, which Herman believes is the result of survivors who “relive in their bodies the moments of terror that they cannot describe in words.” Psychiatrist Lo Charlap agrees, noting that if the self-destructive trauma survivor “didn’t have any knowledge of what happened to her at all, she wouldn’t [be] living in response to it all the time.”
Unfortunately, the field of memory research is still rife with unanswered questions — the brain is a slippery thing. Additionally, scientists in this field are operating within a patriarchal sociocultural context that prioritizes so-called “empirical fact” over any other forms of (self-)knowledge. This is why trauma memories come under such intense scrutiny — and perhaps nowhere is this truer than in the realm of “recovered memories.”
There has long been hot debate as to the legitimacy of repressed and recovered memories. First defined by Sigmund Freud in 1896, a repressed memory is a traumatic memory so overwhelming that the brain completely subdues a person’s knowledge of it in order to self-protect. Some argue that these repressed memories can then be retrieved as recovered memories many years later, either spontaneously or through intervention. Some studies indicate that these recovered memories are somewhat common in sexual abuse survivors.
The validity of these recovered memories has come under intense fire from many scholars, particularly when those memories are accessed in the context of therapy. One of the primary opponents of recovered memory theory is Elizabeth Loftus, a scientist controversially known for testifying on behalf of Harvey Weinstein, O.J. Simpson, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
Loftus and her ilk design scientific experiments in attempts to implant false memories in research participants. With each experimental success, they believe they are proving that individuals who recover trauma are in fact retrieving false memories. However, these experiments are arguably a poor parallel to recovered memories for several reasons:
Critique 1: Therapy and scientific experiments are contextually different
The therapeutic context is one of deep vulnerability and trust. Indeed, Judith Herman writes that it is because of that “privileged space” that trauma survivors “gain the freedom to know and tell their stories.” Conversely, the experimental context is highly-controlled, formal, and impersonal. The affective nature of these two contexts is vastly different, rendering it difficult to apply “false memory” experimental results to therapy settings.
Critique 2: Individuals relate to therapists and scientists differently
A key purpose of therapy is to build a genuine relationship between the therapist and patient. The therapist is meant to act as a compassionate witness, utilizing various therapies to help the patient navigate their memory. Conversely, the research participant does not have an established relationship to the research scientist. As such, they have less reason to trust the scientist or make disclosures. This, too, makes it difficult to relate false memory research findings to therapy.
Critique 3: Other aspects of false memory research raise additional questions about validity and transferability
It’s worth noting that research scientists have not attempted to implant false memories of sexual trauma (for obvious ethical reasons). Rather, they implant memories such as indoor accidents or injuries from an animal attack. While such scenarios are clearly upsetting and possibly traumatic, some have argued that their comparability to sexual abuse is suspect. Additionally, even research that comes close to implanting of sexual abuse suggests this type of charged memory cannot easily be implanted — see Pezdek & Hodge’s 1999 example.
Additionally, research has demonstrated that not everyone is susceptible to the implantation of false memories. For instance, in Porter, Yuille, & Lehman’s 1999 study, nearly half the participants resisted memory implantation. Additionally, around 90% were able to guess which of their memories had been falsely implanted once the study concluded. Taken together, these and similar findings suggest that false memories are not as common as some scientists (such as Loftus) would contend.
Those who argue in favor of recovered memories are largely trauma recovery practitioners — therapists, psychiatrists, and psychologists. The depth and richness of their experience with trauma survivors should not be overlooked. Beyond this, however, there is also scientific research that suggests recovered memories are plausible.*
First, research indicates that it is entirely possible for people to forget their trauma. This contradicts many false memory researchers who contend that traumatized people always have clear recollections of their experiences. In one study, survivors of documented child abuse were interviewed years later about their experiences — yet 38% of the survivors denied any memory of this abuse. There is also evidence of dissociation and “delayed recall” of a wide range of trauma memories, including natural disasters, war, abductions, concentration camps, and interpersonal abuse. Spontaneous recovery of trauma memories has been documented in scientific literature; in some cases, the memories have been corroborated.
While it is true that there is incomplete scientific research supporting the validity of recovered memories, the above research makes a compelling case. Additionally, we should recognize the context within which these discourses arise. Our culture disbelieves survivors, from law enforcement to survivors’ family members and partners to our society writ large.
In keeping with this, Judith Herman argues the following in “Trauma and Recovery” (emphasis mine):
Denial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level . . . In the absence of strong political movements for human rights, the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness.
Though I clearly fall on one side of the recovered memory debate, I recognize that it is impossible to know whether a memory is “true” or “false” in every case. Thus, who is the final arbiter on a recovered memory? Is it a scientist, with their clinical results on implanted memories? A therapist, with their lived experience advocating for survivors? Or is it the survivor themselves, who often experiences their own self-doubt?
Many survivors will never have full confirmation of our memories. Regardless, I would argue that it is the survivor’s right to be the arbiter of their own narrative. I believe that you tell yourself the story that makes the most sense, and you learn to live accordingly.
In other words, maybe you ask yourself: What is the most livable story? What story can I bear? The simplistic answer would be to say that the most livable story is the one that denies abuse, a story in which you never had to suffer. However, this story is often the least bearable, because it requires a constant severance of yourself from your child self. In many cases, it may be more livable to name what happened, to tell yourself a story of violence and survival and re-integration, than to deny the possibility it happened.
I would also argue that if a story explains much of you to yourself, that’s significant. If you find that a memory allows much of your experience to cohere, that probably means something. As Charlap might say: What have you been living in response to this whole time? What falls into place for you if you give early trauma a name? Does your life story become more coherent? If so, that’s something. That’s meaningful.
None of this suggests that there is no sense in trying to remember something correctly. It does suggest that we deal gently with ourselves in cases in which our somatic, cognitive, or emotional memories are hard to navigate — when they are hazy, disconnected, or unexpected. As van der Kolk writes: “It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember.”
To quote Herman one final time**: “[T]he person has authority over their memories; they can elect both to remember the trauma and to put memory aside . . . The first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the survivor. They must be the author and arbiter of their own recovery.”
*Note that the matter of recovered memory is not a perfect diametric opposition between those who disbelieve recovered memories and those in support. There is also a middle camp that contend so-called “recovered” memories are simply abuse memories that had been forgotten for years because the rememberer did not register the experience as abusive at the time. I excluded this middle camp from this essay because there is less research on that front, and much of the heated discourse on this subject falls into the two camps described here.
**Quote rendered in gender-neutral format.
