Wow, what a thread. First off, thanks Big Tex, for sharing your experience with all this--what courage you have.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about so-called repressed memories. The reason for this is that as I was growing up, from when I was about 10 yrs old to about 17, both my older sister and my mother went through years-long episodes of recovering their repressed memories and also all the sudden having multiple personalities. My adolescense was spent not knowing who I was going to come home to; my mother, or one of her teenage personalities who had a crush on my brother. Or, my sisters, or one of her hundreds of personalities (or so she explained to me), like a six year old girl who would cry and throw tantrums if she didn't get her way.
Those were hard times for me, for all (of course, not the kind of "hard times" BT spoke of!). One time my mother made the whole family sit around the TV set and watch some sort of video to impress upon us that all this was real (i didn't need convincing), and as an eleven year old kid I had to watch and listen grown women re-experience their memories of being raped as children. To this day, I don't think that was necessary. I was too young for that kind of thing. But anyway, what made me have "mixed feelings" about the experiences and memories of my mother and sister was the fact that all the sudden, in the space of a few months, they were both "integrated" and that was that. I found it hard to believe that all these personalities--people who I eventually came to know as REAL people--were just gone, and now they were Ok. Incidentally, there were several other women in the local congregation that went through the exact same thing. They all came down with MPD (as they used to call it), and then in a few years they were "cured." I didn't know what to think of it then, and I don't know what to think of it now. Nowadays, you never hear of someone with MPD. It's almost as if, as the psychological theories and diagnoses change, the ways in which histories of abuse manifest themselves in people also change.
I went through some interesting things during those times. I learned how to "disassociate"; since my mother and sister explained to me how it worked, and the theory that when something bad happens you disassociate, and that's why the memory is "locked away" for a time. Well, since i found living with hundreds of different personalities a little trialsome, I appropriated this disassociative behavior to my benefit. Well, now I have all these gaps of time and events it's a little hard tp piece things together. I don't know which memories have just sort of crumbled away "naturally," and which ones are in reality warped. Discerning the difference is very hard.
I've since applied this attempt at discernment to other, earlier memories. For instance, every summer me and my brother would go visit my dad, who has a family of his own. So we had two step-brothers. Well, one of my step-brothers was this obnoxious, mind-in-the-gutter type, and always kind of irritated me (incidentally, he was removed as a publisher for smoking pot when he was about 15). My dad had a trailer sitting in the car port and my step-brother thought it would be fun to sleep overnight in it. So we go out there (I was about 8 or 9, he was a about 4 years older) and bunk up inthe single bed thats up in the loft area. but as soon as I'm about to fall asleep he takes all his clothes off, and says something about it being more fun to sleep without any clothes on, and, here's where it gets sketchy--encourages me to do the same. Now, from here on out, my memory fails. The only sure thing I have is that sometime later, that night, I was back in the house, telling my step-mother (his mom) that it got cold ou there and I couldn't sleep or something so I came back inside. I don't recall feeling "guilty," 'dirty,' "confused,' or any of the other kinds of feelings i've heard people have when something actually happened. I do know that I was more suspicious of him for years after that, especially when he one day came out of the shower naked and mooned all three of us boys--and I mean mooned so you could see everything. Yes, he was a freak, and to this day I can't stand the sight of him--as I said his mind is in the gutter, and always will be.
So anyway, my point is that there is this fine line between memories just fading away naturally (like how i can't remember the name of this one cat I had), or if the memory was "repressed" somehow. You can have all these other indicators, such as traumatic recollections, or strong, physical and emotional reactions to a trigger, or years of inexplicable depression, but what if you have none of these things? At some point, you have to go try to reconstruct the memory, if it doesn't simply flood back. And that's where, I think, things get sticky. Concerning the incident with my step-brother, my instinct tells me that he was, in fact, trying to make a perverted pass at me, but that I got up and left when I felt uncomfortable, realizing that something wasn't quite right. However, I'll never know for sure. All i know is that i don't have any of the "leftover" indicators of abuse, such as the ones others in this thread have discussed.
Anyway, I guess I'm rambling. I guess I just have mixed feelings about the methods some people use to recover from their trauma. I have no reason or desire to discredit anyone's memories--since, as someone else pointed out, only a severely unstable person would do it merely for attention--but acknowledge that when it comes down to it, our memories are what we DECIDE them to be (not accounting for outside verification of course--that negates this point). At some point, we fill in the gaps and re-construct them. What we fill in those gaps with is what I'm curious about.
