Blocked Memories: When We Don’t Dare To Remember

Our unconscious tends to erase the most painful memories, but if we want to heal them and stop suffering, we must bring them to light.
Memories locked

“I don’t remember anything from my childhood.”

Scientific knowledge about how our memory works is still in its infancy. For now, we have very little data on how memories are selected and stored or why we remember some events and not others.

However, in recent years, neurologists are making very important discoveries about the importance of emotions in storing memories. Research findings tell us that we are more likely to remember an event if it is linked to an emotion (whether pleasant or unpleasant). This explains why we remember perfectly the day of the birth of our daughter or the moment in which the teacher congratulated us for having done the best work in the class and we cannot remember what we had for dinner two weeks ago.

An exciting phenomenon, in the deep and unfathomable mystery of memory, is that of the unconscious processes that make us forget certain unpleasant episodes in our lives. Sometimes, very important events that had great significance for the person, are erased from memory and it is impossible to access them consciously.

Blocked memories: a barrier to trauma

From time to time, some of the people who come to my office tell me that they do not keep any memory of their childhood, none, neither good nor bad. His amnesia reaches such a degree that he cannot even identify himself when he sees the photographs of his childhood or at family gatherings, when everyone begins to comment on anecdotes from the past, he feels unable to remember anything that others relate.

“It’s as if it wasn’t my story, as if I hadn’t lived it,” Lucia told me in one of her first sessions.

In these cases, it is not correct to use the term “forget”, it would be more appropriate to say that we do not remember our past. Information is not lost, it is always inside us, but, in these circumstances, hidden under a very peculiar characteristic: access to these memories has been blocked.

Our unconscious, in an effort to protect ourselves against traumatic situations that we have experienced, blocks these memories to avoid the daily suffering of reliving the pain of those moments. Amnesia, in the face of this type of experience, we have to understand it as an unconscious protection mechanism against situations that surpassed us and that we could not assume at the time due to its severity and our immaturity.

However, the situation of not remembering these traumatic situations does not eliminate the negative effect that those events caused on us. Pain, grief, fear or anger are still present in us. In our body, in our emotions, we feel its action, its weight, but we do not understand its cause, its origin, since we do not know it.

Those past events, erased by our unconscious, continue to affect us in our present in such a way that they can cause serious symptoms of anxiety, depression and even physical symptoms such as pain or illness. Due to their discomfort, the person can start a whole pilgrimage through different health professionals, but none will be able to help them if they cannot access their memories and heal the traumatic situations of the past.

Another problem derived from forgetting (or blocking access to information) is that the mind gets used to this process and ends up exceeding its functions, blocking not only unpleasant and traumatic memories, but also positive ones. In the case of Lucia, I encountered particularly extreme circumstances, the young woman was unable to evoke any memory prior to her 15 years.

Our memory provides us with a wealth of memories and lived experiences that shape our personality and make us who we are. If we don’t remember our history, if we can’t think or talk about it, who are we then?

Sometimes there are such extreme cases of depersonalization that people who suffer from it are unable to recognize their own bodies or their faces in a mirror.

In order to heal our past, rescue our memory and, ultimately, know ourselves in depth, it is essential to find a therapy that helps us immerse ourselves in our history to recover it, bring it to the surface, assimilate it and heal it. In all probability, we will find resistance and we will think that it is better not to remove what is hidden, however, in our present, there is an important difference with respect to the child who hid their painful memories: today we are adults, now we are stronger, we can learn different tools to defend ourselves and, with the appropriate accompaniment from the therapist, we will be prepared to bring all those traumatic memories to light.

At last, we can come to understand and heal our entire history. In addition, once the veils of our past are removed, we can also deactivate the negative effects of trauma on our psyche.

It is not an easy job and, at times, it can be painful, but if we do nothing with it, the pain will remain present and we will continue to live disconnected from ourselves. The benefit of connecting with our interior and of regaining the power that we lost in the past, makes the effort totally worth it.

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