If you are an adult survivor of childhood trauma you are likely to experience memory loss. Childhood trauma and memory loss go hand-in-hand. Blocking out memories can be a way of coping with the trauma. Memory loss from childhood trauma can affect your life in many ways.
The answer is yes—under certain circumstances. For more than a hundred years, doctors, scientists and other observers have reported the connection between trauma and forgetting. But only in the past 10 years have scientific studies demonstrated a connection between childhood trauma and amnesia.
These traumas can impact your brain's ability to form memories. It could be due to a physical impact on your brain, which impairs your ability to create memories. It also could be from your brain's attempt to cope with the emotional and psychological impact of the trauma. Sometimes you can develop dissociative amnesia.
Dissociative amnesia occurs when a person blocks out certain events, often associated with stress or trauma, leaving the person unable to remember important personal information.
Most unresolved childhood trauma affects self-esteem and creates anxiety. Did you suffer a serious childhood illness? If so, you were likely isolated at home or hospitalized. This meant being removed from normal social activities and you probably felt lonely, maybe even worried about being different.
While some are unable to recall a small period of time, others are missing entire years of their life. Along with memory loss, other signs of repressed trauma can include low self-esteem, substance abuse disorders, increased physical or mental illnesses, and interpersonal problems.
Adults can generally recall events from 3–4 years old, with those that have primarily experiential memories beginning around 4.7 years old. Adults who experienced traumatic or abusive early childhoods report a longer period of childhood amnesia, ending around 5–7 years old.
Adults who have experienced childhood trauma often have heightened anxiety levels. They may worry excessively and have trouble managing their anxiety. Childhood trauma can lead to persistent feelings of sadness, lack of interest in activities, and difficulty experiencing pleasure.
If you often feel as though your life has become unmanageable, this could be a sign that you have some unresolved emotional trauma. Emotional overreactions are a common symptom of trauma. A victim of trauma might redirect their overwhelming emotions towards others, such as family and friends.
Without treatment, repeated childhood exposure to traumatic events can affect the brain and nervous system and increase health-risk behaviors (e.g., smoking, eating disorders, substance use, and high-risk activities).
What is Trauma blocking? Trauma blocking is an effort to block out and overwhelm residual painful feelings due to trauma. You may ask “What does trauma blocking behavior look like? · Trauma blocking is excessive use of social media and compulsive mindless scrolling.
Severe stress, depression, a vitamin B12 deficiency, too little or too much sleep, some prescription drugs and infections can all play a role. Even if those factors don't explain your memory lapses, you don't need to simply resign yourself to memory loss as you age.
Children who have experienced complex trauma often have difficulty identifying, expressing, and managing emotions, and may have limited language for feeling states. They often internalize and/or externalize stress reactions and as a result may experience significant depression, anxiety, or anger.
The researchers found that between the ages of 5 and 7, the children remembered more than 60% of the events, but by the ages of 8 and 9, this had fallen to less than 40%. But these memories aren't always gone for good.
In most cases, not being able to remember your childhood very clearly is completely normal. It's just the way human brains work. On the whole, childhood amnesia isn't anything to worry about, and it's possible to coax back some of those memories by using sights and smells to trigger them.
The Trauma Test is a brief self-administered rating scale. It is useful in determining the degree to which you struggle with the aftermath of trauma, anxiety or depression, nervous system overarousal, and difficulty with healing and recovery.
Physical, emotional, and psychological trauma can all play a factor with memory loss. You can experience permanent or temporary memory loss depending on the type of trauma.
Re-experiencing or re-living unwanted memories as flashbacks or nightmares. Hyper-arousal: problems with sleep, irritability, anger, anxiety, hyper-alertness, exaggerated startle response. Hypo-arousal: feeling numb or cut off, feeling detached from others, dissociating, feeling flat or empty. Emotional dysregulation.
Studies show that babies can recall traumatic events, particularly those that occur during the first year of life. While they may not remember the exact details of what happened, they can retain a feeling of the experience, shaping their behavior and responses later.
Cognitive Signs of Unhealed Trauma
You may experience nightmares or flashbacks that take you back to the traumatic event. Furthermore, you may struggle with mood swings, as well as disorientation and confusion, which can make it challenging to perform daily tasks.