I am very pleased my collage Remembering What Was Forgotten-Traumatic Memory was selected to be part of the National Association of Women Artist’s national exhibition Collage/Mixed Media The Art of Layering in N.Y.C.
Remembering What Was Forgotten-Traumatic Memory, PTSD and Childhood Sexual Abuse
With the outpouring of women coming forward with their stories of sexual abuse, it’s important to remember traumatic memories of sexual abuse can be buried for decades but the consequences for the victim are felt for years and many suffer PTSD
Trauma is processed by the brain differently than other ordinary events and “gaps” don’t detract from the truth and accuracy of the pieces of memory the victims do have. The central details remain, haunting their victims decades after the event.
I know. I have them.
My memory leads a double life of knowing and not knowing at the very same time. It is a constant, exhausting battle. Mine is a story about memory gone awry; about traumatic memory and its effect on memory functions and post traumatic stress disorder.
I was sexually abused as a child by a family member. Here’s why I didn’t remember.
Among friends, I am the go to person when it comes to history and trivia, priding myself on my steel trap of a memory.
How then can someone “forget” an event as traumatic as childhood sexual abuse?
Simply put, trauma affects a variety of memory functions and dissociation is one such disruption.
Memory has to do with recording, storage and recall of information perceived from the internal and external environment. Dissociation is an effective defense walling off what cannot be tolerated and storage and retrieval of memory is affected as the actual memory goes into the deep freeze. Detail “Remembering What Was Forgotten-Traumatic Memory, PTSD and Childhood Sexual Abuse” collage by Sally Edelstein
Childhood sexual abuse can create negative disturbances of memory such as dissociation and PTSD leading to problems in basic memory encoding, storage, and retrieval.
Being abused by a trusted family member is the perfect opportunity for the victim to create information blockage. Memory blocking is not to avoid suffering, but because not knowing about abuse by a parent is necessary for survival.
But the body remembers.
Detail “Remembering What Was Forgotten-Traumatic Memory, PTSD and Childhood Sexual Abuse” collage by Sally Edelstein
With PTSD, traumatic memories become dissociated, fragmented, free-floating in time. They pounce into the present unbidden in the form of flashbacks, nightmares intrusive thoughts and images you cannot control.
I search my memory bank for a coherent, narrative filled with nuance and detail but that is not how traumatic memory is.
Those who expect a linear and logical account, seem to think of memory as akin to a Netflix stream; click on a title and sit back for a streaming documentary, a clear-cut representation of what transpired as though a camera had been there filming the whole time. That sadly is far from the reality.
I am missing the explicit narrative of information necessary to make sense of the distressing body sensations and images.
Memories of the trauma tend to be predominantly experienced as fragments of the sensory components of the event as visual images, olfactory, auditory, body sensations, out of context feelings and intense waves of feeling.
Implicit and Explicit Memory
For people with PTSD, traumatic events are remembered differently than non traumatic events.
They are not actually remembered in the normal narrative sense. Usually memory implies the relegation of an event into one’s history. “I remember when.” Where explicit memory depends on language, implicit memory bypasses it. Implicit memory is non verbal, unconscious, somatic. I have no words.
Dissociation and Fragmentary Nature of Traumatic Memories
Detail “Remembering What Was Forgotten-Traumatic Memory, PTSD and Childhood Sexual Abuse” collage by Sally Edelstein
Children and adults who have been abused cope by using a variety of psychological mechanisms.
One effective way to cope with overwhelming trauma is dissociation, the immediate blanking out of reality so that memories are not stored in the first place, not in a narrative, coherent way. Dissociation is an effective defense walling off what cannot be accommodated and actual memory goes into the deep freeze.
Memory in The Absence of Memory
In dissociation elements of the experience are not integrated into a whole but stored in memory as isolated fragments, sensory perceptions, intrusive images, behavior and body sensations.
With PTSD I am missing the explicit narrative of information necessary to make sense of the distressing body sensations and images.
I am a storyteller without a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
But I now have an opportunity to tell my story.
Please Join me for the RECEPTION Thursday March 14, 2019, 5-7pm
NAWA Gallery
315 West 39th Street, New Tork, N.Y. 10018
EXHIBITION DATES: March 6-27, 2019