Traumatic Memories

I am a person-centred counsellor, but neither a particular scholar nor a scientist. Any empirical observations I make should be read with that caveat.

Now and again, I have such a sharp impression of something that it seems important to share - sometimes it is based on an experience with a client, and sometimes on personal reflections and friends' stories. This thought is one.

It is a commonplace that children don't like to revisit unpleasant events. My autistic son would never talk about bad things that happened to him in school until they were safely in the distant past. Sometimes it would be months, or years, before we heard about the damaging behaviour of a teacher or an unhappy interaction with a classmate.

Adults, on the other hand, often have clear individual - 'snapshot' - memories associated with traumatic events which they call up when talking about their feelings. Sometimes they say things like "I don't know why this upsets me so much, but it's what I remember - it has stuck in my mind".

What occurred to me was that they may be remembering a moment of insight, and that it is this insight that is itself traumatic. It is the moment they realise that the misery isn't just misery, but part of a malign pattern.

So, to give an invented example:

A child my be persistently emotionally abused by a carer. One day they are at the beach, and the carer refuses the child's request for an ice-cream. At that point the child realises something it has not consciously recognised before: that the carer deliberately makes them unhappy. It may even be the triviality of the disappointment that makes it possible to think about it clearly. However, the realisation is traumatic, and the occasion becomes representative of the feelings associated with relationship - it becomes the 'snapshot' label for a whole container of events which are miserable and undermining, but which the child has no name for nor any 'theory' about.

Someone with an experience like this in their background may come to counselling and say "I don't know why this upsets me so much, it was just an ice-cream." They may still, as adults, be unable to fully visit their feelings about the events that this snapshot represents, and without the feelings the events themselves may escape comment. But the occasion of the snapshot - the occasion that they can visit their feelings about - comes to stand for all the others ...