Misremembered Childhood Trauma

And other ‘lies’ I wish were true

So let me get this straight. The abuse I suffered at the hands of boys and men in my youth could all just be in my head. Or at the very least, so fragmented that my mind with its many nooks and crannies, scattered files and swirling fog, has possibly fabricated the memories that still surface today?

If only that were true. Praise be.

When I first read the words ‘misremembered childhood trauma’ in Stephanie Foo’s harrowing memoir What My Bones Know, I had to read it again and again.

Wait, what?

Is that a real thing?

It was too shocking.

I needed more information. And Foo provides it in exquisite detail and haunting visuals throughout her thoroughly researched memoir on healing from complex trauma or CPTSD (Complex PTSD).

I let it sink in.

Misremembered childhood trauma sounded like a revelation of hope to me, not like the broken tormented afterthought it seemed to be for Foo.

I guess it can go both ways. A blessing and a torment.

Blessing. A word that makes me cringe. Its overuse is astronomical. But it does the job.

Imagine a sweet reality where all the shitty things that happened to me weren’t really as bad as I thought they were. And if that’s the case MY memoir is now moot. There’s 18 months (and 35 years) I’ll never get back.

Shit.

On the other (tormented) hand, what does it say about me, my psyche, my recollection of events and how my brain has imprinted them, not just in memory but also in my DNA.

How can I remember it wrong? Hasn’t it been wired from the start?

Who’d want to make that shit up.

A narcissist? Someone with borderline personality disorder? I’m not sure but I am neither.

Foo was speaking about her own misremembering of course; she wasn’t being literal unfortunately. And she wasn’t generalising anyone else’s trauma. It made me dig deep into my own past, and I certainly wasn’t expecting that.

I also didn’t expect to be triggered by Foo’s story. I read the Authors Note. It didn’t apply to me. We are worlds apart; culturally, intellectually, generationally, and our stories couldn’t be more different.

Yet, I found myself entwined in some kind of kinship with this young woman, a universal heartbreak of sorts. I ‘felt’ her story unfold as if I had lived it with her, as if I knew her pain. I don’t.

What a storyteller.

But my real surprise came as a disturbing trip into the vortex of my mind.

Foo revisits her childhood home, as a form of healing to try and remember with clarity every horrible thing that happened to her. In the telling, I was transported to my own childhood home, surprised at how my memory recalled the detail of that house. I can’t physically go there as Foo did (it’s a car park now) but there I was recalling things I hadn’t remembered until that moment.

I watched my childhood home being demolished decades earlier, like a scene from Forest Gump; ‘sometimes there just aren’t enough rocks…’

I hadn’t misremembered anything.

It was all there. Every. Single. Part.

And in a mockingly twist of fate, I grasped even more detail now. How was it possible that I’d misplaced it before? I closed the book and cried. I wish I was lying to myself, but no. And now I have all that added shit to file away in the recesses.

That’s a lot of extra paperwork Stephanie Foo.

But oh how my heart is full and my soul a little wiser for knowing her story.