Another reason that survivors experience amnesia for their trauma has to do with their ability to share what happened to them with others. Young children do not have the language with which to share, and therefore, a place in their mind, for the events that they went through or the feelings that they experienced. As a result of their inability to place and process the information, the children do not remember the event. These creative responses determine how information is stored and retrieved. Dissociation separates aspects of the trauma and stores these memories in different parts of the brain.
Amnesia prevents memories of a trauma from entering the survivor's consciousness.
Therefore, because these two devices determine a victim's ability to retrieve information about his or her trauma, they can greatly affect an individual's success in coping with a trauma, as well as his or her creativity. Because information blockage occurs when a trauma victim utilizes the two above mentioned survival mechanisms, the survivor may not be consciously aware of either the trauma itself, or the emotional disturbances stirred up by the experience. However, this lack of consciousness does not prevent the victim from exhibiting behavior which reflects their internal turmoil. Even children who do remember their trauma, and the psychic pain it caused, often are unaware that they reveal subconscious attempts to cope through their play. She gives one example of a girl named Mary Vane, who was kidnapped and buried alive.