Shoved Deep Down Under Lock and Key
By: Janvi Babu
Tags: Memories, Trauma, Chilhood Amensia

I was sitting on a four legged pedestal chair, resting my head on the cold black and white marble table. There was so much going on. Every minute it seemed to get hotter and hotter with every breath from all the crying and talking around me. The cold table brought me comfort.

A police officer comes up to me and wishes me a happy birthday and his apologies for the hard times. I say thank you and lay my head back down on a cold spot on the table.

It was my fourth birthday and some of my family members had been a part of a hit and run accident. My birthday festivities stopped right before it was about to start. The accident injured some family members, leaving them with pain they still feel today.

This is one of the few memories I have of my childhood. My childhood years I would consider to be from being ten years of age and younger. The rest are similar to this one. All of them have one feeling in common, sadness. I do not have a proper memory of something good that happened to me before the age of 10.

My parents are both immigrants from India. My dad came to America when he was thirteen to go to school and worked. My mom moved here when she got married. They both have a ten year age between them, meeting only once before they got their arranged marriage. They lived with my dad’s family for the first few years of their marriage and moved a few months after I was born. Still despite moving, there still was a strong, toxic in a way, bond.

There was always something going on in my family. Some crisis that affected us all. That caused yelling. Screaming. And lots of fighting. When I look back that’s all I can seem to remember in the memories I do have.

I talked with other friends at school growing up. The topic of our childhood always came up. One goes, “My family and I are going to Mamomt again for christmas. We’ve been going since I was 5, I remember my first snowboarding lesson, it was awesome!” Another, “We had a summer pool party when I was in elementary school. It was a blast!” Somehow, everyone around me seemed to have all these memories of their childhood.

And here I am to this day just struggling to hold on to the few I have.

Why don’t I remember much from my childhood? Am I repressing it because of trauma? Do I genuinely just not remember?

An article from Greater Good Magazine written by Jeanne Shinskey called “Why Can’t We Remember Our Early Childhood?” (July 26, 2016), mainly touches on the ages from birth to around age seven about how the development of the brain affects memory. One of her main points she talks about is the study of childhood amnesia and how it can go about in the brain plus the effects during different stages in development with children. Another being how the environment in which the infant is being brought up can also have a huge difference in their memory for later childhood years. Jeanne Shinskey states, “developmental changes in basic memory processes have been put forward as an explanation for childhood amnesia.” Which I believe to be helpful because it helps explain the cause of some childhood amnesia cases.

Another study conducted that she touches on is that if not translated into verbal language, the chances of remembering are slim, “One lab group conducted this work by interviewing toddlers brought to accident and emergency departments for common childhood injuries. Toddlers over 26 months, who could talk about the event at the time, recalled it up to five years later — whereas those under 26 months, who could not talk about it, recalled little or nothing.” This quote speaks miles to me. It makes plenty of sense that if a child can not repeat their emotions or actions or even put it into verbalized language it will be harder for them to remember. Another reason why I am inclined to believe this is because we often hear that repetition is the best way to remember something. Doing an action again and again like math or lines for example.

I remember as a child, my parents made me write my full name, address, their names, and their phone numbers as lines “Good. Again!” is what I remember my parents telling me. They stood over my shoulder where I could feel their breaths on my neck and see my baby hairs move into my face. Lines are when you write the same information again and again on different lines on a sheet of paper.

A Harley Therapy article “What is Childhood Trauma and Did You Experience It?” by Sheri Jacobson published on October 6, 2015 primarily answers the question they present to readers. The article starts off with defining what childhood trauma is in its primary definition and then elaborates on the different ways trauma can be experienced. Dr. Sheri Jacobson also touches on how trauma can look in children and the ways they can experience childhood trauma. As well as talking about ways to get help and what to do if you think you have experienced childhood trauma. Dr. Sheri Jacobson informs readers that, “Anything that leaves a child feeling alone, vulnerable, overwhelmed or terrified is traumatic. Psychological trauma occurs not over the ‘facts’ of ‘what really happened’, but because of your personal experience and perspective of what happened to you.” I liked this in particular because it actually gives a definition of what trauma can be for anyone. Oftentimes when you ask someone to define childhood trauma or trauma in general they would say something like “it is a traumatizing event” — at least that is how I would have defined it before all my research. She outlines the different forms of trauma such as physical, environmental, emotional, and sexual trauma and possible symptoms for them.

Further in the article she explains “In fact a child can be more affected by trauma than adults as they can sense danger but not ‘explain’ it to themselves like an adult, meaning they feel more terrified and vulnerable.” I think it is important to understand this because it also ties into another article that mentioned children who can not verbally express their emotions or actions are less likely to remember it. Children can not express their feelings into words; they can only feel them so they are prone to forgetting the memory but not the feelings which affect them in their later years of life. This makes sense to me because I remember times in my childhood where I was getting a beating from my parents. I could not speak. I could not move. But my body was feeling and expressing what I could not verbalize. I would just stand there shaking or have tears rolling down my eyes. But no words would ever come out despite my parents continuing “Janvi! HUH! Don’t you have anything to say for yourself!?” Even though I was at a speaking age, I felt terrified and vulnerable.

I also love that she mentioned what childhood trauma affects are on mental health! Mental health is HUGE in our society today. More often than not you will come across people who suffer from anxiety or depression or eating disorders or self harm but many do not know the underlying reasons of the trauma they experienced till adulthood. Many wonder where the illness started and if anyone is like me you think they started in your adulthood, but research tells us that much of our behavioral tendencies are from what we experienced as kids.

The American Psychological Association published an article “Oh Where, Oh Where Have Those Early Memories Gone? A Developmental Perspective on Childhood Amnesia” by Patricia J Bauer (December 2004). This article includes a lot of psychological history of the phenomena we are referring to as childhood amnesia which was written about over a hundred years ago. Most theories fall into two categories, adults can not remember anything because they do not have memories or because the way in which information and knowledge is acquired changed. She discusses different studies performed throughout the years on children’s memory from different age groups. Patricia J Bauer states, “Freud (1916/1966) attributed ‘the remarkable amnesia of childhood’ to repression of inappropriate or disturbing content of early, often traumatic (due to their sexual nature) experiences” because it tells readers that it has been discovered for a while now that children tend to forget or “[repress]” memories that caused them harm; whether that be emotional, physical, environmental, or sexual.

Something I learned more about in this article is autobiographical memory. From previous studies conducted children “appeared to become reasonably skilled mnemonists at just about the same time as adults begin to have reliable autobiographical records, namely, age 7 years.” Children have proven to have used their autobiographical memory, which is a way memories store themselves based on personal experiences and life, to help them remember unusual lists or data in no particular order. Another quote that also resonates with me is, “Several other reports followed, each indicating that within the period eventually obscured by childhood amnesia, children had remarkably rich autobiographies… ” These correlate to my question because they show that children are capable of remembering their personal memories or something that they have been through. In my case, I was most likely to remember little “imitation based tasks” as described in the article. Most of my memories were short lived. It makes sense because babies although they do have memories they are short lived memories due to an incomplete development of cognitive and brain function.

One picture I wanted to bring up is from the Department of Health and Social Services Office of Children’s Services. This image is one that shows the impact of abuse on the brain. The part of the brain that is being circled is the temporal lobes which are responsible for processing: auditory information, language, emotions, and memories. On the left is the brain of a child who has developed healthy emotionally while the picture on the right is of a child who has grown up with some type of distress. Whether that be parental neglect, abuse of any sort, death, illness, etc. The temporal lobe helps process memory and emotions, both of which go hand in hand with my question. If a child is suspected of having childhood an unhealthy emotional upbringing their brain will not be healthy therefore possibly limiting cognitive developments in the future.

Photo Copyright @ State of Alaska, Office of Children Services 2019

Another picture I wanted to show is about repression versus suppression when it comes to memories and dealing with emotions that is presented in a picture in an article by PsycholoGenie. This picture touches on Sigmund Freud’s discovery and analysis of repression. His definition and explanation is widely known today as something that is hidden from the conscious, otherwise as unknowingly hiding it from one’s mind. While suppression is the exact opposite. It is the act of consciously, knowingly aware and ignoring the emotions. Trauma is something that can be repressed from early adolescence. For many as children we barely can communicate our emotions but we can feel and sense all emotions. This can affect us by repressing emotions that affect us in our temporal lobe which lead to cognitive setbacks and not realizing till adulthood when the behavior or managing emotions can become an issue.

Photo Copyright @ Psychologenie & Buzzle.com, Inc

The research helped me realize that I maybe am repressing these old memories, emphasis on the maybe. With everything that I have been through as a child as studies have shown it is completely normal for babies to forget the memories of what they went through, but the emotions of feeling scared may have behavioral problems in adulthood. Though a controversial topic, Freud Sigmund’s of psychoanalytic theories main duty is to release repressed memories and the relationship of how the conscious and subconscious affect the human psyche. Although memory is a very complex topic that I have not dove very deep into. I believe there is still much to learn about human behavior and development of memories because much of what our memories are as said in class is a figment of our imagination. We come up with these details often as we recall the memories, which is why sometimes our memory is untrustworthy.