I am here to tell you that there IS such a thing as repressed memory. There is also such a thing as body memories. I was sexually abused for many, many years and while I always remembered I was abused, I had forgotten many instances. Interestingly, I had also forgotten most of each instance... i.e., I would remember a few moments in the middle of the event... but never the beginning and NEVER the end. Also, I witnessed many traumatic events happening to my brother but have absolutely no memory of any of them. OTOH, many of the same things that happened to my brother, happened to me within minutes, and I remember most of that abuse as it happened to me. My brother was sent to an orphanage when I was 6 and to this day I have never recalled that event... but if anyone mentions orphanage to me, I start crying and shaking.
If repeated traumatic abuse happens to an individual an early age (and I'm not isolating that to just include sexual abuse), then the trauma alone can cause repressed memories to occur. It's simply a way to survive... you shove the memories as far away from your consciousness as you possibly can. I think it's incredibly sad that some unscrupulous therapists pushed retrieving "repressed memories" the way they did in past years, to the point that a whole movement sprung up claiming there was no such thing as repressed memories. OTOH, as I've said before, most people who are willing to sexually abuse small children are the very same people who would lie until the sheep came home about having done it... so it's never surprised me that there is an entire group of parents who have formed a group claiming their child had false repressed memories. I'm not saying every parent in the group was an abuser, but you can bet your bottom dollar that many were. The statistics, as we know them, on sexual abuse of children is so outrageous that it is appalling... and yet many people still want to believe that the children are making it up. But the statistics are actually much higher than anyone can prove because most children never come forward to report them. As the statistics now stand, 1 in 4 girls are sexually abused by the age of 18.
For anyone who doesn't believe in repressed memories, I suggest reading anything to do with Marilyn Van Derbur's (a former Miss America) abuse by her father, a prominent and wealthy Denver man. It occurred from the age of 5 (I believe) until the age of 18. In order to survive, she split off into day memories and night memories. It wasn't until her own daughter reached the age she was when her abuse started that she was able to start retrieving her lost memories...and it took many, many years for her to recover. At one point she even became paralyzed and couldn't move her legs.
