Part 3: Are Repressed Memories Real?

The chilling revelations of my early twenties.

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Trigger Warning: repressed memories, childhood sexual abuse

Repressed memories make for good storytelling in movies, books, and TV shows, but are they real? Is it possible to remember something, then not remember it, then later remember it again?

Confused?

You’re not alone.

There’s been much debate on the subject, and proponents on each side have solid opinions and their own versions of “evidence.”

I’m not here to definitively tell you whether repressed memories are real or not. All I can give you is my personal story and what it was like to remember something that I didn’t want to.

You might be thinking repressed memories have nothing to do with bipolar disorder, and you are probably right.

However, in my life with bipolar, repressed memories played a part. A painful, terrible part.

Today, I am going to share that story.

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Surviving Bipolar is a monthly series telling the story of the early days of my journey with bipolar disorder. Read it from the beginning here.

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A Dream That Doesn’t Go Away

Have you ever woke up in the morning after a vivid dream you can’t remember?

You know the feeling. Maybe you woke up sweating or with your heart pounding, yet once you opened your eyes, the dream vanished. It was so real you could touch it, but in a flash, it’s gone like a steamy exhale on a frozen day.

“Maybe it wasn’t a bad dream,” you tell yourself.

You try to forget it, but as you go through your day, a feeling sticks with you. Part of your mind won’t let you forget you had an intense dream, and you can’t help but think of all the possibilities.

Sometimes, events during the day may bring back remnants of the dream.

The smell of perfume or the sound of a song on the radio may bring images to your mind you know are from your dream. Yet, the whole picture itself never becomes clear again.

The forgotten dream haunts you like Jacob Marley’s ghost. The missing piece gnaws at you, but doesn’t disrupt your day.

That’s how my experience with repressed memories played out.

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What are the common symptoms of Bipolar Disorder? Read 12 Signs to Look for

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Glimpses of Mental Illness

I was a happy teenager.

I often felt like an outsider and pretended to be someone other than me, but I was still mostly pleased with life.

I had a small circle of friends, and we were close as family. My friends were my world, and when we weren’t together, I was usually on the phone with one of them.

Thinking back, I wonder how my parents ever used the phone during my teenage years. If I was home, I was on the phone.

For context, my teenage years were in the 1980s, long before everyone had a phone in their pocket. Most families had one phone line. If someone was on the line, the phone was out of commission.

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Fascinated By Sybil

Bipolar disorder was nowhere on my radar. I doubt I even knew what it was.

However, I was fascinated by mental illness and thoroughly enthralled with Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber. Sally Field did a fantastic job in the 1976 TV mini-series adaptation.

If you don’t know, Sybil is the story of a woman with sixteen distinct personalities.

Multiple Personality Disorder, as it was then known (now called Dissociate Identity Disorder or DID), fascinated me. I imagined I had several personalities I knew nothing about.

I knew if I had DID, more of my life would make sense. From day to day, I was often a very different person.

Some days, I was the life of the party, a stand-up comic who loved being center stage. I would dance or sing or entertain you with hours of jokes.

Those days were rare. Most days, I wished to be invisible. I liked quiet or to be around only one or two friends at a time. It felt like I had no control over how I felt.

Then there were my moods.

I was a teenager, so moodiness was normal. After all, hormones were coursing through my young veins. Yet, it bothered me how my behavior could change so drastically.

One minute, I would be giggling like a toddler, and the next, angry and hateful. Sometimes I watched myself interact with my friends like I was a spectator in a movie theater unable to affect anything that was happening on the screen.

Too often, I felt like my life was happening to me and I had no choices.

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Repressed Memories Begin to Surface

The first warning signs of something more came in my late teens.

I started losing time. First minutes, then hours, and then entire days would disappear.

I would find myself with friends and be clueless as to how I got there. Sometimes I would be driving with no idea as to why I was in that part of town.

It was all fodder to feed my belief that I had DID. I feared being committed to a psychiatric hospital, though, so I never talked about my fears to anyone.

Nightmares were a plague I always lived with, but in my late teens, they grew more intense. I became obsessed with the belief I had done something terrible, that I was someone other than the person everyone knew.

And I knew that person was evil and awful.

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At times, I would wake up during the night feeling like someone had touched me.

The feeling was so real that I always expected someone to be there. Frequently, I would jump out of bed and turn on the overhead light. If I still felt scared, I would flip on my bedside lamp as well.

I fixated on my closet and couldn’t sleep if the doors were closed.

No matter how many times I tried, sleep was impossible until I could verify my closet was empty.

Something was wrong, but I wasn’t courageous enough to tell anyone.

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A Magazine Opens the Door

About that time, I read a magazine with a series of articles about repressed memories. The subject engulfed me, and I found myself thinking about it all the time. I read the pieces over and over again.

It seemed impossible to me that anyone could live through something terrible and then not remember it. I remembered every horrible thing that had happened in my life, and there had been more than a few.

Or so I thought.

I don’t remember precisely how the memories first returned. I’m pretty sure that I was dreaming, or thought that I was dreaming when the first of them finally broke the surface.

There were visions of me in the dark, much younger than I was at the time, but I was not alone. Someone else had been there. That someone had done unspeakable things to me.

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Trying to Close Pandora’s Box

The memories were overwhelming. They filled my mind day and night. I struggled to force them from my mind, but they snuck back in through any crack they could find.

I knew I was crazy. I had imagined this horrible scenario because I had read books like Sybil and read articles about repressed memories. It wasn’t true. I knew it wasn’t real.

In one of the memories, there was someone else, another family member, young like me. It terrified me, but in time I found my way to talk to that other person.

The conversation was terrible. Much more was said in the words we didn’t say than the ones we actually did. At one point, I found the bravery to ask the words, “Did someone touch us?”

My relative turned white and looked at the floor.

“You know he did,” he answered. “And more than once.”

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You Have to Run

The most logical way to handle things when something terrible happens is to run away. That is true, right? Well, at least, that is what I thought at the time. I needed to run, to run far away, and that would make everything right again.

Somewhere in there, I turned twenty. The memories and dreams only go worse, and I found myself seldom sleeping more than two or three hours a night. I was adamant that the memories were false, and did everything I could to drown them out, including more than a small amount of underage drinking.

Not able to deal with the turmoil inside, I became fixated on my parents. I was enraged that they did not tell me what had happened. It made my blood boil that they were living their lives as usual when such unspeakable things had happened. I hated them for having ever allowed me to be put in a situation where bad things were done to me, and then to be put there time and again.

My parents had no idea what I was going through. I was cold, sullen, and angry all the time. I didn’t speak to them other than to bark replies to their questions. I found reasons to never be home, whether it was taking on more work shifts or just staying with friends until late into the night.

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Using Words as Weapons

Finally, one day I exploded. I berated my parents and ripped them limb from limb. I was cold and mean and made sure every word cut them.

That was more than twenty-five years ago, but I can still clearly see the tears running down their faces as they tried to understand what was happening to them.

Then I ran. For weeks, I was homeless, though I had a home I could have gone home to at any time. I stayed with friends or family or slept in my car. I couldn’t face seeing my parents. It was their fault, whatever had happened.

Then I ran even more. I picked up everything and moved 900 miles. I had little money, no job, and only knew one person, but at the time it was the only course to take.

Happily, things worked out in time, and I was able to repair my relationship with my parents. I would hurt them a whole lot more before then, though.

Until next time, keep fighting.

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Part 4: When You Feel You Need to Run Away From It All

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