Unfortunately, I feel like this is one of those things that those who haven't experienced trauma first hand tend to dismiss.
Maybe it's because folks assume traumatic events are something the person can't help but constantly think about.
But for me, and I'm guessing most others, you tend to simply block off that part of your psyche. For example, I have forgotten my sister during introductions in the past, despite the fact she didn't leave my life until I was eleven. And I suppose she didn't really exit my life then either, she would continue to show up over my teenage years as well. But it's like my mind wrote her out of existence.
Also, when I write about the events of my past, I tend write them from a perspective that is dissociated. It's hard to explain. But I think it's a way of protecting myself. Like pretending the events happened to someone else.
qwerty456127 1088 days ago [-]
> this is one of those things that those who haven't experienced trauma first hand tend to dismiss.
So do many of those who did. Having experienced a trauma doesn't imply even remembering it, let alone being consciously aware that was a trauma, still actively affecting you.
float4 1088 days ago [-]
> Having experienced a trauma doesn't imply even remembering it
I've even seen the same thing happen in people who beat their depression.
A few friends of mine were depressed in the past 5 years and are doing well now. However, they are having a very hard time understanding and helping a currently depressed friend. They know this friend is depressed, they see the signs, they have talked about it, but because they themselves are not suffering from depression right now they are genuinely having a hard time understanding it. They find it incredibly difficult to not blame their friend for not calling back, "being lazy", etc.
Delk 1087 days ago [-]
I suspect that might be at least partially because, in some cases or for some people, getting out of a deep depression might involve kind of disowning or denying the kinds of emotional states and thinking that were part of the depression. If the depression was hard enough, it could be that one doesn't want to feel them again, and genuinely understanding a feeling requires feeling it at least in some way.
This is just a hunch, based on personal observations, not any kind of psychological theory.
bashinator 1088 days ago [-]
Having a deep depression is, if not exactly traumatic, certainly something that I’ve blocked out of my psyche in the same way.
Item_Boring 1088 days ago [-]
I’d like to add that this also sometimes goes along with either being in denial of having experienced trauma or convincing oneself that the experience “was not that bad after all”.
bozzcl 1088 days ago [-]
Been there, done that. To the shock of the people who witnessed said situations, who couldn't believe I dismiss them. I just can't remember being that bad.
diob 1088 days ago [-]
Definitely true. I realized talking to my therapist that I was afraid I would be chastised for talking about my trauma or abuse.
loceng 1088 days ago [-]
This to me feels like that event, the exit of your sister from your life may be considered somewhere on a spectrum of post traumatic stress - stress that's formed the development of your thinking and feelings patterns - and not necessarily considered as a dis-ordered or dis-eased state.
MAPS.org did highly successful research for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in treatment of PTSD in veterans; ~80% of non-placebo participants who had average of 17.5 years of treatment resistant PTSD, after just 2-3 sessions with MDMA (100-125mg) - with non-MDMA sessions initially and afterward for integration etc - no longer had PTSD after just 1 year; Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS - Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies - had said from his own experience he realized the most important part of any psychedelics you take is doing the work to integrate whatever you unlock to have access to again.
diob 1088 days ago [-]
Yeah, to be honest her exit was the least traumatic thing that happened. She's just collateral damage in my brain's attempt to section things off.
I've been watching the MDMA treatments with some hope that they'll become legal and mainstream in the USA.
notsureaboutpg 1088 days ago [-]
I think psychologists / therapists are also to blame.
I faced some kind of trauma as a kid (who hasn't), and while visiting a therapist to see if therapy was right for me regarding my lack of sleep and depression the therapist constantly tried to make me believe I was molested as a child and was blocking that memory or had forgotten it.
Maybe he was trying to do his job well, perhaps it's a common scenario and I showed all the signs of being such a person, but it didn't sit well with me at all. I didn't remember any such thing. No one in my life stood out as someone who would so such a thing. I could have forgotten such an event but so could anyone on Earth. I really didn't like this suggestion and how commonly it was repeated and the questioning of my memory and sanity. I eventually thought therapy is not for me and left and I imagine I'm not the only one with such an experience.
jtbayly 1088 days ago [-]
The book “Try To Remember” lays out the terrible damage done by such therapists.
float4 1088 days ago [-]
I'm not the person you replied to, but it looks very interesting. I will give it a read.
Thank you.
taurath 1088 days ago [-]
This was common for a while, and the backlash against it is one of the things the article is addressing. I for instance have very little memory of my life before 18, and accessing that has been taking many months of intense therapy. There was a time when literally any memory recovery would’ve been regarded as highly suspicious, and it’s true memory isn’t always exact, but it’s not as if my therapist is implanting suggestions. They all come from my mind and they do not guide it, only expand.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 1088 days ago [-]
>In an effort to provide a firmer grounding for their arguments, Kaufman and her McLean colleagues used artificial intelligence to develop a model of the connections between diverse brain networks that could account for dissociative symptoms. They fed the computer MRI data on 65 women with histories of childhood abuse who had been diagnosed with PTSD, along with their scores on a commonly used inventory of dissociative symptoms. “The computer did the rest,” Kaufman says.
Knowing a little of the issues with MRI studies (see dead fish fMRI study, https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/fmri-gets-slap-in-the-... ) and with ML models, and with the replication crisis in psychology, it does not inspire confidence at all that a team who strongly backs dissociative amnesia, feeds a bunch of MRI data into an ML model, and lo and behold after "the computer does the rest" they get the answer they had been hoping for.
Hnrobert42 1088 days ago [-]
Do we know that they got the “answer they had been hoping for”? A good scientist hopes for nothing more than data that conclusive validates or fails to invalidate the null hypothesis.
I appreciate that you admit you have strong biases. That does not mean these scientists also do or that they let their biases get on the way of doing a good job.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 1088 days ago [-]
In science, rarely is the individual scientist neutral. People have built careers and staked reputations on one thing or another being true. This is why you have publication bias, p-hacking, because scientists are ultimately human and they would like to publish something and something that agrees with their position.
This is why we do double-blind studies for those studies were the answer is critical (like does a medicine work), because humans can't be trusted to completely disregard their biases. We also pre-register trials, so we don't only get results that the person is happy publishing.
The wonder and genius of science, is that there is a process that works in spite of human bias.
If instead, we had to depend on the ideal, bias-free scientist, science would become a lot less useful pretty fast.
If you want some evidence that scientists are not just neutral reporters of fact, see the story with Susan Fiske's accusation of "methodological terrorism" against people who pointed out math errors.
You offer no evidence that these scientists were biases for affected by their bias. You offer only speculation.
rukuu001 1088 days ago [-]
Interesting that this would be contentious - child trauma victims especially have reported giant chunks of missing memory, like almost no memories before the age of 8.
The ability to elicit fake memories shouldn’t imply forgotten traumatic memory is impossible.
rozab 1088 days ago [-]
Although it has entered the public consciousness as fact, it should go without saying that most work on repressed memories etc has been bogus.
>In 2006, psychologist and attorney Christopher Barden drafted an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court of California signed by nearly 100 international experts in the field of human memory emphasizing the lack of credible scientific support for repressed and recovered memories.
JackFr 1087 days ago [-]
We look at medieval witch hysterias in Europe and wonder how they could happen. But when you see the McMartin trial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial you’re like “Oh yeah, that’s how it can happen. Cause people are still people.”
And I mean you look at that trial and it’s crazy. It’s not some Qanon type fringe it’s the LA district attorney buying into the most patently absurd allegations.
donw 1088 days ago [-]
Isn't childhood amnesia -- having very few memories before the age of eight or so -- common to all children, regardless of trauma?
RcouF1uZ4gsC 1088 days ago [-]
And many times the memories kids do have are traumatic ones. I remember being bullied or being at the funerals of friends/family, or the time I fell down and broke my arm. If anything, trauma made the memories stronger.
throwanem 1088 days ago [-]
It depends, I think, although I'm not sure on what. I broke two bones through childhood misadventure, and I remember both those moments quite clearly. Likewise some of the particularly standout moments of bullying. And too, I spent a lot of time in the hospital as a small child, pretty much all of it unpleasant, and I remember that well enough.
But there are things I don't remember, too. There is enough continuous memory adjacent to such gaps that to infer what must lie within them is trivial, but it has to be inferred, because the memories themselves are either not present or not accessible.
There's nothing in those gaps to which I want or need access, so it doesn't concern me especially that I don't have it. But it does leave me able to attest that both responses not only exist, but can co-exist in the same person.
As I said, though, I really don't know what makes the difference in how memory and trauma interact, why it varies within and between people - certainly there are many who've had experiences like the ones I don't remember, only they do remember, and I wouldn't hazard a guess as to the why of either.
hmmokidk 1088 days ago [-]
Not to suggest your experiences aren’t traumatic but it’s different when your parents/family hurt you emotionally, physically and otherwise. Also what is extremely traumatic for one person may not be as traumatic for another.
Jeff_Brown 1088 days ago [-]
There's reason to expect that, too. Processing an event writes it more durably into the brain, and we have good reason to continue processing bad events until we have extracted whatever learning is possible from them.
magicalhippo 1088 days ago [-]
What counts as "very few"?
My SO and my mom always seems surprised that I'm able to recall various events from my childhood, but to me it doesn't feel very special.
Is there a controlled study on this? I can't remember much, if anything, before the age of 8. I don't think it's very uncommon.
Jeff_Brown 1088 days ago [-]
Me either, and I'm quite sure there was no trauma. I also remember more but still quite little from age 9, and more than that but still little from age 10, progressing pretty monotonically until about high school.
1087 days ago [-]
dwighttk 1088 days ago [-]
All of that for two very non-specific paragraphs about the experiment.
imperio59 1088 days ago [-]
The book Dianetics had this figured out in 1950 already. Psychiatry is so behind the times it's ridiculous.
ysleepy 1088 days ago [-]
Scientology "science" by Hubbard. For anyone wondering.
jariel 1088 days ago [-]
Yes, Hubbard is a dramatic science fiction writer, and it's not 'Science' but a lot of Scientology is derived from other fields some of it is reasonably rational conjecture at least for the era i.e. 1950s.
The very first time I read Dianetics, I felt that the 'engrams' (stored traumatic memories) had a truthy ring to it.
I think they are literally not too far off base on that one, and were popularizing something that we probably already commonly knew, but merely had not formalized very well in Science.
After all, it would have been possible for any basic civilization to have figured it out on some level, i.e. Greeks or Romans might have had something rational to say about these suppressed memories.
Just because something isn't science, doesn't mean it's total science fiction.
It's worth contextualizing that most of our understanding of the mind was (and is) a lot of conjecture.
krageon 1088 days ago [-]
It's worth mocking purely because of the source in this case. Anything that legitimises scientology is bad and should be avoided. If it is as you say and it's sort of a generally distributed idea that exists in a bunch of different forms we can come up with an example that doesn't involve humans preying on other humans (actively, and without intervention).
jariel 1087 days ago [-]
Instead of being ideological or paternal about it, just call it for what it is, this isn't Cable News.
krageon 1087 days ago [-]
I'm sorry to say I genuinely don't understand what you're trying to express here.
jariel 1087 days ago [-]
"It's worth mocking purely because of the source"
"Anything that legitimises scientology is bad"
There's no need advocate for or against an idea for ideological reasons here.
We're not here to promote some ridiculous cult, obviously, you don't need to worry about that.
If there is a neat idea somewhere, then that's fine, even if it's from a weird source.
Cable News is a giant stream if narrative and advocacy misrepresentation, and everything is fully distorted 'because the source' and 'because we don't want to legitimize such and such'.
It's nice to have places where adults have conversations about things and can assume people act in good faith given the information at hand, instead of having to worry about how suppressive some people are going to be because they 'don't want to legitimize/delegitimize' some group or source.
Right now there is an HN thread on Bret Weinstein's supposed 'Theory of Everything' and nobody seems to be able to get past their personal views of the man. It'd be better to assume a shred of good faith and discuss his 'new concept' as either worthy or quackery on it's own merits, and not based on whether or not we like him because he works with Peter Thiel.
krageon 1086 days ago [-]
I do believe I also proposed avenues of approach that didn't involve using Scientology as an example. More broadly, I'm not sure I agree every idea deserves it's just due, especially when it comes from a source that's unquestionably terrible. I'll follow along with you that there is some gray area and we should be able to have a conversation about that (much as we're doing now), I just don't agree that this is such a gray area.
fieldcny 1088 days ago [-]
It’s got science in the name, must be good!!
gumby 1088 days ago [-]
Such a classifier in the name is often (thought not always) a good signifier: astrological science, the people's democratic republic of Germany, etc etc.
teddyh 1088 days ago [-]
> people's democratic republic of
“Peaceful and Serene People’s Democratic Republic of…”
And all their paper money is comically wide to print it across the top.
Talanes 1088 days ago [-]
And Sigmund Freud a few decades before that. They're not slow on the uptake, even the false-memory crowd are a reaction to the idea of buried traumatic memory.
Rendered at 06:02:45 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Maybe it's because folks assume traumatic events are something the person can't help but constantly think about.
But for me, and I'm guessing most others, you tend to simply block off that part of your psyche. For example, I have forgotten my sister during introductions in the past, despite the fact she didn't leave my life until I was eleven. And I suppose she didn't really exit my life then either, she would continue to show up over my teenage years as well. But it's like my mind wrote her out of existence.
Also, when I write about the events of my past, I tend write them from a perspective that is dissociated. It's hard to explain. But I think it's a way of protecting myself. Like pretending the events happened to someone else.
So do many of those who did. Having experienced a trauma doesn't imply even remembering it, let alone being consciously aware that was a trauma, still actively affecting you.
I've even seen the same thing happen in people who beat their depression.
A few friends of mine were depressed in the past 5 years and are doing well now. However, they are having a very hard time understanding and helping a currently depressed friend. They know this friend is depressed, they see the signs, they have talked about it, but because they themselves are not suffering from depression right now they are genuinely having a hard time understanding it. They find it incredibly difficult to not blame their friend for not calling back, "being lazy", etc.
This is just a hunch, based on personal observations, not any kind of psychological theory.
MAPS.org did highly successful research for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in treatment of PTSD in veterans; ~80% of non-placebo participants who had average of 17.5 years of treatment resistant PTSD, after just 2-3 sessions with MDMA (100-125mg) - with non-MDMA sessions initially and afterward for integration etc - no longer had PTSD after just 1 year; Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS - Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies - had said from his own experience he realized the most important part of any psychedelics you take is doing the work to integrate whatever you unlock to have access to again.
I've been watching the MDMA treatments with some hope that they'll become legal and mainstream in the USA.
I faced some kind of trauma as a kid (who hasn't), and while visiting a therapist to see if therapy was right for me regarding my lack of sleep and depression the therapist constantly tried to make me believe I was molested as a child and was blocking that memory or had forgotten it.
Maybe he was trying to do his job well, perhaps it's a common scenario and I showed all the signs of being such a person, but it didn't sit well with me at all. I didn't remember any such thing. No one in my life stood out as someone who would so such a thing. I could have forgotten such an event but so could anyone on Earth. I really didn't like this suggestion and how commonly it was repeated and the questioning of my memory and sanity. I eventually thought therapy is not for me and left and I imagine I'm not the only one with such an experience.
Thank you.
Knowing a little of the issues with MRI studies (see dead fish fMRI study, https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/fmri-gets-slap-in-the-... ) and with ML models, and with the replication crisis in psychology, it does not inspire confidence at all that a team who strongly backs dissociative amnesia, feeds a bunch of MRI data into an ML model, and lo and behold after "the computer does the rest" they get the answer they had been hoping for.
I appreciate that you admit you have strong biases. That does not mean these scientists also do or that they let their biases get on the way of doing a good job.
This is why we do double-blind studies for those studies were the answer is critical (like does a medicine work), because humans can't be trusted to completely disregard their biases. We also pre-register trials, so we don't only get results that the person is happy publishing.
The wonder and genius of science, is that there is a process that works in spite of human bias.
If instead, we had to depend on the ideal, bias-free scientist, science would become a lot less useful pretty fast.
If you want some evidence that scientists are not just neutral reporters of fact, see the story with Susan Fiske's accusation of "methodological terrorism" against people who pointed out math errors.
https://www.businessinsider.com/susan-fiske-methodological-t...
The ability to elicit fake memories shouldn’t imply forgotten traumatic memory is impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse
>In 2006, psychologist and attorney Christopher Barden drafted an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court of California signed by nearly 100 international experts in the field of human memory emphasizing the lack of credible scientific support for repressed and recovered memories.
And I mean you look at that trial and it’s crazy. It’s not some Qanon type fringe it’s the LA district attorney buying into the most patently absurd allegations.
But there are things I don't remember, too. There is enough continuous memory adjacent to such gaps that to infer what must lie within them is trivial, but it has to be inferred, because the memories themselves are either not present or not accessible.
There's nothing in those gaps to which I want or need access, so it doesn't concern me especially that I don't have it. But it does leave me able to attest that both responses not only exist, but can co-exist in the same person.
As I said, though, I really don't know what makes the difference in how memory and trauma interact, why it varies within and between people - certainly there are many who've had experiences like the ones I don't remember, only they do remember, and I wouldn't hazard a guess as to the why of either.
My SO and my mom always seems surprised that I'm able to recall various events from my childhood, but to me it doesn't feel very special.
The very first time I read Dianetics, I felt that the 'engrams' (stored traumatic memories) had a truthy ring to it.
I think they are literally not too far off base on that one, and were popularizing something that we probably already commonly knew, but merely had not formalized very well in Science.
After all, it would have been possible for any basic civilization to have figured it out on some level, i.e. Greeks or Romans might have had something rational to say about these suppressed memories.
Just because something isn't science, doesn't mean it's total science fiction.
It's worth contextualizing that most of our understanding of the mind was (and is) a lot of conjecture.
"Anything that legitimises scientology is bad"
There's no need advocate for or against an idea for ideological reasons here.
We're not here to promote some ridiculous cult, obviously, you don't need to worry about that.
If there is a neat idea somewhere, then that's fine, even if it's from a weird source.
Cable News is a giant stream if narrative and advocacy misrepresentation, and everything is fully distorted 'because the source' and 'because we don't want to legitimize such and such'.
It's nice to have places where adults have conversations about things and can assume people act in good faith given the information at hand, instead of having to worry about how suppressive some people are going to be because they 'don't want to legitimize/delegitimize' some group or source.
Right now there is an HN thread on Bret Weinstein's supposed 'Theory of Everything' and nobody seems to be able to get past their personal views of the man. It'd be better to assume a shred of good faith and discuss his 'new concept' as either worthy or quackery on it's own merits, and not based on whether or not we like him because he works with Peter Thiel.
“Peaceful and Serene People’s Democratic Republic of…”
http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2019/08/22/1108-republics/