Thanks a bunch for making this thread and sharing, first of all. I was just thinking about this.
I can't think of anything particularly traumatizing in my past. It's always been more like death-by-a-thousand-cuts. My parents were the type to spank but that was only before I was... 5? And honestly they didn't do it much.
The real abuse for me (I say "real" to mean the kind that still bothers me in the back of my mind to this day, over 20 years later) was the yelling. Sometimes my mom, but usually it was the way my dad would speak to me and treat me in that respect. The sort of abuse that doesn't leave physical evidence; it's more emotionally and psychologically damaging. He wouldn't see it as abuse to be honest, and I understand why: his mom, my grandmother, was... a real piece of work. She loved me to death but as I've gotten older and learned more about my dad's upbringing, she was a nightmare. In some sense it's a miracle he's not more of an emotionally stunted asshole than he already is. Now I feel this immense of weight of trying to figure out how to not be like him, and the awareness that I'm failing in one way or another.
I think "forgetting" trauma is normal. Part of it might be textbook psychological repression, a sort of survival / coping mechanism. Another could be the simple fact that, if you're young enough, you really can't fully process certain events or understand their long-term impact. I mean, how could you if you're like 7 or whatever? Also, one might assume that such things are normal, because our parents or older siblings are theoretically who we are supposed to trust when we're kids, we typically have little choice in that matter. If nobody else made a big deal of it, then certain events can be a weird mix of pain followed by confusion and ultimately ignorant acceptance, the belief that the way we feel about something must be wrong because it goes against what we think we know about our family and the world.
For better and for worse, the brain is also adaptive. When something bad happens, it will try its best to keep you moving on, moving past it. Our adaptability is a huge reason why our species has survived for so long, through so many changes. Without this ability to compartmentalize or to repress or to suppress or to ignore, any little thing would just be catastrophic and utterly crippling. Especially bad things we cannot control. Unfortunately, this comes at a price. There is always a price to pay for adapting. It isn't free, it's just meant to keep us alive and moving forward—it doesn't care about the debt of experiences / memories that go emotionally unprocessed, because those things aren't about immediate survival.
I was just thinking that my childhood wasn't actually as happy as I sometimes think it was, and then I came across this thread. How serendipitous.
