Question about childhood amnesia

I'm not doubting just curious. I am 43 so I dont know what is normal just forgetting. Is it normal not to know a whole lot about how your parents were to you all the way up to 11? I mean I have some memories of them like when my dad bought me a baby doll. Or when my mom threatened to take me to the orphanage. That's single events though. I'm talking like not remembering how they were most of the time.

Hi Rive, I had very little childhood memory and it was cloudy and confused before teenage years. Then I went to group psychotherapy. This really helped me remember my own childhood as an overall. I didn't remember all the abuse but I had clearer good and bad and neautral memories. Someone would talk about how their brother killed their rabbit for example and that would open up a whole load of memories around the rabbits in my childhood and anything connected to them - my cousins, what happened to my rabbit, things about my grandmother and mother I'd forgotten that weren't abusive.

So I think it's normal to not remember childhood much at all when dissociation is your main coping mechanism.

Also you can start off remembering what you want to remember, it doesn't have to be abusive, remembering other stuff is helpful.

Rive wrote:Is it normal not to know a whole lot about how your parents were to you all the way up to 11?

This is completely normal when you have DID. Memories are there but they're often held by others. I discovered that I, John, wasn't even part of our system until age 6½, when I first arrived. All I remember before that is stuff others have remembered and I've been able to "see" it and, reasonably, considered it to be my own. These memories are mine when considering all of the alters to be one person, but they're not mine when looking at us as individual alters.

Then there were so many others of us that I've never had a lot of recallable memories myself. So that, on top of the fact that in our system, once an alter becomes an active part of the present system, that is, they start fronting regularly or periodically, their access to their own memories becomes difficult.

I have impressions of how the parents were, I have specific events that I've always been able to "remember" though upon reflection, the overall impressions and some of those memories have become whitewashed, meaning links to any bad stuff have been removed and replaced with neutral but inaccurate memory bits. Sort of a rewriting, over time, of some memories so that our hosts' impression was we mostly had a normal, even good childhood.

is so common for those like us. Our brain devided the pain level of our child hood. like the others here its not untill we work through the past to fully understand our past.

sending warm thought to let you know your not alone.