Trauma and Overgeneral Memories

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In a recent blog entitled Abused children and overgeneral memories: Could they lead to depression? Nestor L. Lopez, PhD, examined whether abused children developed overgeneral autobiographical memories, perhaps due to a coping mechanism designed to protect one from reliving traumatic events, or due to acute levels of stress hormones being released by abuse and damaging the hippocampus, a region of the brain important to memory formation.

An overgeneralize autobiographical memory means that a person has trouble recalling specific events in their life, and rather makes generalizations about their own history.

On Mr. Lopez's blog I posted a comment asking if those who had a traumatic childhood, not just those who had abusive parents, could also have over-generalized autobiographical memories.

Mr. Lopez, PhD, replied that "theoretically those who faced non-abuse trauma should have overgeneral memories."

This makes me believe that many people with ASDs might have overgeneral biographical memory, because we tend to have faced much social trauma in our lives.

I realize this isn't scientific, but what are your experiences? Do have an overgeneral biographical memory? Do you think it's due to trauma?

Hello MS

Forgive me for not being able to give my full attention to your deeply interesting ideas. However, I have cut and pasted some of my thoughts from a previous thread I started some weeks ago now. I do hope you find it stimulates some thought for you and others.

I am interested to hear from as many adopted aspies and also aspies who have experienced profound childhood trauma.

The reason being is that I have written a book (A Painful Gift-The Journey of a Soul with Autism) which is to be launched in a couple of months, and the whole writing experience has led me to reflect very deeply on the impact adoption can have on the personality, with particular relevance to the formation of highly adaptive skills with individuals within the autistic spectrum.

When I was dx with AS nearly 2 years ago it was a great relief as it made such profound sense. What baffled me, and deeply disturbed me, was how convincingly NT I had become, to such an extent, that I baffled even the most sharpest of professionals.

However, as time has passed and reading the lives of many folks with AS such as caiseal mor and Donna Williams, I have come to see how trauma and deep emotional distress can result in dissociative type identity problems. I also understand, that even the average aspie who has not experienced trauma and who has had the good fortune of having loving parents and friends, can still have an NT persona to support then though the struggle in life.

However, psychologists now know that ALL babies who have been adopted have no pre-trauma personality, and the effects this has on the new-born is simple.............it is being re-wired to attune itself to any possible danger of experiencing abandonment (thus triggering the original trauma). For such adopted babies who were also High functioning autistic, it seems to make sense that survival can take priority over autistic expression. As was the case with myself, as any degree of unusualness or oddity (my natural autistic expression /personality) would be met with psychological abuse and humiliation.

Although everyone is welcome to respond to this, I will off course be paying great attention to those who have AS and were adopted.

It is a growing conviction within me that my great hunger to connect with others and be loved by others, stems from my early experiences of profound loss and deprivation. In so doing, I developed extremely highly adaptive skills born out of emotional and brutal necessity. The image of a carrot here is very rich, with it's root being (root being my aspie nature) stunted and blocked by a brick. (the brick being a trauma/adoption and also parental neglect)



Many thanks.

Chris

Congrats on writing a book criss.

Thanks for the post, I am very interested in how deprivation and trauma can affect child development. Very interesting.

I am on my own journey of sorts. I am trying to overcome the psychological trauma and the deprivation that has destroyed me. In school, I was never put in the LD class like I should have been, and I never got much support at home or by friends, and I was allowed to flounder, failing school and dropping out. Not being in the LD class probably saved me from a lot of trauma but it would have been the best thing for me.

I have gotten my G.E.D. and I hope to go to college in 5 years, when I am 30. I will be spending the next 5 years preparing, getting the education I missed, and trying to fix myself as best I can.

I'm glad to see this topic here, I've been thinking about making a thread about that myself but I wasn't sure if this is the right place for it.

I have a massive memory gap due to PTSD. basically, I remember the event itself pretty well but all my memories prior to it were erased.

psych told me that they did not get erased but they are on "island" but there are no "bridges" linking to it (it's an analogy). so if I could only build one of those bridges I could access the memories. what it takes to build such a bridge I don't know, because this information is only available to patients who can actually pay said therapist the equivalent of an average monthly income per hour. but she also said that it should all just "come back" with time (that was almost 10 years ago and still nothing, so I personally think it's crap).

so as you said, my childhood "memories" are mostly generalisations based on stories I had heard, pictures from childhood and such. they are more like facts that I know somehow (probably because I had heard them as stories) than actual memories.

I'm lucky to still be very close friends with a bunch of people that I've known since kindergarten, so there's a lot of stories that were the "backup" for my memories. but I have no way of knowing if they are true.

That sounds horrible Anna. You reminded me that I too tend to remember the bad things rather than the good things, just like you can remember your traumatic event. I tend to relive bad experiences.

This doesn't seem to fit with the theory that it's a coping mechanism, if you can remember the bad. Perhaps at the time when a traumatic event damages the brain, that event imprints itself into your memory.

this to NT's.

Last edited by Sorenna on 20 Apr 2009, 7:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

the thing is though- I can't remember any other bad things from before it, and there were a few. I think that it happened at an age when one starts being more aware of the "bad" stuff, plus it was pretty unexpected so there was the shock part which supposedly had something to do with the memory loss.

anyway, it's not that bad, I remember I had a very cool childhood actually and I don't need memories to prove it.

plus, it would be cool to have a massive flashback on my deathbed or something of that sort :p

I can identify with this so much. I have reams of pictures my parents took for me (perks of being the first born child) but have absolutely no memory of any of the events taking place in them. Even most family anecdotes I 'remember' in much the same way you'd remeber events in a book you read.

This is a fascinating topic- thanks for posting it Master Shake.

Last edited by LosFrida on 21 Apr 2009, 6:34 pm, edited 2 times in total.

*Double post- sorry*

Last edited by LosFrida on 21 Apr 2009, 6:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I was gonna flame this thread out (cos i'm an arse some times) ... but you really hit something on the head here.

I am not sure if this is an AS trait, or something that can bring AS on, but it is certainly real.

I was always told it was called a repressed memory, but you're explanation is so much clearer.

The more i think about it, the more I am aware that there are huge gaps in my childhood. Years.. I remember very little of highschool and primary school. I can recall the bad times if i try and it seems like these memories have a DO NOT OPEN around them which seem to be effecting other memories around the same time..the same way a mould sends spores out.

Very very interesting.

Thank you for this thread

So much so that i gotta sing

"My name is...Shake zula, the mic rulah, you want a trip, I'll bring it to ya"

I have found working with the Jungian concept of the shadow, very helpful with regarding me having AS and having experienced profound childhood trauma.

I feel the reason this is, is because to survive I had to develop a very complex persona (public face) and unconsciously put into the shadows my true aspie personality.

I have been working on my lost memories for many years, bu it was only in finding the missing link (my Dx with AS) was I able to go back into the 'closet' and reclaim my true self.

When I finished writing my book (autobiography) I was able to make an extensive linking to various key events in my life. It formed a very intricate network, a little like a nervous system. When I had finally finished the final draft, I recall an enormous feeling of connection with those that had hurt me, and I felt an enormous and overpowering sensation in me to magically go back (to childhood) and make everything better. Little did I know that that is what i would exactly be doing....................for my book had set in motion, a pilgrimage from my head (the book) to my heart (my deepest emotions, that have always remained frozen)

Memories that were frozen, like pictures, began to move in me........i was terrified, my whole being fought against this terror. I am sure that what set this movement into action was the feeling that many of us get when we get the Dx with AS, and that feeling is a wonderful sense of I AM NOT BAD, and subsequently, being deeply held and affirmed in this understanding, I was able to go deeper.

For me, the movement of unlocking frozen, or stuck memories, has only come from grieving, for when I am able to cry from the deepest part of my being (my inner-child) I feel the tears offer the bridge, from my hidden frozen world, to the world of light and air.

The process of feeling long lost memories is deeply complex and has taken many many years to find the sense of freedom I am now beginning to feel. However, I should say, this work of working on trauma, needs to be undertaken with great care and with highly specialized and trained professionals.

I am delighted this thread has been started, i have been trying to connect with others with AS who have experienced Trauma for some time, but to no avail.

Thank you.

Wishing you all well

Chris

^

As I read through your words I feel myself step to the edge. Those memories are lurking there, in the deep murky waters. There are monster in there. I know physically I can recall, but there is a pain block telling me not too. It terrifies me to go into these black spaces in time as the darkness has teeth.

Yes, the darkness we all fear so much.

Yet in embracing the darkness we can find great light. Words cannot convey how different the feeling world is from the world of the head I feel.

For those Aspies who have suffered serious trauma in their life, and who are seriously embarking on this inner-journey, I will be pleased to send them my book completely free. Just drop me a PM with your email.

Wishing you all well.

Chris.

i always thought i had this too because usually people with aspergers have great memorys, and mines awful

Well, this is an interesting thread! I had a particular coping strategy when I was a child, which is apt for this subject....

I used to imagine my brain as being one large tape recorder that stored memories. I would imagine myself pressing the rewind button, and I would, in my mind, rewind and "erase" the bad memory that I wanted to get rid of. Then, I would think up a new memory that I wanted to have instead of the original memory. I would superimpose this "memory" over the erased one, imagining it over and over again until I believed it had actually happened. I quite literally "erased" many of my memories! These were almost always memories that related to social events in school. It´s no wonder that I have such a selected memory. But now that I finally know about AS, I wish I could remember these things again. Some things have come back, but not many. Of course, many of these social problems I didn´t understand at the time I had them, thereby also making them hard to remember...it´s hard to process something you didn´t even understand.

As someone mentioned, many of the things I know about my childhood are things my parents have told me. After they tell me certain things, I might remember them, vaguely.

Many of my memories of childhood are sensory based. For instance, though my parents told me I had a teacher in Nursery School who traumatized me in some way, or that I never wanted to interact with the children in the school- (2 things I don´t remember specifically)- I do remember that the inside of the school had a very strong odor- (too strong)- of fruit juice, and the lights were too bright! Those are the things that stand out in my mind.

yeah I've been thinking about this too, it's weird because my memory is really legendary. my parents used to ask me to "replay" their conversations if there was some misunderstanding about "who said what" and stuff like that. I always remember details, faces, events, facts. the more weird it is that my childhood memories got erased.

I can also relate to what Morgana said about sensory-based memories. actually the only childhood memories I have (save for one) are like that, they are mostly connected to smells. for example, a while ago there was a dead rat at my work. nobody knew what the smell was at first, but it triggered some weird memory from my very, very early childhood- basically, I know the story because I heard it so many times, it's about how I used to play with a cat carcass in my neighbour's garden. I didn't realise that it was dead, so I would sit and try to play with it (of course my parents tried to keep me away from it for health reasons), put some snails on it to keep it company, pick it with sticks etc. up until now I really had no recollection of it.

but the smell triggered this memory in a way, although I still can't say that I "remember" it- I just saw the image of the dead cat with snails on it when I smelled the dead rat smell and connected the image to the childhood story. I have no recollection of what I was thinking back then, or of anyone else around, or of my parents telling me not to touch the cat, nothing.