Rory

and they were pardners 🐎

Some horse sketches for the crew under the cut:

This is because there are two parts to memories - their encoding and their recall. The encoding determines their availability, their recall determines their accessibility. The reason why trauma memory and childhood amnesia are different is in this distinction. Trauma memory is often encoded differently, bypassing to the limbic system where it is stored as intrinsic memory. It can’t be recalled because it was never encoded. Childhood amnesia, however, seems to indicate that the memories are encoded, but we lose access to them as we age. This is most likely due to the development of brain structures that fundamentally change our encoding and recall of memory as we get older.

Trauma isn’t necessarily ‘stored in the body’ and doesn’t necessarily have triggers. These are common experiences but not universal. The 'encoded in the limbic system’ theory has been disproven. Traumatic memories are re-experienced physically mainly because remembering causes our system to flood with stress hormones. There it also no evidence that trauma is stored in our 'ancient animal brain’. (The body keeps the score is a bad pseudoscience book)

'Repressed memories’ don’t really exist. There are memories that are difficult to remember because they happened a long time ago and there are memories that you’ve systematically trained yourself to avoid thinking about because they upset you, but they are still accessible to you. But if a therapist says you need hypnosis or some shit to 'recover’ memories: run. That’s dangerous quack science and is likely to result in false-memory recovery which can really complicate existing trauma.

Intrusive remembering is a more common trauma-response than memory avoidance.