#memory suppression

My dad just visited for about a week. He kept showing photos of my childhood and asking if I remember and I don't know how to tell him that my childhood was so traumatic that I've suppressed like 90% of my memories. I'm glad you have these great memories dad, but it wasn't like that for me.

okay so.. in my life i’ve gone through multiple periods of trauma, and afterwards i have compartmentalized, and shoved unpleasant memories away, and had post-traumatic stress. over a long period of time, this led to me having a very fragmented feeling where i couldn’t recall a lot of things. i theoretically knew that i’d had happy times but i couldn’t really remember them, or they were all colored with negative feelings when i tried and i would shove them away again. i had a hard time really feeling my life as a linear progression or accessing my past in a very meaningful and dimensional way. now that i’m working on healthier ways to confront past traumas and integrate them into myself in a way that deals with them and keeps them in their appropriate relation to the present, i keep getting just... absolute cascades of other past memories that are neutral to happy. they just prompt others and others and others, like that bad memory i confronted was the stopping point for a whole network of memories i accidentally shoved away along with them. i’m trying to do some research on memory suppression and post-traumatic stress but i’m not really finding anything that really connects, so far. does anyone else have experiences like that? it’s not like, complete memory suppression but it’s kind of like... things just felt very inaccessible to me and now i’m reaching them easily and it’s really trippy.