Why Can’t I Remember My Childhood? 5 Possible Reasons

Why Can’t I Remember My Childhood?

It’s normal to have gaps in memory or not remember a lot of specifics about childhood; that’s just how memory works. However, for those who have specific things they can’t remember, childhood trauma is the most common reason. Childhood trauma causes memory loss by interfering with how memories are consolidated in the brain’s hippocampus.

Not remembering trauma can be a coping mechanism, which is when the brain protects someone from experiencing the intense feelings associated with memory. So instead of a clear, detailed memory, someone may have gaps or only remember vague sensory aspects, like a color or smell. Sometimes these experiences happen when something is triggering, leading a person to wonder what could have happened to them earlier in life.

Types of trauma that may prevent you from remembering your childhood include:

• Sexual trauma: Sexual trauma refers to any inappropriate or unwanted sexual activity or behaviors. These behaviors happen without consent and cause extreme stress.
• Religious trauma: Religious trauma happens when someone is indoctrinated into a religious culture with strong norms and expectations that lead to intense feelings of shame, not belonging, or self-hatred. This can include shutting a person off from outside support, pressure to conform to purity culture, or being expected to endure financial stress for the sake of the group.
• Emotional abuse: Emotional abuse refers to non-physical behaviors that cause emotional harm, meant to intimidate or control someone. This includes but is not limited to humiliation, excessive jealousy, control, monitoring, or dismissiveness.
• Bullying: Bullying can take many forms, from the typical schoolyard bully threatening or assaulting another child to gain power and control to more insidious forms. Slut shaming is bullying that goes after someone based on real, perceived, or made-up sexual behavior, cyberbullying occurs online, and bullying can also be intended to change one’s social status.
• Physical abuse: Hitting, kicking, shoving, or otherwise causing physical harm are all types of physical abuse. Most physical abuse occurs before children reach one year old.¹
• Domestic violence: Even when children have not directly been abused themselves, witnessing domestic violence between their caregivers is harmful and traumatic. This can result in a feeling of helplessness, fear, and anxiety, as well as symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
• Neglect: Childhood neglect refers to when children do not have their basic physical, emotional, and developmental needs met by their caretakers. All children need love, safety, and care to thrive, and not having these needs met can be traumatizing.

Freud’s Theory of Repressed Memories

Freud believed that people actively, yet unconsciously, prevent painful memories from coming into awareness. This is a central tenet of classical psychoanalytic theory, which states that most, if not all, difficulties are due to repressed memories that have not yet been uncovered. Freud believed that these memories could be recovered through hypnosis.¹

One of the key criticisms of Freud’s theory is that in the case of childhood sexual abuse, the theory assumes that it is usually a false memory and never happened. Modern therapeutic approaches have moved away from the idea of repression and focus more on dissociation when someone disconnects from their current experience due to trauma.³ Normal childhood memory loss and childhood amnesia differ from repression and dissociation, as they are both normal, developmentally appropriate occurrences.

Other Reasons You Can’t Remember Your Childhood

Although trauma is the primary reason, there are many other reasons a person may be unable to remember their childhood. These can include mental health issues, cognitive problems, or ordinary forgetfulness. It is also possible that the memories were not actually forgotten after all.

Here are four other reasons you may not be able to remember your childhood:

Your Mental Health Is Impacting Your Memory

Many mental health conditions have been known to impact memory. Depression, for example, is thought to create changes in the brain that can cause memory loss.⁴ Anxiety has also been shown to impact memory negatively. By causing changes in the hippocampus and amygdala, parts of the brain involved in emotion and memory, anxiety can decrease short and long-term memory.⁵

PTSD has also been shown to impact memory. PTSD is a disorder that occurs at least one month after a traumatic event and includes symptoms such as intrusive images, avoidance, changes to thinking and mood, and hypervigilance.⁶ PTSD has been shown to be caused by chronic stress and inflammation, which contribute to memory loss and other cognitive problems.⁷

Cognitive Issues

Various types of dementia and other cognitive impairments can also cause memory loss. In these situations, memory loss is caused by structural changes to the brain’s areas responsible for creating and storing memories. Dementia usually worsens over time, so early diagnosis and treatment are critical.⁸

Ordinary Forgetfulness

When trying to recall an event, people may get frustrated and look for an answer as to why the memory is gone. However, it may be due to just ordinary forgetting! It’s normal to forget things from the past, and it may not be a sign of anything concerning. The brain is a well-tuned machine that prunes excess information, especially during childhood and adolescence.

You May Not Have Forgotten After All

There is data to suggest that many people who think they have forgotten actually did not forget after all. Research on survivors of sexual abuse found that on further investigation, many people who thought they did not remember that they had already shared the memories with others but forgot the disclosure.⁹

How to Recover Childhood Memories

If you are unable to remember your childhood due to trauma, there may be ways to recover the memory. Not all memories can be recovered, but some tools and exercises may help. Revisiting reminders of the past, talking with others, exercising your brain, and getting mental health therapy are all worth trying. Be sure to have a support system in place.

Look at Childhood Photos

Memories can become stronger when they are revisited, and looking through childhood photos can be a great place to start. Notice the details in the photos, like the color of your old room, the outside of your childhood home, your favorite toys, or a beloved pet. These photos may jog other memories that get the ball rolling.

Visit Places From Your Past

It can be a powerful exercise to visit places from the past. This could include your childhood home, school, a relative’s house, or a favorite park. Even driving through your old neighborhood and seeing the streets may help you remember something. Notice what emotions and body sensations come up when visiting these places- these can provide clues.

Talk About the Past

Talking through the past with someone can be another helpful way to get memories flowing. Start with something you do remember, and see where it goes from there. It can be especially helpful to share stories with someone else who was present, and jointly, you can piece together the details.

Exercise Your Brain

Strengthening your brain can be a good way to improve memory and other cognitive processes. This can include logic, word, or crossword puzzles, learning a language, or a new hobby. Brains can grow new connections due to neuroplasticity, and strengthening your brain in general when trying to recall memories can’t hurt.

Begin Trauma Therapy

Beginning to heal childhood trauma in therapy can help a person to recall their childhood. In cases where someone has dissociated or detached from their experience as a subconscious way to protect themselves, re-establishing a feeling of safety is the first step. After safety is established, processing events with a therapist can help fill in details and reconsolidate memories.

Different types of trauma therapies work in different ways. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) uses bilateral stimulation to reprocess memories in the neural network. CRM and Narrative approaches involve telling the story in a supported way. Trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (CF-CBT) is a behavioral therapy that works to change thoughts and beliefs. Internal family systems therapy (IFS) works with different “systems” or parts within a person to heal the trauma.

When to Seek Professional Support

Suppose someone is experiencing recurrent, disturbing dreams, changes to mood, sleep, or functioning in everyday life and relationships. In that case, they should consider seeking professional help to address the possibility they experienced childhood trauma. Be sure to look for a therapist who specifically states that they offer trauma treatment or trauma-informed care.

An online therapist directory or online therapy platform can be a good choice for finding a therapist, as can asking your primary care physician or other healthcare provider. Someone who is experiencing multiple symptoms and wondering whether medication could help will want to consider seeing a psychiatrist. Again, your trusted healthcare provider is a great starting point but there are also online psychiatrist options that may be a good choice.

In My Experience

In my experience as a certified EMDR therapist, clients often come to me feeling that there are things they are just not remembering. EMDR can do a great job linking present-day triggers with past events by activating the neural network. This is the most successful when we have a place to start, even if it is something as vague as a body sensation or a color.

I think it’s important to remember that when traumatic events occur during infancy or childhood, the memories may not have been stored in the first place. As my EMDR trainer said, “The tape wasn’t in the VCR.” In other cases, having a small flash of a memory can help other memories return. Even so, the outlook is very good that therapy can reduce present-day triggers and symptoms and help one find healing even if memories are not completely recovered.