Why do we have repressed memories?

I find often times throughout my life that I get repressed memories when I'm in friendships/relationships with other people. I realize that some memories are painful so it's just one of the brain's mechanisms of shutting yourself off to other people and keeping yourself from letting it damage your confidence.

I used to have a lot of repressed memories. I've recently been able to access a lot of my memories which have previously been repressed. I think that I wasn't perhaps able to deal with those memories in the past, and, that's why I wasn't able to access them. It just seems that a lot of times memories that shouldn't be repressed end up being repressed, and, it makes it harder to deal with relationship conflicts, and, just personal relationships in general. Does anyone here understand where I'm coming from? Why do we have them so much of the time?

reply to post by Frankidealist35


It takes time to process traumas.. the deeper the trauma the longer it "digests".. people seem to remember only when they are at least partially ready. It's still painful but it's far easier to look at an old scar than it is a bloody open wound.

or something.

I think we have to be careful in distinguishing between "repressed memories" and "fantasy" though.... I've seen issues in the past where the two got confused, and it has been nothing but trouble for the folks involved...especially when such "memories" were treated as factual without other evidence...

It's a VERY slippery slope

reply to post by Gazrok


I hear what you're saying. That's also part of it. I have had these fantasy memories in the past, where, my fantasy has clouded out the real event of what has happened. I think our brain has those fantasy memories because our brains want us to make us think that reality was so much better than it actually is. It's our brains way of lying to us and keeping us from going crazy, at least, that's how I see it.

However, I'm not just talking about those fantasy memories here. In the past I've been unable to advance relationships with friends and other people I guess crushes, because, primarily my memory has been faulty. It's not that my brain was restructuring events as I would like them to be. It's that my mind was keeping from readily access tons of details that anyone would really need to have access to in order to build up a relationship. It's like the details were stored in my long term memory and I had to think really hard about them in the past in order to retrieve them, but, now I can look at them more quickly.

They weren't necessarily bad memories. There were some bad ones and some good ones. In the past though I've only been able to look at selective memories, but, like now I can look at all of my memories as a whole, and, I can make judgments on them. I couldn't do that before. So that's why I say they were repressed memories. They weren't always traumatic. I guess a lot of things have happened at once every now and then and I couldn't process everything. So that's why it was like that.

[edit on 28-4-2010 by Frankidealist35]