symptom questions

Leslie, depends on what you mean by accurate? Take a look at Marcel Proust and his semi-autobiographical novel, "Remembrance of Things Past". He keeps going back to a memory of something that happened in his family's garden when he was very young. And each memory creates a whole different plot line over and over again as Proust mines all the emotions connected with that event. I think the Freudians go into how much we alter our memories of events long ago in our childhoods and often repress them. I know we have some Freudians here (Dr Sarno among them) who might be able to offer the latest theories about how repressed emotions and memories interact to alter events in the past. I know that a lot of people who recount memories of being molested as children weren't really molested. Something about incest prohibitions.

 

So I asked my sister about this event in particular and it turns out that I was 2 when it happened. Now, I don't know what the "rules" are related to age and memory, but she was 9 and remembers the event. So I guess I have a memory from when I was 2. I really don't think it is completely accurate and I think it actually overlaps with another memory from a later incident, maybe one that I remember more clearly because I was older, but at least I know the memory is real (ish.) I am doing EMDR to address them anyway regardless, because they're there in my head.

 

Yes, it seems like earlier memories blend with later ones sometimes according to some set of rules I don't really pretend to understand yet. But there seems to definitely be another quality to the earlier memories from really early childhood than the stuff you remember when you were 10, 11 or 12.