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Though recovered memory has been discredited, we're encouraged to understand our suffering in terms of trauma.

It can be appealing to look for a dramatic root cause to explain our difficulties, but this can distract us.

Our suffering matters and deserves compassion and treatment, even if it wasn't caused by trauma.

Last month, it was revealed that a woman has filed a lawsuit against Amy Griffin, the author of The Tell, a memoir of childhood sexual abuse based on memories recovered while under the influence of MDMA. The book has sold many copies, and praise has been lavished on its author, but questions have also been raised as to the veracity of Griffin’s story. According to the suit, Griffin co-opted the plaintiff’s history of abuse, claiming it as her own.

The controversy surrounding The Tell harkens back to the recovered memories scandal of the '80s and '90s in which therapists encouraged patients to recover memories of trauma. These therapists were guided by the belief that many patients had repressed memories too awful to recall, and that healing could only come once these split-off memories were recovered, often alongside dramatic abreactions. Unknowingly, many therapists widely subjected patients to suggestion and subtle manipulation. Some therapists even encouraged patients to produce memories using sodium amytal or hypnosis. The assertion that traumatic memories can be locked away and then later recovered is controversial. We now know that memories are slippery, fungible, and ever shifting.

Do we need to remember to heal?

Though the notion of recovered memories has been widely discredited, the belief that healing requires us to unearth traumatic memories persists, as evidenced by the popularity of books such as The Tell. Last week, a patient arrived for our session looking distraught. Monique is a talented and experienced therapist herself, but that day, she needed my help. Recently, something had happened that had reawakened her suspicions that she had been abused in childhood. Since this triggering event, she had found it difficult to concentrate and had even needed to take time off work. Although she had no memories of being abused, she had long had a sense that something might have happened to her. Through the years, she had tried hard to remember, but the answer was not forthcoming. Now, in the midst of renewed apprehensions, she wondered how she could move forward with the aching doubt. If something had happened—as she suspected it had—how could she move forward unless she could remember?

Since the days of Freud, psychoanalysis has invited us to look to our past to understand aspects of our current suffering. Consideration of a patient’s childhood remains a major component of depth psychological work. One of the paradigmatic beliefs of a depth psychological approach is that childhood experiences—particularly traumatic ones—can shape our emotional lives and affect our adulthood, often in ways we are not consciously aware of and don’t understand. This initial intuition of early psychoanalysts has been borne out by research. We now know that adverse childhood experiences such as abuse, domestic violence, neglect, and parental mental illness correlate with higher risk of future problems in adulthood, including alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicidality.

The trauma hypothesis—that adult difficulties can be traced to adverse childhood experiences—is demonstrably valid. At the same time, it has morphed into the dominant story we often tell ourselves about any distress we experience. These days, we’re more likely to be encouraged to look for forgotten childhood trauma by social media influencers than by poorly trained therapists, but the potential downsides remain. The temptation to seek buried memories may do us a disservice by delegitimizing psychological suffering that doesn’t have its roots in childhood trauma or sending us on impossible errands to find the biographical antecedents of our difficulties. Ordinary struggles caused by ordinary disappointments, temperamental mismatches between us and the environment, or even our own heritable neurotic tendencies don’t have the same dramatic panache as anguish that originates in trauma. And yet, these forms of distress are just as legitimate, just as important, and just as worthy of compassion, curiosity, and treatment. Exploring painful aspects of our childhood can deepen self-understanding and bring healing, even when these more ordinary difficulties do not rise to the level of trauma.

The appeal of finding a cause

How seductive it is to have a reason for our anguish, as well as a straightforward way to fix it. If our troubles are the result of a dramatic trauma in childhood, we would be absolved once and for all from any suspicion that we might have contributed to our own suffering. We could then go looking for that single memory that, if uncovered, would release us from our dark moods, self-sabotaging tendencies, and difficult relationships.

Jung noted the appeal of searching for the cause of our current suffering in the past: “if one could remember [the forgotten trauma], then the entire neurosis would vanish on the spot. The efforts to remember give the appearance of strenuous activity, and furthermore have the advantage of being a beautiful red herring. For which reason it may seem eminently desirable, from this point of view also, to continue to hunt the trauma as long as possible.” 1

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Most of us experience mental distress sometimes. Perhaps it is difficult for us to accept that suffering is an ordinary part of being human. There is something appealing about believing that our difficulties exist for a reason, and that without this explanatory root cause, we would exist in a natural state of happiness. But our suffering is important even when it doesn’t have a dramatic origin story. We owe it to ourselves to take our suffering seriously—to be curious about it, and to cultivate compassion toward ourselves even when there is no extraordinary event that explains it.

Our suffering matters—even when it's not caused by trauma

Childhood trauma happens, and it probably happens more often than we think it does. It can profoundly affect people. And yet, childhood trauma doesn’t define us, and our suffering doesn’t only count when we can prove that it exists because of childhood trauma.

Had Monique suffered abuse that she couldn’t remember? Perhaps. But without a clear recollection, focusing on the past was unlikely to help her move forward. Concentrating on recovering traumatic memories when we have none may stymie us, making us feel as though our suffering is inauthentic or unimportant if we can’t recall. It can lead us on a fruitless search for memories that can distract us from living our lives, enjoying what we have, or focusing on other forms of healing and self-reflection. For Monique, appreciating her strengths and considerable resilience, developing compassion for herself as she continued to sometimes struggle, and cultivating a wider perspective about herself and her life helped her to focus on moving forward, rather than staying preoccupied with the past.

1. Jung, C. G., Adler, G., & Hull, R. F. C. (2014). Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Volume 17: The Development of Personality. Princeton University Press, para. 200.

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