Why would people repress memories of abuse?
It seems like that’s too big a deal to not remember it. Perhaps the most important fact she offers in this area is that “the traumatic and the trivial are the two kinds of information your mind represses.” You almost certainly don’t remember every spelling quiz you took in elementary school or every dinner you ate last year. Your mind experienced those things with you, and you probably have some immediately accessible information about them like that pop quizzes freaked you out or that you ate a lot of pasta. But having all of those details to hand at all times is more than our minds can handle. That’s the trivial side of things. The traumatic is repressed for a different reason. As other memory researchers (like Jennifer Freyd) have explained, we repress traumatic memories most often when we have no support around them, like when they involve betrayal and silencing from our families. Fredrickson observes that “If you have repressed memories of childhood trauma, the memories are undoub
