Lost childhood memories

A lot of my work can involve going back and focusing in on specific emotions that can be held at certain ages from childhood. But what if you can’t remember your childhood? And why is that?

It’s surprisingly common with people I see to say they don’t really hold many memories from childhood. It can be anything from specific events to huge chunks of their life where they just can't recall what happened. One reason is that we can spend a lot of childhood, or indeed our life, dissociated if it doesn’t feel safe to really be present. This can start for many reasons, and isn’t always the most obvious ones such as actually being in physical danger.

If you are particularly sensitive, childhood dissociation can start and become a tendency even from events that other people might have little issue with. It can be any kind of emotion that is deeply felt that our system deems as unsafe to be around. You can be overwhelmed by grief just as much as overwhelmed by fear, and this doesn’t need to be grief from losing a caregiver; how strong your grief is is purely a mark of how much you love someone or something. And so grief from a lost pet can be enough to spark dissociation in some children and may be easily overlooked.

This need to dissociate - to not be present - when feeling overwhelmed by these feelings can then become a habit, an automatic tendency, and is something we can carry through with us into our adult lives.

Breaking this habit is possible in many ways; one is in one aspect of the work I do, in addressing the memories that triggered the dissociation in the first place. Another, is by physically addressing the dissociation in the moment, encouraging yourself back into your body, whilst calming your nervous system to break the habit. I am posting three methods of how to do this in my reels on Instagram this week in my series: Calming the nervous system parts 1-3.