We undergo a traumatic experience, such as a life-threatening accident or a brutal attack. We survive a period of relentless stress, perhaps because we are in a war zone and witness or commit atrocities. Raised by parents who are alcoholic or mentally ill, we endure traumatic experiences on a daily basis. Or we are ignored, neglected, or treated as playthings by narcissistic parents who themselves were ignored and neglected, and on and on through the generations.

To survive these experiences, perhaps we dissociate. This can take various forms. In extreme forms, we remove ourselves, psychically speaking, from the situation (because we are unable to do so physically), perhaps by adopting the role of a witness to (instead of the object of ) the cruelty. In many cases, because we depended for our lives on those who brutalized us, what would have been normal reactions to our plight—fear, rage, or indignation—could never be expressed or perhaps even felt. But these emotions do not away. Instead, they become misdirected, perhaps aimed at ourselves in self-harming patterns or (sadistically) toward others who have no responsibility for our suffering. To an onlooker or therapist, it makes sense to suppose that such odd behavior is triggered by memories, but these memories are all but inaccessible to the traumatized. Indeed, that is one aftermath of the dissociation. Later in life, we see the effects in our relationships with others, in addiction, in other forms of self-harm, and in serious illness. Indeed, in the case of early trauma, it is sometimes only by working backward from these unhealthy patterns that we can be brought to see any connection between how we now act, react, sense, and perceive situations and what we experienced as children.

In this description, the use of “memory” is a clear extension from the ordinary one because what we are counting as memories here are all but inaccessible. A person is usually considered authoritative about what she remembers, but the justification (or criterion) for the application of the concept of memory in these circumstances is the unusual behavior of the one who has been traumatized, not her avowals or other natural expressions.