Effects of Repressed Child Sexual Abuse
The following essay presents the topic of effects of repressed memories of child sexual abuse. Trauma and repressed memories, the false memory debate, lifetime effects of childhood sexual abuse, and dissociative disorder and PTSD outcomes of abuse are presented. This is followed by a summary and conclusion.
Trauma is linked with repression (Resneck-Sannes, 1995). When the individual experiences a shock and is overwhelmed by what has happened, the brain isolates and represses the incident and it is no longer remembered. Memories can become conscious at any time and may not come to the surface for many years (20 to 50 years later); victims of child abuse or sexual abuse present with this phenomenon (Resneck-Sannes, 1995). Clients may present symptoms of sexual abuse without remembering any incident of this abuse in their childhood. Memories of the abuse may not be present or there may be false or blurred memories. When a client feels threatened with anger or violence or is afraid of being overwhelmed by a memory, the memory may be shaped into a different form or the individual may act out to deal with the event. For example, a child may run away from home to avoid an incestuous father without remembering any sexual abuse incident. Instead the child may remember only that the father is angry or they may remember being raped with no memory that the father was the perpetrator, as if the incident was dreamed.
When a victim of sexual abuse grows up with the memories of the events repressed, they may distort the emotional impact and become perpetrators of the same abuse. For example, a father repressing a history of molestation or sexual abuse may encourage his daughter to dress sexually, or they may kiss the child on the mouth or expose their bodies to the child. The father may unconsciously sexualize the daughter by checking her vagina (or penis in the boy child), under the gui...