Memory is a topic I am very interested in as it and many who question it have been a challenge to me.

It has not been enough to know I remember. Like so many others I questioned why I remember certain things like it were yesterday and yet there are years of my childhood I cannot recall. I questioned the memories themselves as many survivors do when memory presents unbelievable events.

“Did it really happen?” “Did it happen the way I remember?” Part of me knows full well it did and the rest of me wants it not to be true. And so the battle has raged internally for most of my life.

Others question my memory also. “How could you possibly remember back that far?” or “You weren’t even born when that happened.” or “Where did you dream that one up?”

This book has given me a lot of clarity about my life, my memory, and how the mind and body both remember the trauma of childhood.

I am very grateful.

“The extraordinary capacity of the human mind to rewrite memory is

illustrated in the Grant Study of Adult Development, which has systematically

followed the psychological and physical health of more than two hundred

Harvard men from their sophomore years of 1939–44 to the present.2 Of course,

the designers of the study could not have anticipated that most of the participants

would go off to fight in World War II, but we can now track the evolution of

their wartime memories. The men were interviewed in detail about their war

experiences in 1945/1946 and again in 1989/1990. Four and a half decades later,

the majority gave very different accounts from the narratives recorded in their

immediate postwar interviews: With the passage of time, events had been

bleached of their intense horror.

In contrast, those who had been traumatized and

subsequently developed PTSD did not modify their accounts; their memories

were preserved essentially intact forty-five years after the war ended.

Whether we remember a particular event at all, and how accurate our

memories of it are, largely depends on how personally meaningful it was and

how emotional we felt about it at the time. The key factor is our level of arousal.

We all have memories associated with particular people, songs, smells, and

places that stay with us for a long time. Most of us still have precise memories of

where we were and what we saw on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, but only a

fraction of us recall anything in particular about September 10.” Bessel Van Der Kolk