I was abused physically and mentally by both parents growing up, and my father also neglected me. A lot of my childhood memories are blocked out...I think including some of the abuse itself. The things I do remember, my mother denies ever happened, even though she still acts in some of the same ways today. How can I know these memories are real and not something I made up? And how do I start dealing with the memories I've suppressed?

Thank you for trusting us with this. What you're carrying here is heavy and the confusion about your own memories is one of the most disorienting parts of surviving childhood abuse. Based on what you shared, it sounds like you are not imagining things.

Let's start with the memory piece. Childhood trauma, especially when it's chronic and comes from the people who were supposed to protect you, does something very specific to how the brain stores and retrieves memories. The hippocampus, the part of your brain that processes memory, is highly sensitive to stress hormones. When a child is regularly flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, the brain sometimes doesn't encode memories in the clean, narrative way we expect. Instead, they can be stored in fragments (for example, sensory impressions, body sensations, emotional states) without a clear story attached. Some memories are blocked out entirely, which researchers call dissociative amnesia, a way the mind protects itself from experiences too overwhelming to integrate. None of this means the experiences didn't happen. It means your brain did exactly what it was designed to do under extreme stress.

What your mother is doing (repeatedly denying things you remember, minimizing your reality, acting as though your experience never happened) is itself a form of harm, separate from the original abuse. The fact that she continues some of those same behaviors today is actually meaningful information. It is not unusual for a survivor to find that their memories feel more credible precisely because the pattern is still visible in the present. Your doubt is not evidence that the memories are false. It is probably evidence that you grew up being told not to trust yourself and that takes a long time to unlearn.

On the question of suppressed memories, unfortunately, there is no safe way to rush them back. Trying to force blocked memories to surface without the right support might even retraumatize you rather than heal you. What does work, and what the research consistently supports, is building enough safety and stability in your nervous system so that memories can surface on their own terms, in a context where you are resourced enough to hold them. That process happens best in trauma-focused therapy, specifically with approaches like EMDR or trauma-focused CBT, which are designed to help the nervous system process what it could not process at the time.

If therapy is not accessible to you right now, a useful first step is simply beginning to document what you do remember, in a private space, in your own words, without pressure to make it complete or coherent. Writing can externalise what the mind has been holding alone, and it often creates just enough distance that the material becomes more workable. But the goal is not to uncover everything. The goal is to live more freely in your own body and your own story.

You have been doubting your own reality for a long time because someone taught you to. What you remember is yours. Thank you for trusting us with this.