What do I do when I can't remember what happened or how I felt during childhood? I know my sister and I engaged in sexual play on an ongoing basis when I was young. I can remember two instances of actively feeling uncomfortable and not knowing how to get away, but I don't remember any emotions tied to the other experiences. In general I remember very little of the events of my childhood and even less of how I felt during it. I have a lot of anxiety and depression and am several years into therapy, but I just remembered these two experiences. It's making me question what my childhood was actually like, and I have no idea how to find that answer. It's been distressing trying to figure out if my childhood was actually scary and whether it's the reason I feel so unhappy so much of the time. I'm autistic and know I never talked to anyone about my feelings growing up. Because of the autism, I wonder if I was more sensitive, meaning things that seem relatively normal could have been extremely distressing for me personally, but I can't remember. I also don't know if I could have hidden my discomfort well enough for it to go unnoticed when I was that young.

Thank you for trusting us with this. To start, I want you to know that what you're sitting with right now is one of the hardest places to be in, and it makes complete sense that it feels so unsettling. Memory gaps around childhood experiences, particularly ones that may have been confusing or uncomfortable, are incredibly common and do not mean something is wrong with you or that your experiences weren't real.

Memory, especially from early childhood, is not like a recording. Our brains, particularly at ages 4 through 7, are still developing the structures responsible for storing and organizing explicit memories. When experiences carry emotional weight, the brain sometimes stores them in fragmented ways. This can result in a feeling here, a flash of sensation there, without a clear narrative connecting them. This is not a failure of your mind. It is actually your mind doing what minds do, especially when something feels too big or confusing to fully process in the moment. The two instances you do remember (where you felt uncomfortable and didn't know how to get away) are meaningful data points, even without a full picture surrounding them.

It's also worth knowing that people with autism often process and store emotional experiences differently. Sensory and emotional sensitivity can make certain experiences register more intensely, and the tendency to mask or suppress distress can begin very early. It is absolutely possible that you experienced significant discomfort that went unspoken and unnoticed externally, even as a young child. That doesn't mean something was wrong with how you handled it. It means you were doing the only thing available to you at the time.

The distress you're feeling as you try to reconstruct your childhood is coming from a real place. But it's also important to gently hold the reality that you may never have complete clarity about what happened or how you felt and that the absence of that clarity doesn't have to prevent healing. Many people work through the impact of early experiences without ever recovering a full memory of them. Your nervous system, your anxiety, and your depression all carry the weight of experiences even when your conscious mind doesn't have access to the full story. Therapy that is attuned to trauma and to autistic experiences can help you work with what your body and emotions are telling you, even without a complete narrative.

Reaching out to family for factual information is something only you can decide whether to pursue, and there is no right answer. It may offer some pieces of context, or it may raise more questions than it answers. Either way, your healing does not depend on outside confirmation of what happened. What you remember is enough to take seriously and enough to bring into your therapeutic work. Thank you for reaching out to us.