Development and Psychopathology, 10 (1998), 761–780

Copyright  1998 Cambridge University Press

Printed in the United States of America

The fate of traumatic memories in childhood

and adulthood

SVEN-ÅKE CHRISTIANSON AND TORUN LINDHOLM

Stockholm University, Sweden

Abstract
The present article addresses issues concerning the complex relation between memory and trauma in childhood and
adult life. Research findings showing how children and adults remember public and personal emotional events are
presented, and mechanisms functioning to hold traumatic memories back from awareness are discussed. In the final
section, developmental aspects are addressed by considering the interplay between child and adult trauma. Several
cases are described that show how childhood trauma may be represented in memory and influence later development
and adult memory processes.

The prospect of being interrogated after hav-
ing been sexually abused, and further the pos-
sible risk of a new deceit by not being be-
lieved, may prevent a traumatized child from
telling about the experience. The importance
of understanding how children deal with diffi-
culties in disclosing traumatic experiences
such as sexual abuse is illustrated by an 8-
year-old girl who, during a videotaped police
interrogation, joked and seemed unconcerned
while describing how her father had abused
her sexually. Given the character of the event,
one might have expected her to show negative
feelings and to have difficulties in describing
it, and her behavior was taken as an indication
that she had made things up. When inter-
viewed 9 years later, the now 17-year-old
woman remembers the interrogation very
well. She remembers that someone had told
her that “when you lie you get a pain in your
stomach, and you feel bad.” During the inter-
The preparation of this article was an equal collaborative
effort and was supported by Grant F 793/95 from the
Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and So-
cial Sciences to Sven-Åke Christianson.
Address correspondence and reprint requests to:
Sven-Åke Christianson or Torun Lindholm, Department
of Psychology, Stockholm University, S-106 91 Stock-
holm, Sweden.
rogation she felt pain in her stomach, although
she knew she told the truth, and she did every-
thing to hide her feelings so that no one would
suspect her of lying.
The above example from a real-life experi-
ence of an 8-year-old girl illustrates how com-
plex it is for a child to encompass and report
about sexual abuse experiences. The relation-
ship between trauma and memory is indeed a
complex matter. Over the past two decades
there has been an increased awareness and in-
terest about how trauma might affect memory
processes. Interest in sexually abused chil-
dren, especially about children’s memory pro-
cesses and how children exposed to trauma
will retain and retrieve these events, has stim-
ulated an increased production of research. In
recent years the issue of memory for early
trauma has attracted a lot of attention through
the debate among academics and profession-
als concerning the reality of repressed memo-
ries and recovery of repressed memories of
childhood sexual abuse (i.e., people who
claim to suddenly, often in connection to a
psychotherapeutic treatment, remember trau-
mas that have earlier been inaccessible). This
article will address these issues with reference
to the literature on the effects of emotional
stress on memory. We review some main

761
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findings from research on flashbulb memories
in children and adults and discuss how this
phenomena relates to memories of traumatic
events. Besides other studies on autobiograph-
ical memories of trauma, we also present an
overview of recent laboratory findings in this
field. We discuss how effects of emotion
sometimes are facilitative and sometimes det-
rimental to memory. In the final section of
this article, we address developmental aspects
in considering the interplay between child and
adult trauma, that is, how memories of child-
hood trauma may be expressed and affect ex-
periences of trauma in adulthood.
Remembering Traumatic Experiences
What is the nature of highly stressful or trau-
matic memories in children and adults? Are
individuals more likely to have accurate and
persistent memories of an emotionally arous-
ing event such as a shooting or an assault than
of neutral, everyday scenarios, or, does the
emotional stress evoked by witnessing or
hearing about a traumatic incident usually re-
sult in a poorer recall ability? From an analy-
sis of the literature on eyewitness memory
(Christianson, 1992) it is evident that we re-
member emotional events differently than
neutral or ordinary events. However, the vari-
ous studies in the field of emotion and mem-
ory have yielded different answers concerning
the direction of emotional stress on memory,
that is, whether emotional events are poorly
or well maintained. A major finding obtained
in both studies on children and adults is that
traumatic memories tend to be accurate and
persistent with respect to the traumatic event
itself and the central, critical detail informa-
tion about the emotion-laden event, that is, the
information that elicits the emotional reaction
(Christianson, 1992; Heuer & Reisberg, 1990;
Howe, Courage & Peterson, 1996; Rudy &
Goodman, 1991; Terr, 1990a). This is not to
say that traumatic memories are always fully
accurate. It is often found that emotional
events are less accurately recalled with re-
spect to peripheral or more irrelevant details
within an emotional scenario or information
preceding and following traumatic events
(Christianson & Loftus, 1990; Christianson &
Nilsson, 1984; Loftus & Burns, 1982).
S.-Å. Christianson and T. Lindholm
Another major finding is that traumatic
memories might be available but not always
accessible. Several instances in the clinical
and the cognitive psychology literature sug-
gest that victims of violence and sexual as-
saults express difficulties in accessing or con-
fronting their traumatic experiences at a
conscious level. There is also extensive docu-
mentation showing that memories can be lost
through trauma. Victims of rape, torture, sex-
ual abuse, and war may initially show epi-
sodes of partial or complete amnesia, but
these memories may be successfully retrieved
later on (Christianson & Engelberg, 1997;
Terr, 1990b; van der Kolk, McFarlane, &
Weisaeth, 1996; Williams, 1994).
This paper suggests that inconsistencies in
research findings can be explained as reflect-
ing differences in the to-be-remembered
(TBR) detail information studied, differences
in elaboration and processing of the TBR in-
formation, and differences in retrieval circum-
stances. They may also reflect two opposing
functions that are at work when we are ex-
posed to and try to remember emotional
events. From an evolutionary perspective, it is
essential to recognize and remember emo-
tional events and, in particular, unpleasant
situations in order to ensure appropriate re-
sponses in maintaining protective, withdraw-
ing or defensive behavior. Thus, survival has,
to a great extent, hinged on some sort of emo-
tional system that is fast enough to alert us to
threatening or disturbing stimuli. With evolu-
tion, we also seem to have developed other
types of mechanisms which help us to cope
with more contemporary situations in life.
These mechanisms may inhibit the activation
of representation of traumatic events and
sometimes exclude from conscious awareness
negative types of experiences that would im-
pede efficient functioning in everyday life.
In this article we will discuss in more detail
the availability and accessibility of traumatic
memories.
Remembering Public Traumatic Events:
“Flashbulb Memories”
A domain of studies that support the existence
of an emotional system that quickly recog-
nizes and responds to environments and cir-
Fate of traumatic memories
cumstances that are upsetting emanates from
research on so-called flashbulb memories
(Brown & Kulik, 1977). The literature shows
that national shocking events such as John F.
Kennedy’s assassination and the Challenger
disaster tend to form vivid memories over
time. Not only does such unexpected, violent,
and shocking news itself appear to be well
preserved in memory, but also the specific
personal circumstances (such as location,
time, ongoing activity, thoughts, feelings,
etc.) when receiving the news are maintained
(see Winograd & Neisser, 1992, for a review).
One problem with flashbulb studies, as
well as with most other studies of real-life
events, is that one usually does not know for
sure what actually happened at the time of the
event. As Neisser (1982) points out, an uncrit-
ical acceptance of vivid descriptions from un-
verified events in the distant past is question-
able, since a vivid and detailed recollection is
not necessarily an accurate one. One way to
verify the accuracy and consistency of flash-
bulb memories is to ask people a series of
questions about the circumstances in which
they first learned about the shocking event,
and then ask the same questions again later to
compare the consistency between the recol-
lections reported on the two occasions. This
double assessment technique has been used by
several researchers (Bohannon & Symons,
1992; Christianson, 1989; Christianson & En-
gelberg, 1997; Conway, Andersen, Larsen,
Donnelly, McDaniel, McClelland, Rawles, &
Logie, 1994; McCloskey, Wible, & Cohen,
1988; Pillemer, 1984) and has shown a fairly
good consistency over long retention intervals
and revealed that people remember these sorts
of public negative emotional events better
than ordinary events that occurred equally
long ago. This is not, however, to say that
flashbulb memories are immune to deteriora-
tion with respect to all specific circumstances
of the flashbulb event. It seems that some core
information (e.g., informant, place, accompa-
nying person) is less vulnerable to memory
loss, whereas some specific detail information
(i.e., own clothing, exact time) shows a sub-
stantially decreased accuracy over a year.
Moreover, although subjects’ confidence in
their own memories decrease to some extent
over time, they are often fairly sure that they
763
remembered correctly the specific circumstan-
tial details.
From the double assessment technique, we
still cannot tell how accurate people really are
in their initial descriptions of the flashbulb
circumstances. The initial recalls may not
have been truthful or accurate observations of
the original situation when the news was first
delivered. They may well be reconstructive
and presumably contain some erroneous in-
formation, as most other memories. A second
recall of the event and its concomitant cir-
cumstances quite likely will produce the same
memory for some core elements, but many
plausible details will be added or constructed.
In an early interpretation of the flashbulb
memory phenomenon, Brown and Kulik
(1977) attributed the detailed recall perfor-
mance to a neuropsychological “Now print!”
mechanism that is triggered when an event is
highly emotionally arousing, surprising, and
consequential. According to this hypothesis,
this special memory mechanism preserves the
whole event, including many irrelevant de-
tails, relatively indiscriminately, like a “pho-
tographic picture.” Once one has access to the
“picture,” one should have access to both im-
portant and unimportant details of the flash-
bulb occasion. The empirical evidence, how-
ever, indicates that we do not retain flashbulb
events and attendant circumstances as “photo-
graphically” complete memories and a special
“Now print!” memory mechanism has accord-
ingly been disputed by several researchers
(see Christianson, 1989; McCloskey, Wi-
ble, & Cohen, 1988; Neisser, 1982; Neisser &
Harsch, 1992). According to Neisser (1992),
the detailed content in flashbulb memories is
most likely explained by reconstructions from
the gist of the event. A further argument
against a special flashbulb memory mecha-
nism has been presented by McCloskey, Wi-
ble, and Cohen (1988), who claim that a pos-
tulation of a special memory mechanism that
is triggered when one experiences an emo-
tional event is warranted only if there is evi-
dence that these memories cannot be products
of ordinary memory mechanisms.
Few flashbulb studies have attempted to
directly examine the processes involved in
flashbulb memory formation. Recently, how-
ever, Conway et al. (1994) conducted a study
764
using multivariate analyses to compare the
processes of flashbulb memory formation
with the formation of non-flashbulb memo-
ries. Conway et al. found that although the
encoding of both flashbulb memories and
non-flashbulb memories featured similar sets
of processes, these processes were more inte-
grated in the formation of flashbulb memo-
ries. According to Conway et al. these results
indicate that the quantitative differences be-
tween flashbulb memories and non-flashbulb
memories might be due to structural differ-
ences in the processes involved in memory
formation.
Studies on childrens’ memories of shock-
ing public events show that they resemble the
flashbulb memories found among adults. For
example, Warren and Swartwood (1992)
showed that children who expressed strong
emotional reactions to the explosion of the
space shuttle “Challenger” were more consis-
tent in their memories over a 2-year period
than children who reacted less emotionally.
Furthermore, the study showed that although
younger children remembered fewer details
than older children, the younger children were
as consistent as the older children and as
adults in what they actually remembered over
a 2-year period. Similarly, Terr et al. (1996)
found that children’s memories of the Chal-
lenger explosion were vivid, detailed and con-
sistent up to 14 months later. At the same
time, the interviews also showed inaccuracies,
and about one third of the sample had incor-
porated misinformation into their memories,
suggesting, in accord with studies on adults,
that detailed and vivid memories do not guar-
antee accuracy.
Although it is clear that children have
flashbulb memories, differences do exist in
the way children and adults remember such
events. Very young children (under the age of
4 years) have difficulties forming conceptual
links between the aftermath of hearing trau-
matic news and the preceding event. In a
study by Pillemer (1992), preschool children
between ages 3.5 and 4.5 years old were inter-
viewed about their memories about an event
occurring one week earlier when the school
was evacuated in response to a fire alarm. Pil-
lemer found substantial differences in the re-
S.-Å. Christianson and T. Lindholm
sponses of the 3.5 year olds compared to the
4.5 year olds. The older children were able to
give direct answers to specific questions
about where they were when they heard the
fire alarm, their ongoing activity, their own
affect, etc. However, the younger children
were more often incorrect and gave more ir-
relevant answers. Several other studies con-
firm that children under the age of 4 years do
not seek causal relationships between events
as do older children and adults (Berman,
1988; Bullock, 1985; Fivush & Mandler,
1985; Sophian & Huber, 1984). To a 3-year-
old, the assassination of a minister or a presi-
dent is a highly abstract and incomprehensible
event that does not mean very much. Al-
though the adults’ strong reactions to the trag-
edy would be salient and memorable, the
young child will not attempt to identify the
potential causes to these reactions. To the ex-
tent that the child remembers the experience,
it will be recalled as an isolated event dissoci-
ated from an adults conception of the tragedy.
Thus, although the child may well have a
memory of the personal experience, questions
about reactions in connection to the hearing
of the specific news are likely to be unsuc-
cessful in locating the memory.
Remembering personal traumatic events
Besides studies on flashbulb memories, which
do not concern details of the emotion-eliciting
event itself but surrounding and associated de-
tails, there are also several studies on personal
real-life events that parallel in some respect
the observed amount of detail of flashbulb
memories, and which also show that emo-
tional information is very well preserved over
time. The double assessment method, where
people are asked a series of questions about
details in which they first experienced the
emotional event, and then asked the same
questions again later, has also been used to
verify the consistency of personal traumatic
memories. In a study by Yuille and Cutshall
(1986), witnesses to a murder were inter-
viewed soon after the crime by the police and
again in a research interview 4–5 months
later. Results showed a high degree of accu-
racy of memory and little decline over time.
Fate of traumatic memories
Subjects who reported the highest amount of
stress showed a mean accuracy of 93% in the
initial police interview and a mean accuracy
of 88% 4–5 months later. The overall mean
accuracy scores for subjects who reported
lower levels of stress were 75% in both inter-
views.
Using a similar approach as that of Yuille
and Cutshall (1986), Christianson and Hübi-
nette (1993) examined witnesses who had ob-
served a bank robbery, either as victim (a
teller under gunpoint) or bystander (fellow
employee or customer) concerning their emo-
tional reactions during the robbery and their
memory for specific event information. The
consistency of the witnesses’ accounts were
measured by a comparison of the information
in the police reports and the recollections
given in the written research interview be-
tween 4 and 15 months later. The results indi-
cated that witnesses’ recollections of detailed
information concerning the actual robbery
(e.g., action, weapon, clothing) were highly
consistent with what was described in the po-
lice report, whereas recollections of the spe-
cific circumstances (e.g., date, time, other
people) were less consistent with what was
described in the police report. Furthermore,
the accuracy rates among the victims were
found to be significantly higher than the accu-
racy rates among the bystanders.
In a study of extremely traumatic experi-
ences, such as being a victim of a Nazi con-
centration camp, Wagenaar and Groeneweg
(1990) compared testimonies from 78 former
prisoners of “Camp Erika,” collected in the
periods of 1943–1947 and 1984–1987. A
comparison between the testimonies from
these two periods revealed that almost all vic-
tims remembered the concentration camp ex-
perience in great detail even after 40 years.
Although errors did occur, Wagenaar and
Groeneweg found recall of the conditions in
the camp and smaller details to be remarkably
consistent and accurate. It may be that re-
peated telling among concentration camp vic-
tims have contributed to the accuracy of their
recall.
In a survey of peoples’ autobiographical
memories, Reisberg, Heuer, McLean, and
O’Shaughnessy (1988) found that the more
765
intense the emotional event, the more confi-
dent one was of the memory. Christianson and
Loftus (1990), collected data from over 400
students regarding their “most traumatic
memory.” A major finding was a significant
relationship between rated degree of emotion
and the number of “central” but not “periph-
eral” details, the participants believed that
they remembered. Thus, according to these
two survey studies, there seems to be a signif-
icant correlation between affect strength and
rated memory vividness, at least for the cen-
tral and critical details of the emotional
events.
Numerous studies indicate that emotional
events are well remembered also by children
(Goodman, Hirschmann, Hepps, & Rudy,
1991; Sheingold & Tenney, 1982; Terr, 1988,
1990). Research by Terr (1983, 1990) sug-
gests that experiences of violent crimes, sex-
ual abuse, death of a family member, etc, are
remembered in great detail over long reten-
tion intervals. The fact that even very young
children can recall and describe traumatic ex-
periences accurately was reported in a case
study of a 3-year-old girl’s abduction, sexual
abuse, and attempted murder (Jones & Krug-
man, 1986). In evaluating children’s memory
of a very stressful medical experience, a sam-
ple of 3- to 7-year-olds was interviewed after
being subjected to a voiding cystourethrogram
fluoroscopy (VCUG)—an aversive and stress-
ful radiological procedure involving painful
genital contact (urinary catheterization) (Orn-
stein, personal communication). Open-ended
recall immediately after the medical proce-
dure and after a delay of 6 weeks revealed
impressive levels of recall with relatively lit-
tle forgetting observed over the 6 week delay
interval (the overall recall performance
dropped from 88% to 83%). The level of re-
call of this stressful experience was found to
be higher compared with combined data from
routine doctor-visit studies. Moreover, initial
recall was only marginally correlated with
age, and forgetting over time was not associ-
ated with age in contrast to the other doctor-
visit studies. That is, the 3-year-olds per-
formed similarly to the 7-year-olds (!).
In a subsequent study of children’s mem-
ory for VCUG experiences by Goodman,
766
Quas, Batterman–Faunce, Riddlesberger, and
Kuhn (1996) age differences did occur, such
that younger children (3–4 years) recalled less
about the experience than the older children
(5–6 years and 7–10 years). These age differ-
ences were related to children’s understanding
of the event, children’s emotional reactions,
and maternal communication and compassion.
Older children had more general experience
and greater knowledge of medical procedures,
which may have contributed to more elabora-
tion and organization of relevant knowledge.
All children were, however, able to answer
some of the direct questions correctly about
their VCUG experience. Regarding the chil-
dren’s memory and emotional responses, it
was found that an internal focus on thoughts
and feelings was associated with less com-
plete memory of the external event informa-
tion (see also Yuille & Tollestrup, 1992). As
exemplified by Goodman et al. (1996), one
child could not describe what happened be-
cause he cried. The strongest predictor regard-
ing accurate versus inaccurate memories of
the VCUG experience was whether or not the
mothers had discussed the examination with
their children. According to many researchers
(see Fivush, Pipe, Murachver, & Reese, 1997;
Goodman et al., 1996; Williams, 1994; Tes-
sler & Nelson, 1996), parents attention, com-
munication, and emotional support seems to
be one of the most crucial factors for forget-
ting or accurate memory for emotionally
stressful events experienced in childhood (see
also cases below). The parental influence in
facilitating or impeding children’s memories
is an important point in abuse cases, espe-
cially in cases involving parental perpetration
of abuse.
Remembering laboratory traumatic events
Several laboratory studies mimic the findings
from real-life event studies and show that the
rate of forgetting is less pronounced for emo-
tional or violent events compared with nonvi-
olent events. It is generally found that detail
information is remembered better when it is
presented in an emotional context. Studies by
Christianson (1984) and Christianson and
Loftus (1987) showed that forgetting of detail
S.-Å. Christianson and T. Lindholm
information was much less pronounced for
subjects who had watched an emotional ver-
sion of a slide sequence (a boy hit by a car)
than those who had watched a neutral version
(a boy walking beside a car). In a telephone
interview with subjects 6 months after having
been presented with the series of slides, the
central theme, or the gist of the slide se-
quence, was remembered by 89% of the sub-
jects who had watched an emotional series
compared to 52% of those who had watched
a neutral series of slides. In another study
(Christianson & Fällman, 1990), it was found
that very unpleasant scenes (pictures of vic-
tims of traffic accidents, war, malady, famine,
etc.) shown for very brief durations (50 ms
followed by a mask slide) were retained to a
higher degree than neutral scenes (pictures of
people in everyday situations), or very posi-
tive scenes (e.g., sexual pictures of nudes or
very sensual summer scenes).
From research on phobias, it seems that
humans are predisposed to remember certain
types of emotional information, such as blood,
injuries, snakes, and other details which are
potentially threatening or dangerous (cf. Han-
sen & Hansen, 1988; Öhman & Dimberg,
1984; Öhman, Dimberg, & Esteves, 1989).
This disposition has been interpreted as a
“hard-wired” mechanism, in which the emo-
tional experience per se is of subordinate im-
portance. That is, when an individual is ex-
posed to an emotional event, this mechanism
may extract certain stimulus features, such as
a blood stain, as emotionally significant. An
orienting response is then triggered automati-
cally, and the subjects’ attention becomes fo-
cused on this emotion-provoking details of
the event. Experimental research has shown
that detail information is remembered differ-
ently from an emotional event when blood is
involved than without blood (Christianson,
Lindholm, Österlund, Karasavidou, & Rivera,
1997). Christianson, Loftus, Hoffman, and
Loftus (1991) showed that the level of mem-
ory performance for subjects presented with
emotional stimuli (e.g., involving blood) at
very short exposures (180 ms) was almost the
same as that found for subjects presented with
the same emotional stimuli at longer expo-
sures. Perhaps a ready assimilation of emo-
Fate of traumatic memories
tional stimuli can be developed as an adaptive
coping strategy in an aggressive and maltreat-
ing environment, alerting the individual to
signs of imminent danger. For example, a
study by Rieder and Cicchetti (1989) showed
that children that have experienced repeated
trauma (i.e, domestic physical and psycholog-
ical violence) were more attuned to poten-
tially aggressive components of a situation
than nontraumatized children. Rieder and Cic-
chetti (1989) argue that children who readily
assimilate aggressive stimuli are likely to ex-
perience difficulties in social interactions be-
cause they tend to interpret ambiguous social
stimuli as having aggressive intent.
Remembering central versus peripheral
details
Although the studies referred to above show
that both children and adults remember emo-
tional events well and that the loss of clarity
and detail over time is far less for emotional/
traumatic memories than for memories of ev-
eryday events, it is not justified to conclude
that everything within an emotional scenario
is well retained. For example, some of the
studies referred to show that whereas the gist
of the emotional event is remembered well,
memory for information which is not directly
associated with the emotion-eliciting event
can be impaired by intense emotion. A series
of laboratory studies have shown that central
details of an emotional event are retained bet-
ter than corresponding details in a nonemo-
tional scenario, whereas the reversed pattern
is obtained for peripheral details (Burke,
Heuer, & Reisberg, 1992; Christianson &
Loftus, 1987, 1991; Heuer & Reisberg, 1990;
Kebeck & Lohaus, 1986). For example, in a
study by Christianson and Loftus (1987), sub-
jects viewed a slide sequence depicting either
an emotional or a neutral version of the same
type of event and were instructed to select and
write down the most distinguishing detail of
each slide. Subjects showed a higher recall
performance for central features selected and
recorded from the emotional pictures (e.g.,
“blood,” “eye injury”) than from the neutral
pictures; however, they were less able to rec-
ognize the specific pictures that they had seen.
767
Christianson et al. (1991) conducted an exper-
iment in which subjects in an emotional and
in a neutral condition attended to the same
critical information and for the same amount
of time. Although subjects in the two condi-
tions were equalized with respect to the detail
information attended to during stimulus pre-
sentation, it was found that the central detail
information in the emotional condition was
retained better than the corresponding detail
information in the neutral condition.
The issue of memory for central and pe-
ripheral details in an emotional versus a neu-
tral event was also explored in a simulation
study by Burke et al. (1992). The results
showed that subjects who had seen an emo-
tional version of a story remembered detail
information that was spatially and temporally
associated with the central characters in the
slides better than subjects who had seen the
neutral version and a reversed pattern for pe-
ripheral details. However, it was also found
that the favorable effect for central details in
an emotional scenario increased over time and
that the disadvantage for peripheral details in
the emotional condition decreased at delayed
testing. Thus, despite impaired memory per-
formance for certain detail information of
emotional events, the Burke et al. study sug-
gests detail information in general seems to
be more resistant to forgetting in emotional
events than in neutral events over time. This
finding is of specific interest in a legal context
because eyewitnesses in police investigations
or court settings are likely to be interviewed
and questioned after an extended interval
(several weeks or months after an accident or
crime.)
A similar interaction between type of event
(emotional vs. neutral) and type of detail in-
formation (central vs. peripheral) has been
shown in research on children. In a study by
Goodman, Hepps, and Reed (1986), 3- to 7-
year-old children’s memory of a stressful
event—having a blood test at a medical
clinic—was compared with children in a con-
trol condition who were brought to the same
clinic but had a design placed on their arm
instead of having their blood drawn. After a
delay of 3 to 4 days, Goodman et al. found
that the highly stressed children remembered
768
central information better than the control
children, whereas the control children remem-
bered the peripheral detail information better
than the highly stressed children.
On the basis of 25 cases of young chil-
dren’s long-term retention of early traumatic
events, involving emergency room treatment,
Howe et al. (1996) concluded that central fea-
tures of the incident, as well as the post-event
treatment, were extremely well remembered
both immediately and at a 6-month recall, but
the amount of peripheral information that was
freely recalled declined over a 6-month reten-
tion interval. Moreover, Terr (1979, 1983),
points to the accuracy by which the children
in Chowchilla could verbally recall the gist in
the sequence of events of their kidnapping,
but they were often mistaken in their recall
of peripheral details. This pattern is consistent
with laboratory-based studies of long-term re-
tention (e.g., Christianson 1992; Heuer &
Reisberg, 1990; Rudy & Goodman, 1991),
and with studies on adult witnesses to violent
crimes (e.g., Yuille & Cutshall, 1986, 1989;
Christianson & Hübinette, 1993; Yuille &
Tollestrup, 1992).
Based on Easterbrook’s (1959) hypothe-
sis, researchers have argued that physiological
and psychological arousal narrows the range
of cue utilization in an event, such that one
attends relatively more to the central aspects
and less to the periphery (see Christianson,
1992 for a review). According to Christian-
son, Nilsson, Mjörndal, Perris, and Tjelldén
(1986), increased emotional arousal or stress
leads to heightened attention and responsive-
ness to the central cues which are the source
of the increased arousal. Compared to a neu-
tral event, subjects exposed to an emotionally
stressful event, such as an accident or a crime,
are also more concerned with what they have
just experienced, which will lead to increased
post-stimulus elaboration (Christianson, 1984;
Christianson et al., 1991). Heuer (1987) ar-
gues that the recall pattern for emotional
events and associated details is different from
that of neutral events in that emotional memo-
ries center around the causes of the emo-
tions—the thoughts, feelings, and reactions of
the subject—and thus cause the subject to per-
sonalize a narrative account around the central
S.-Å. Christianson and T. Lindholm
elements of the emotional experience. In the
view of Christianson and Safer (1996), the
process of increased elaboration as thinking
about and reacting empathically to the emo-
tion-provoking information, may limit access
to the information that is in the mental periph-
ery. In cases of very strong emotions, the indi-
vidual may be occupied by intrusive thoughts
and feelings about the traumatic event, pre-
sumably focusing on certain threatening and
emotionally provocative details. An outcome
of narrowed attention and heightened psycho-
logical focusing on those critical details
which are the source of the emotional stress
may be regarded as “tunnel memory” (Chris-
tianson & Safer, 1996; Safer, Christianson,
Autry, & Österlund, in press). This mode of
processing, such as thinking about and react-
ing to the emotion-provoking information,
will promote memory of central detail infor-
mation and the gist of the emotional event but
actively inhibit processing of details that are
irrelevant, spatially peripheral to the emotion-
eliciting event or the source of emotional
stress, or both. Thus, the initial effect of nar-
rowed attention (i.e., tunnel memory) on trau-
matic event information, may explain why
subjects remember central details better for an
emotion-arousing event and peripheral details
better for a neutral event.
Attentional narrowing in terms of tunnel
memory effects resulting from emotional/trau-
matic experiences appear to lessen over time,
perhaps as the emotions evoked by the trau-
matic event becomes less intense. One impli-
cation of this change may be that the subject
will be able to think about and reconstruct
background information or information which
occurred just before or after the event. Thus,
over time the peripheral detail information of
a traumatic event will be more accessible than
in the initial recalls. Research has also shown
that the favorable central details effects of
traumatic events found with immediate testing
increased with delayed testing, compared to a
neutral condition, whereas the peripheral de-
tails disadvantage in the emotional condition
decreased (Burke et al., 1992).
Although the main part of recent labora-
tory and autobiographical studies indicate that
traumatic memories are well retained with re-
Fate of traumatic memories
spect to the traumatic event itself and the cen-
tral, critical detail information about the emo-
tion-laden event, there are, of course, factors
related to individual differences that may ob-
scure this pattern. Memory for details is to
some extent a function of whether a witness
has focused internally or externally during the
occurrence of the emotional event. While an
external focus on event information (actions,
perceptual details, etc.), may have a facilita-
tive effect on detail memory, an internal focus
on thoughts and emotions will restrict percep-
tion and elaboration of event information
(Goodman et al., 1996; Yuille & Tollestrup,
1992). Moreover, as noted earlier in this paper
regarding children’s memories of traumatic
events, a lack of parent–child interaction may
lead to forgetting rather than elaboration of
central, critical details of a trauma. Further-
more, it is resonable to assume that emotional
events have greater implications for the in-
dividual’s sense of self, which promotes
elaborative rehearsal and thus facilitate recol-
lection. However, a failure to integrate a trau-
matic experience with the sense of self which
is sometimes observed in prolonged or re-
peated trauma may result in denial, suppres-
sion, or dissociative reactions, such as psy-
chogenic amnesia, psychogenic fugue, or
multiple personality disorder (Christianson &
Nilsson, 1989). Finally, criminal psychopaths,
who seem to not experience emotional reac-
tions to emotionally valenced events, show no
differential processing of emotional informa-
tion and thus may fail to show enhanced
memory for central details of a traumatic
event (Christianson, Forth, Hare, Strachan,
Lidberg, & Thorell, 1996).
Implicit/non-conscious remembering of
traumatic events
Several researchers emphasize the role of im-
plicit/non-conscious/nonverbal retrieval mech-
anisms in remembering traumatic events (see
e.g., Brewin, 1996; Brewin, Dalgleish, & Jo-
seph, 1996; Johnson & Multhaup, 1992; Lev-
enthal, 1984; Tobias, Kihlstrom, & Schacter,
1992). For example, neuropsychological stud-
ies on amnesics suggest that certain character-
istics of negative emotional events are per-
769
ceived and retained in an automatic fashion
by memory mechanisms, which may not in-
volve consciously controlled memory pro-
cesses, either during acquisition or retrieval
(Johnson & Multhaup, 1992). The phenome-
non that affective components of an emotional
event are retrieved beyond the specific details
of the event itself, is illustrated in a study by
Johnson, Kim, and Risse (1985), in which se-
verely amnesic Korsakoff patients were pre-
sented with two pictures each portraying a
different male face. Subjects were then asked
to rate the two faces on several characteristics
pertaining to personality (e.g., honesty, gener-
osity). After having made the impression rat-
ings, the Korsakoffs were asked to listen to a
tape containing fictional biographical infor-
mation, which depicted the person on each
picture as either a “good guy” or a “bad guy.”
When the Korsakoffs were tested after a 20-
day interval, they recognized both target pic-
tures but were unable to recall the biographi-
cal information. Although the patients did not
have voluntary access to the biographical in-
formation, 78% of these had more favorable
impression ratings of the good guy than of the
bad guy. Using a similar design as that of
Johnson et al. (1985), Christianson, Säisä, &
Silfvenius (1995) presented patients with pic-
tures of ordinary faces and accompanying
neutral, pleasant, or unpleasant biographical
descriptions, while either the right or the left
cerebral hemisphere was deactivated in a so-
dium Amytal testing procedure. Results
showed a superior recognition of faces that
were associated with unpleasant biographies
following left hemisphere deactivation (i.e.,
testing the nonspeech dominant right hemi-
sphere). Although the content of the biograph-
ical information could not be recognized, the
ratings of the faces associated with the un-
pleasant biographies were less favorable.
The phenomenon when affective compo-
nents of an emotional event are retrieved be-
yond the specific details of the event itself is
further illustrated by a 17-year-old man who
was jailed and tortured in Argentina for 6
years. Barely alive, he was saved through
Amnesty International. After residing in Swe-
den for 20 years, he recounted the following
about his memories of the years of torture:
770
Memories come over me, not when I try to remem-
ber or want to. . . . We were going to play indoor
hockey. I was there with a few friends from work
and we were sitting in the locker room, changing
clothes and waiting for a couple playing badminton
to finish their game. It was a big hall where there
was a powerful echo to every loud sound. The two
people playing badminton seemed to be at it quite
intensely. . . . All of a sudden, I could feel how I
started to perspire. I felt my heart beating faster
and this nauseous feeling. I felt as if I was going
to faint. I could definitely feel that something was
happening to me. I could not control it. I thought
to myself: ‘What is happening to me?’ . . . Then,
all these sensations started to fade. My colleagues
asked me: ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘I’m okay,’ I said.
And a few minutes later, I understood. The sounds
from the hall where it echoed, were identical to the
sound that I had heard a thousand times in jail,
where they tortured people. The badminton players
screamed very loudly when they missed the ball or
something, and indeed screamed pretty ferociously.
There was also the noise of an almost naked body
falling to the floor, which was exactly the same
sound that you could hear in the isolation unit in
the jail in Argentina.” (Christianson, 1994, p. 360)
It seems that emotions per se constitute a
form of memory that the brain encodes and
stores. When such emotion memories are es-
tablished merely by means of subcortical
mechanisms (LeDoux, 1992), they may be en-
coded through nonconscious processing and
become very resistent to extinction. Several
researchers have argued that this kind of emo-
tionally monitored memory response is a rudi-
ment of earlier stages in evolution (see e.g.,
Christianson & Engelberg, 1998, and Gai-
notti, Caltagirone & Zoccolotti, 1993 for an
overview). That is, a type of primitive mem-
ory mechanism that ensures automatic and
nonconscious retention of distinct emotional
information from stressful events, to react to
threatening stimuli and maintain a defensive
behavior. More sophisticated mechanisms
have developed with evolution, either to inte-
grate an experience with relevant schemata at
a cognitive level or to block experiences from
consciousness that would otherwise impede
normal functioning in contemporary life.
Brewin et al. (1996) presents a dual-pro-
cessing model of PTSD, in which they pro-
pose that traumatic experiences can be ac-
S.-Å. Christianson and T. Lindholm
cessed in two ways; either through “verbally
accessible knowledge,” which implies a con-
scious experience of the trauma and deliber-
ate retrieval, or “situationally accessible
knowledge,” which implies a nonconscious
and automatic activation of traumatic memo-
ries in specific contexts. The latter form of
processing indeliberately triggers emotional
responses, as originally conditioned, in situa-
tions in which some aspects may be remi-
niscent of the traumatic event. Situationally
accessible knowledge is not available to con-
sciousness via so called verbally accessible
knowledge, which is generic knowledge that
enables an individual to appraise the implica-
tions of the traumatic event and to integrate it
with existing schemata of self-image and the
world in general. This dual representation the-
ory ties into observations that traumatic expe-
riences are often represented as memories of
feelings and bodily sensations as described
above. A further example of this is presented
by Howe et al. (1996), in describing recollec-
tion of traumatic physical experiences in chil-
dren. An 18-month-old girl had a fish bone
stuck in her throat and had to have it removed
by a physician. The girl was described as
“hysterical” during the removal of the fish
bone. Seven months later she was unable to
verbally relate any details about this event,
but she was nevertheless able to recognize the
physician. Further, she refused to eat fish and
was very reluctant to have her throat exam-
ined. This example of implicit remembering
leads us naturally to the next section of this
article, “forgetting.”
“Forgetting” Traumatic Experiences
While arguing that we normally remember
certain central characteristics of emotional
events, and that it is important to remember
upsetting and threatening events for the sake
of survival, we also need mechanisms to ex-
clude these negative experiences from our im-
mediate consciousness. Of course, we forget
information from emotional events as well as
everyday events. But forgetting seems to be
more functional when it comes to negative,
unpleasant experiences. For example, people
tend to remember painful experiences such as
Fate of traumatic memories
surgical operations or deliveries as less pain-
ful as time goes by (e.g., Robinson, Rosen,
Revill, David, & Rus, 1980). It is important to
note though that “forget” does not necessarily
imply that the information is lost forever but
that we sometimes have great difficulties ac-
cessing these events.
We know that memory of information as-
sociated with unpleasant emotional events,
that is, information preceding and following
such events, or peripheral, noncentral infor-
mation within an emotional scenario, seems
to be less accurately retained. This relative
decrement in memory may recede, however,
with strong retrieval support (e.g., reinstating
internal and external contexts), if delayed test-
ing is employed or after repeated memory
testing.
Recovery effects of laboratory-induced am-
nesia were demonstrated in a study by Chris-
tianson and Nilsson (1984) in which subjects
were presented with a series of pictures of
faces, which were either traumatic (grotesque
forensic pathology photographs of facial in-
juries) or neutral. Along with the faces, the
subjects were presented with verbal biograph-
ical information, such that each face was
given a name, an occupation, etc. When the
subjects were tested by means of free recall,
a memory impairment was obtained for the
words associated with the traumatic pictures,
and also for the to-be-remembered (TBR) in-
formation presented before and after these
horrible pictures (i.e., demonstrating retro-
grade and anterograde amnesia effects). When
memory of the TBR information was tested in
a subsequent recognition test, the retrograde
and anterograde amnesia effects receded com-
pletely. Informal questioning of the subjects
revealed that the images of the horrible faces
inhibited access to the associated verbal mate-
rial in a test of free recall. However, when
subjects were presented with the recognition
alternatives (i.e., provided with strong re-
trieval support), access to, or the search pro-
cess for the verbal information was facilitated.
These results suggest that retrograde and an-
terograde amnesia effects in emotionally
stressful situations might be a problem of ac-
cessibility of information rather than a prob-
lem of availability.
771
A similar conclusion can be drawn from
studies on hypermnesia (net gain in memory
when memory of certain information is tested
repeatedly, see Payne, 1987, for a review). In
a study by Scrivner and Safer (1988), subjects
were tested for detail memory of a violent
event in four consecutive recall tests within
48 hours. (Subjects had watched a videotape
that portrayed a burglar breaking into a house
and shooting three people.) The results
showed that subjects’ recall of details pre-
sented before, during, and after the violent
event became more accurate with repeated
testing. The authors concluded that “the ap-
parent amnesia for some details on the initial
recall trial represented temporary, not perma-
nent, failures of memory” (p. 375). Similarly,
Davis (1990) reports hypermnesia effects for
negative emotional experiences and concludes
that the initial difficulty in remembering cer-
tain kinds of negative emotional experiences
reflects limited access to, rather than limited
availability of, these experiences.
While repeated interviewing thus seems to
be beneficial in accessing emotional memo-
ries, we also have to bear in mind that this
may well lead to fabrication of details, mem-
ory distortions, or even false memories (Hy-
man, Husband, & Billings, 1995; Loftus,
1993; Memon & Young, 1997). Conceptual
memory components may change over time,
for example, as a result of the inadvertent in-
fluence exerted by suggestive connotations in
the way an interviewer phrases his questions
(Loftus, 1979) or by different motivational
and emotional states during the course of re-
counting the experience from time to time
(Loftus & Kaufman, 1992). The recounting of
traumatic memories may similarly alter their
meaning and content and, as pointed out by
Krystal, Southwick, and Charney (1995), in
particular as a result of the focus on central
details at the expense of peripheral informa-
tion belonging to the original trauma-inducing
event (Christianson, 1992). Another side ef-
fect is that recounting and repetition seems to
produce a general increase in subjective confi-
dence, regardless of whether the information
recalled is accurate or not (Hyman & Pent-
land, 1996; Zaragoza & Mitchell, 1996).
Sometimes we use more or less conscious/
772
nonconscious mechanisms to avoid or block
out unpleasant and threatening experiences.
Such mechanisms involve denial, active inhi-
bition, suppression, and dissociative mecha-
nisms, and would, in the words of Brière
(Denton, 1993), represent a “continuum of
cognitive avoidance” proportional to the psy-
chological pain tolerated by the individual. In
the psychoanalytic or psychodynamic idea
tradition, these types of defense mechanisms,
or “ego controls,” are considered to be acti-
vated to regulate emotional stress. The ideas
of Freud have been translated by Horowitz
(1979) into an information processing theory
postulating an interaction between stressful
information, pre-existent cognitive schemata
and so called “control operations.” Total inhi-
bition of a memory occurs when the individ-
ual is unable to integrate the experience with
existing schemata pertaining to self-image
and life in general. A partial inhibition is
achieved through control operations selecting
certain trains of thought, which restrain
threatening ideas or emotions associated with
the unpleasant experience. In a discussion of
intrusive memories, and the alternation be-
tween reexperiencing and avoiding trauma-re-
lated memories seen patients with post-trau-
matic stress disorder (PTSD), Brewin et al.
(1996) argue that we use inhibition as a cogni-
tive mechanism to avoid thinking about the
traumatic experiences and as a strategy to pre-
vent intrusive memories from reaching con-
sciousness.
Active inhibition has been demonstrated in
several laboratory studies using induced or di-
rected forgetting instructions (Anderson &
Spellman, 1995; Brewin et al, 1996; Conway,
personal communication, 1996). An example
of active inhibition or suppression of memo-
ries from a real-life experience is given in the
following statement from a child who had
once been sexually abused: “When I remem-
ber it, I keep trying to think about good things
like Christmas and it goes away “ (McCahill,
Meyer, & Fischman, 1979, p. 44). Another
example is provided by a Swedish serial
killer, who was interviewed by the first author
regarding his way of handling the memories
of the murders he had committed. When
memories of the victims and the killings were
S.-Å. Christianson and T. Lindholm
evoked, he took a bottle of dish soap or a
package of food or something like (it had to
be something boring) and started to read the
label of contents over and over again until the
anxiety-provoking thoughts, feelings, and
memories of the victims and killings van-
ished.
Adults sometimes react with denial when
confronted with shocking and unexpected in-
formation concerning their own health, or
sudden news about the death of a relative.
Sometimes, children can deny a highly un-
pleasant experience and treat it as if it never
happened. This type of denial has been ob-
served among children who have been ex-
ploited in the production of pornography. In
a Swedish interview study, Svedin and Back
(1996) found that even when the children
have been shown the documentation of the
abuse on video films or photos in police in-
vestigation, they insist that they have never
been part of it, maintain that they cannot re-
member, or simply refuse to talk about it.
When presented with a photo depicting him-
self naked with the abuser, one boy repeated
24 times “It’s not me, It couldn’t be me. . . .”
before he finally admitted what had happened.
Svedin and Back also report that, after re-
peated interviews, the children gradually
come to admit that they have been abused.
The process can be described as one of peel-
ing an onion—layer after layer must be cau-
tiously peeled away. It is important that the
child is given several opportunities to talk
about the abuse, since the more interviews
that are made, the more the children tell. The
most unpleasant and abusive details are often
the ones that are remembered last. In their in-
vestigation, only one child told more than the
pictures/films displayed. In a second interro-
gation, he told the police that he was forced to
have an anal intercourse with the perpetrator.
When asked why he did not disclose this in-
formation earlier, he answered, “You’ve got
to be strong enough to remember, then you
remember more and more.”
Blocking out traumatic experiences by
means of dissociative mechanisms has been
clinically observed in a wide range of trau-
matic situations and not seldom in victims of
rape and extreme and prolonged acts of vio-
Fate of traumatic memories
lence. For example, a former rape victim tem-
porarily dissociated during sexual contact
with her partner in order to avoid the sensa-
tion to trigger any memories of the rape expe-
rience. She began to think intensely until “she
felt she only had her head, an enormous head
and no longer a body” (van Wageningen,
1994). Severe cases of traumatic experiences
can also produce dissociative reactions such
as psychogenic amnesia, psychogenic fugue,
or multiple personality (Putnam, 1989). In
one case, a women who had witnessed her
husband being stabbed to death, could not re-
member being thrown to the ground, having a
knife against her throat and then watching her
husband being killed. The course of events in-
volving the woman was observed by other
witnesses who did not dare to intervene. Al-
though such reactions may show an initial for-
getting of the traumatic experience as well as
a loss of self-referential information (i.e., for-
getting of their primary identity), recovery ef-
fects of the previously forgotten information
are commonly observed in these cases.
Christianson and Nilsson (1989) describe a
rape victim who developed an amnesia for the
assault, but also for her personal life history.
When she was found in a park where she had
been out jogging, she could not explain what
had happened to her, who she was, where she
lived, etc. Later, when the woman was es-
corted by the police through the area in which
she was assaulted, she felt very uncomfortable
at specific places and she only recalled two
things—bricks and a path—but was not able
to explain why these details crossed her mind.
When she passed some crumbled bricks on
another small path, she expressed an unbear-
able anxiety and claimed that she associated
the unpleasant feelings with the pieces of
bricks on the path she was walking on. She
felt strongly that something must have hap-
pened to her at this place.1 This reaction illus-
trates a dissociation between memory of one’s
emotions and memory of the emotion-elicit-
ing information, such that the affective com-
1. From a confession by the rapist a few days earlier, the
policemen knew that this was the place where she had
been attacked and from which she was forced out onto
a small meadow where the rape occurred.
773
ponents of the emotional event are retained
separately from the specific details of the
event. Thus, as discussed earlier in this paper,
traumatic experiences are sometimes pre-
served merely through the emotions attached
to the trauma without having access to the
traumatic event information. Her amnesia las-
ted for 16 weeks and started to recede when
she was out running again for the first time
after the assault. It is conceivable that the in-
ternal context she experienced at the time of
the attack was reinstated when she was run-
ning again (e.g., increased motor activity,
heightened body temperature, hyperventila-
tion, increased cardiac activity). At this time,
she was also exposed to external cues that
strongly reminded her of the place of the at-
tack (e.g., a bushy environment, a gravel path
with pieces of bricks, and a pile of bricks).
The reinstatement of internal and external
context information has not only been found
to be functional in crime investigations as
shown by Fisher and Geiselman (1992), but
also in experimental research. Several labora-
tory and real-life studies on context effects
have shown that people’s ability to remember
a certain event is enhanced if the external and
internal context in which the individual per-
ceived the event is reinstated at the time of
retrieval. We know that information learned
in one place may be difficult to remember in
another environment (see, e.g., Godden &
Baddeley, 1975). There has also been consid-
erable research on how one’s emotional state
(i.e., internal context) affect what is retrieved
from memory (see Blaney, 1986; Bower,
1981; Eich, 1980; Kuiken, 1989). If a mood
state acts as a critical context cue, we can as-
sume that mood is a relatively weak cue for
learning and retrieving neutral events, but
may be a potent cue for learning and retriev-
ing emotionally stressful events. Shortly after
a traumatic experience, the strong affective
reaction may act as a cue and cause reactiva-
tion of the emotion-provoking event informa-
tion. That is, a negative emotional reaction
like fear, disgust, or anger, may cue a person
to remember that there was something nega-
tive or upsetting in what he or she just experi-
enced. In contrast to neutral situations where
the detail information normally does not elicit
774
feelings that are intrinsic to the event informa-
tion, there is a natural correspondence be-
tween what a person feels and the emotion-
eliciting information in emotionally arousing
situations. Thus, to obtain mood-dependent
retrieval effects, it is important that the emo-
tional reaction is an inherent property of the
TBR event. That is, the individual must per-
ceive the emotion as causally belonging to the
event which give rise to it (Bower, 1987). In
line with this reasoning, central details of emo-
tionally stressful events will be remembered
quite well when the emotional stress is evoked
by the TBR event rather than by a source that
is causally unrelated to the TBR event (Christi-
anson & Nilsson, 1984; Christianson & Mjörn-
dal, 1985; Christianson et al., 1986).
Remembering and forgetting childhood
trauma
Although there are documentation of forgot-
ten, as well as of remembered, childhood
trauma, it seems that most often the memory
processes associated with traumas experi-
enced in early age are not simply a matter of
either/or, such that we either remember or for-
get them. Instead, both forgetting and remem-
bering can occur selectively, and individuals
may represent these memories in very differ-
ent ways. In the following section, we will
discuss how childhood trauma may be repre-
sented in memory and how these experiences
may influence later development and adult
memory processes.
It is well documented that we need to talk
about memories of traumatic incidents to be
able to cope with and integrate them. Holding
back memories from a trauma has been shown
to cause psychiatric symptoms such as depres-
sion, psychosomatic problems, and personal-
ity disorders (Pynoos & Eth, 1985; Horowitz,
1986; van der Kolk et al, 1996). We also
know that our physical health benefits from
talking about such experiences (see Harber &
Pennebaker, 1992; Pennebaker, 1989 for re-
views). While communication seems to be a
necessary prerequisite for fully recovering
from a trauma, confiding to someone else and
talking about such an experience is not with-
out problems. Recollecting a traumatic event
often evokes strong feelings of distress, and it
S.-Å. Christianson and T. Lindholm
takes courage and strong motivation to con-
front these memories. A reluctance from peo-
ple in the environment to listen to and even
to believe in a traumatized person further
complicates dealing with the experience.
Talking about and sharing the experience of a
trauma is particularly important for children.
Children lack the experiences and resources
to handle trauma on their own and therefore
they need a lot of support from parents to
overcome these experiences. Children who
have been involved for example in accidents
or catastrophes, usually process the experi-
ence by talking about it with their parents who
help them come to terms with the event. If a
close relative, on the other hand, is responsi-
ble for inflicting the trauma, such as in incest
cases or domestic violence, a child is not in
the same position to deal with the experience.
Children who witness extreme acts of vio-
lence such a parent’s homicide, domestic vio-
lence and rape, or suicidal behavior are likely
to sustain severe traumatic stress (Pynoos &
Eth, 1985). These children cannot escape the
passive viewing of the overwhelming event,
and because of the parent’s lack of concern,
the possibilities of processing the event and
overcoming the trauma are often limited.
Difficulties in sharing memories of a
trauma are especially salient in cases of sex-
ual abuse. A child who is threatened with
physical punishment or who is told she will
be abandoned if she tells about the abuse may
prevent herself from thinking of any experi-
ence that these threats relate to. Children may
also feel shame and guilt for what has hap-
pened to them, that they are not worth loving,
and that they have given their consent to the
abuse. Threats and feelings of guilt may be
decisive for inhibiting thoughts about the
abuse, which may be a way for the child to
acquire a sense of relief and of being more in
control. The child may deny that he or she has
been actually abused, maintain that he or she
cannot remember, or simply refuse to talk
about it.
That parental support may have important
implications for a child’s memory of a stress-
ful event was shown in the study by Goodman
et al. (1996) referred to earlier in this article.
Goodman et al. found that children whose
parents did not discuss the painful medical ex-
Fate of traumatic memories
amination with them and did not attend to
their needs had less accurate memories and
were more suggestible in a subsequent inter-
view about the event.
Being prevented from discussing and shar-
ing feelings and memories of an early trauma
may thus make these events difficult to re-
member. Further support for this is provided
in a study on memory for incidents of sexual
abuse, Williams (1994) interviewed women
who had been taken to a sexual abuse clinic as
children, under the age of 12 years. Williams
found that of the 129 women who were inter-
viewed, 38% could not remember the abuse
for which they had been treated 17 years ear-
lier. Factors related to the forgetting of trau-
matic incidents in childhood seem to be
whether the trauma takes place in very early
age (1–3 years), if someone in the family is
responsible for inflicting the trauma, and
whether the child experiences repeated
trauma. In this study, it was also observed that
the women who always remembered the
abuse also recalled more supportive interac-
tions surrounding the experience from their
mothers than those women claiming to have
forgotten the incident for a period of time (Fi-
vush, Pipe, Murachver, & Reese, 1997).
It is relatively uncommon, however, that a
child blocks out the whole experience of a
trauma. Instead, the child or adult may re-
member some parts of the event, while other
parts remain inaccessible. For example, a
woman had during her entire life as an adult
been able to remember the sexual abuse she
had been subjected to as a child. However, it
was not until she, in her middle age, fell into
a crisis and tried to commit suicide that the
memory of the most painful incident from the
abuse came back.
Another strategy that children use to han-
dle a traumatic experience when there is no
room for mourning and assimilation of the
event is to inhibit feelings associated with the
incident. The traumatic event per se is thus
remembered, but the memory lacks any emo-
tional associations. Although, by using this
strategy, the anxiety and pain associated with
the event may be avoided in the short run,
feelings that are dissociated from awareness
in this way will remain unprocessed and dis-
integrated, and as such they may cause the
775
individual severe problems with handling
stressful experiences in adulthood. An unpro-
cessed childhood trauma may, for example,
becomes reactivated if the individual experi-
ences a new trauma as an adult and can de-
crease the individual’s ability to cope con-
structively with this new negative experience.
Reactivation of an earlier trauma was proba-
bly one of the factors that caused one young
woman to develop a total retrograde amnesia
after she had been brutally raped while she
was out jogging (Christianson & Nilsson,
1989). When her memory of the rape started
to recover, those of another incident in child-
hood began to surface. The first thing she re-
membered was the smell of beer from the rap-
ist, and this was something that triggered the
memory of a sexual abuse she had experi-
enced as a 9-year-old girl. The abuser in
childhood had also smelled of beer. While she
had been aware of this childhood incident as
an adult, she had never expressed or discussed
the panic and fear she felt at that time, un-
voiced feelings that were brought to the fore
by the rape.
Disintegrated feelings from childhood
trauma may, in adulthood, also result in psy-
chological numbness that prevents the indi-
vidual from coping with everyday difficulties,
as is illustrated by the following case. A 7-
year-old boy was severely burned when the
barbecue lighting fluid his father was using
suddenly exploded over him. The boy was
treated for his physical injuries, but at the hos-
pital he received no psychological assistance
to help him deal with the trauma. His parents,
occupied with guilt for being responsible for
the accident, avoided discussing the event
with him out of fear of further traumatizing
him. Because their son did not express any
physical and psychological pain, the parents
were advised by the medical staff to not
“wake up” his memories. In a note from his
2-month hospital stay, the physicians describe
him as detached and hard to activate. The boy
eventually recovered from his physical injur-
ies, and as an adult he lived with the convic-
tion that the accident never actually affected
him psychologically. However, while socially
well adjusted, there were problems that pre-
vented him from functioning fully. He strug-
gled with feelings of helplessness, and he was
776
constantly afraid that something terrible
would happen if he did something wrong. He
also had problems in communicating with his
parents. After a family conflict, 25 years after
the accident, the man fell into a deep crisis for
which he sought psychiatric treatment. In con-
nection with this treatment, the memories of
the feelings he experienced during the accident
slowly began to recover. Over a period of sev-
eral months, memory after memory came back.
He remembered the feeling of burning all over
his body, the pain, sounds and smells from the
accident. With the recovery and delayed pro-
cessing of these memories, the man was even-
tually able to disentangle the problems he had
in his life and to deal with the dysfunctions in
his relation with his parents.
Unprocessed and disintegrated memories
of a childhood trauma may not only cause
problems and suffering for the individual him/
herself, but can also constitute a serious threat
for other people. Perpetrators of serious
crimes, such as murder or rape, have often ex-
perienced severe traumas in childhood for
which they have never received any help.
These persons, seemingly cold-blooded, with-
out remorse, and indifferent regarding their
crimes and victims, do not lack emotions.
Rather, as a result of the unbearable life situa-
tions they often have experienced during their
childhood, they have learned to turn off their
feelings. Thus, instead of being confronted,
the feelings are acted out, for example by in-
juring others.
The risk associated with persons who have
no contact with, or control over, feelings from
previous traumatic experiences is illustrated
by the tragic murders of two girls in a small
Swedish village a few years ago. The mur-
derer, an 18-year-old boy from the girls’ peer
group, had taken a walk with the first victim
during a party, when he was suddenly over-
whelmed by rage and strangled her. At a new
party a few months later, he went out with
another girl from the group. They had sex,
and while dressing afterward, the rage came
over him again. He strangled the girl and
threw huge stones on her head to make sure
she would die. When arrested, the young man
soon confessed to the two murders, and he
was able to give the police a detailed account
S.-Å. Christianson and T. Lindholm
of what had happened. However, he had no
emotional associations to his detailed memo-
ries, and seemed totally unaffected when he
described the murders or was confronted with
pictures of the girls’ bodies. He could not give
any explanations to the killings except that,
for some reason, he had suddenly felt an enor-
mous fury that he took out on the girls. He
had no answers as to what had made him so
furious, since neither of the girls had done
him any harm. Although his fury and im-
pulses to kill the girls seemed totally unex-
plainable from the scenario, it soon became
clear that the boy had been emotionally unsta-
ble during the last couple of years, after expe-
riencing several traumatic life events. Three
years before the murders, his younger brother
and closest friend had suddenly committed
suicide without leaving any messages or ex-
planations. His mother went away on a jour-
ney after the tragedy and left the children
home alone with their grief. After his broth-
er’s suicide, the man had become aggressive
and violent, and his girlfriend of 7 years be-
came afraid of him and broke off the relation-
ship. During the same period of time, he
learned that his younger sister had been raped.
He never talked to anyone about how he felt
after all these adversities. He did not have a
close relationship to either of his parents and
had never been able to communicate with
them about his problems. His father was an
alcoholic who had battered his wife and chil-
dren regularly. His parents divorced when he
was 8 years old and during the worst period
of the divorce, the children had been sent to a
psychiatric clinic where they had stayed for a
couple of months. Early in life, he had learned
to turn off (dissociate) his feelings, and he ap-
plied this strategy to skirt the negative things
that had happened to him during the last
years. However, the unprocessed and disinte-
grated feelings from these incidents did not
vanish. When something, even if only re-
motely, reminded him of all these deceits, the
feelings overwhelmed him and he completely
lost control of the situation. As he stated in
an interview after the trial, “Maybe I keep too
much inside, and then something happens,
and I let it all out at once.”
As mentioned earlier, it is relatively un-
Fate of traumatic memories
common that memories of traumatic events
are totally blocked out from awareness.
Rather, a child who gets no help in dealing
with a trauma may use inhibitory processes
and dissociative mechanisms to avoid aware-
ness of some part of the memory, such as the
fear and anxiety that was experienced during
the event. Occasionally, however, the trauma
is so difficult for the child to handle that nei-
ther facts nor feelings associated with the
event can be represented as an explicit mem-
ory. In cases of sexual abuse or when a child
has witnessed his or her parents commit a
crime, there are, apart from the traumatic ex-
perience per se, often feelings of loyalty and
fear of physical punishment or abandonment
that make the memory of the event even more
threatening to discuss or mention. In these sit-
uations, the child may deal with the situation
by blocking every thought and memory of the
event, and try to live as if nothing ever hap-
pened.
In the closing of our paper, we will use an
example originally presented by Christianson
and Wentz (1996), which illustrates how an
early trauma that the child must discard from
reality and deny, may later be expressed in
forms of devastating psychiatric symptoms.
One young woman sought the school doctor
for help with some strange thoughts that made
her life very complicated. She thought she
could smell a cadaverous odour at home, and
she felt as if a corpse was hidden in the small
apartment where she lived with her mother
and younger sister. She was afraid of the bac-
teria that might emanate from this corpse and
had to constantly wash her hands to make
sure she wouldn’t be contaminated. The
woman was referred to a psychiatric clinic,
but although she had occasional contact with
a psychiatrist, her problems grew worse. She
became more and more confused, and she was
burdened with feelings of guilt. She couldn’t
really explain why she felt guilty, but she
thought that somehow it concerned the death
of a small child. She often quarrelled with her
mother, and their relation did not improve
when her sister became ill and died. The years
went by, but her problems did not diminish.
She was constantly thinking about corpses,
death, and contamination, and claimed never
777
to know whether the things she experienced
were real or imagined. Her washing rituals
were so elaborate that they occupied most of
her time, and she became depressed and iso-
lated. At the age of 45, her compulsive
thoughts and behaviors had made her severely
invalidized, and she lived at a psychiatric
clinic. However, at this time a macabre dis-
covery was made in the apartment where she
grew up and where her mother still lived. The
mother, now old and suffering from severe se-
nile dementia, was visited by a home assis-
tant, who started to clean up one of the closets
in the apartment. While cleaning, the assistant
smelled a pungent odour from an old bag at
the very back of the closet. She opened the
bag, and there, wound up in layer after layer
of old rags, was the mummified corpse of a
newborn baby. The forensic investigation re-
vealed that the corpse was between 35 and 50
years old, and that the baby had been alive
at birth. The age of the corpse excluded the
possibility that either of the old woman’s
daughters could have given birth to the baby.
The police tried to interrogate the only living
daughter and her elderly mother to clarify
where the baby came from, but neither of
them seemed to have any memories of the
child. It seemed clear, however, that the
mother had delivered the baby. She was un-
married at that time, and lived as a social out-
cast in great poverty with her two daughters.
What actually happened after the baby was
born will remain a secret. Maybe the mother
could not face taking care of a third child un-
der the circumstances, and chose to kill it and
never mention it again, while still keeping it.
Her daughters grew up with the dead baby
hidden and smelling in the closet. The oldest
daughter, who might have been present when
the baby was born and killed, was left without
any explanations. Either the most important
person in her life, her mother, was a murderer
or she was imagining things. The choice was
probably not very difficult for the little girl,
and she adapted to the situation by actively
blocking the thoughts of what happened. In-
stead of maintaining a conscious memory of
the event with the baby, her experience was
converted to a series of psychiatric symptoms
that crippled her for the rest of her life.
778
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