The memory keeper is not intentionally holding onto memories, they are simply those whose memories are without blank spots. They are able to recall without effort every trauma that they experienced and what they witnessed happening to others. There tends to be at least one in every dysfunctional family and it’s usually the scapegoat sibling. This explains why – traditionally speaking – the scapegoat walks away because the scapegoat remembers everything.
Meanwhile, other family members are in various degrees of enmeshment with the Cluster B disordered (Trauma Glossary 1) parent. Unable to recall everything, they tend to assume it’s normal to have holes in their memory. After all, they think, we can’t be expected to remember every little thing, can we? They may recall a handful of bad memories, but with so many pieces of the puzzle missing, they can’t help but think, “Was it really that bad?”
How is it that some retain the memories and others have trouble recalling them? It’s the same phenomenon that exists in family dysfunction, where siblings tend to have different experiences and differing perspectives on the same events. And like everything else when it comes to trauma, there is a science behind it.
In this article, we will revisit three old pieces I wrote.
6 Assigned Roles in Family Dysfunction. We will explore those siblings once they are all grown up. For there is one other sibling besides the scapegoat who tends to have a long memory, and that’s the surrogate partner. The difference is that the scapegoat remembers all the abuses inside the home. The surrogate partner remembers being a target for bullies outside the home.
Social Bonding Hormones: From Low, Ideal, to High. We will explore Oxytocin, the neurotransmitter in charge of our social memories. Our oxytocin levels determine who among the siblings becomes the memory keeper and who will have trouble remembering.
Hippocampus: How Memories Affect Us in 4 Visual Aids. We will touch upon how certain memories become declarative memories, which are long-term memories that are easy to recall.
The Science Experiment that Represents Enmeshment vs. Social Anxiety
Here is an excerpt from my article that describes the power of oxytocin on our social memories.
One group of mice was missing the oxytocin receptors to the brain while another group had an increased number of receptors to the brain. One at a time, each mouse was put into a cage with a gang of aggressive mice. Each mouse was in there long enough to have its butt kicked by the aggressive mice. Then they were taken out for six hours and promptly placed right back into the cage with the same mice. Those who had no receptors to the brain were calm, as they had no memory of the attack. Those whose brains were overloaded with oxytocin were scared to death and went out of their way to avoid the aggressive mice.
See citation [1] at the end if you would like to see the article describing this experiment and their findings.
Let’s look at the mice who are calm around their abusers as representing the house tyrant’s children who stay enmeshed in adulthood. Now let’s look at those who are going out of their way to avoid their abusers as representing those who walk away from the threat. Be it the family dysfunction, or in the case of the surrogate partner, the outside world. They are the memory keepers.
We tend to think of oxytocin as the bonding and connecting with others hormone. (The so-called “love” hormone.) While it’s true that ideal amounts of oxytocin to the brain mean that we have enough positive social memories to do just that. However, low oxytocin to the brain is an indicator for memory loss and a tendency to be too trusting. Without our past experiences helping us identify bad people in our present life, we are at risk of being like the mice who are calm and docile in the presence of abusers who will abuse them again. After all, low oxytocin also inhibits stress.
Just because the memory keeper knows how to spot a threat and walk (or run) away, does not mean that they fare better than those with low oxytocin. High oxytocin to the brain is an indicator for trust issues and social anxiety. Too many social defeat memories, such as schoolyard bullying, public humiliation, and repeated abuse by the parent create a high-stress outlook. We live in fear because we are “seeing” too many potential threats.
The Curse of the Memory Keeper
The memory keeper feels like they are under a curse because – thanks to how the brain fires random memories throughout the day – any number of painful memories can come flooding back in a moment’s notice. See also intrusive thoughts in Trauma Glossary 2. “Every day for the rest of my life,” thinks the memory keeper, “I am forced to remember everything that happened to me.” So, not only are they struggling with social anxiety and trust issues, they have multiple long-term memories that overwhelm them with pain and “confirm” their sense of self.
The memory keeper has two choices for coping in adulthood. They can either process their trauma and do the healing work or they can distract themselves with excess. Excessive workaholism, substance abuse, or distracting activities that help them escape the present moment are some of the ways the memory keeper will cope and therefore remain stuck in their trauma. The scapegoat is more likely find support groups and seek therapy because so many painful experiences happened inside their childhood home, they can’t help but find relief away from it.
However, it’s the reverse for the surrogate partner. Between the excessive bullying outside the home and the parents ignoring their cries for help, so much defeatist thinking sets in that seeking help as an adult doesn’t occur to them.
So, what about the other siblings? Why can’t they remember as easily as the memory keeper? It all comes down to the perspective we were fed by the house tyrant who was triangulating (Trauma Glossary 1) all the siblings. To understand that one, we need to move from the neurotransmitters and into the parts of the brain, specifically the hippocampus.
The Hippocampus: Our Memory Storage
Think of the hippocampus as your brain’s hard drive. It’s your memory storage that needs daily disk-defragmenting and updates in order to experience new learning. Because let’s face it. If we could recall every single mundane event that ever happened in our lives, we would have a hard time finding those one or two past experiences we need to help us figure out what to do in the present – especially those split second decisions we must make.
So, the hippocampus will “throw out” memories that it deems unnecessary and keep those that seem useful in some way towards managing life. The problem is the hippocampus still operates from primitive times, when surviving hinged on recalling bad experiences over the good. From the primitive time’s perspective, it just makes more sense that remembering which areas of the forest to avoid – lest we become lunch – are more important than remembering that a tribe member admired our stone carving.
Therein lies the problem for the childhood trauma survivor. We have more bad experiences and fewer positive memories than the average person. The hippocampus is turning the bad experiences into permanent (declarative) memories to help us survive while erasing the positive experiences that can help us learn how to thrive.
Confirmation Experiences Become Declarative Memories
I’m going to give you two vocabulary words to help you understand how we end up with permanent memories which impact our outlook on life. Confirmation experiences and Declarative memories. If you clicked on the visual aid link in this article’s opening, you may have seen this.
Confirmation Experiences create what we know as confirmation bias. They are two or more similar experiences that determine how much (or how little) confidence and self-esteem we have. What many people don’t know is that there’s a difference between the two and how we achieve them.
- Confidence is what we do and our ability (or not) to acknowledge it. So, two or more similar accomplishments have the power to increase our confidence and fill us with “I can” thinking. Conversely, making two or more similar mistakes without resolution and we forget to treat them like a learning and growth experience, has the power to lower our confidence and it fills us with “I can’t” thinking.
- Self-esteem is the feedback we receive from others and our ability (or not) to internalize it. So, two or more similar compliments from others have the power to increase our self-esteem. Two or more similar insults from others have the power to lower our self-esteem. In either case, it gives language to our sense of identity with “I am” thinking.
Declarative Memories are long term memories that are easily recalled. In other words, they are the memories that the hippocampus deems necessary for our existence. Confirmation experiences have the power to create declarative memories. Every declarative memory tends to contain one of the three beliefs: “I can”, “I can’t”, or “I am”, either consciously, emotionally, or a hidden thought behind the experience.
Confirmation Bias Becomes Cognitive Bias
Once we develop confirmation bias, we are at risk of full-blown cognitive bias. Then we are really in trouble. If our confidence and self-esteem are low for example, we develop what I refer to as rebuttal scripts that operate on autopilot. Rebuttal scripts look at our accomplishments and small wins as “they don’t count” for whatever reason, while chastising ourselves over minor mistakes. And the same will go for positive feedback from others while internalizing insults and criticism. Our hippocampus doesn’t stand a chance at processing new information that can help us build confidence or self-esteem. It listens to our “doesn’t count” rebuttal scripts and thinks, Oh I’m receiving useless information; let me erase that for you so that we can keep making decisions with the beliefs we already have.
No wonder trauma’s golden rule is that it keeps us stuck until we start healing from it.
Revisiting the Memory Keeper and the Other Siblings
First, when raised by a Cluster B parent, no child is exempt from abuse. Remember there are 7 types of abuses and not all of them are physical and not all of them are obvious. Now with that said, the overall perception is that the scapegoat is the one who is the most obviously abused. The house tyrant fills the siblings’ heads with seemingly justifiable reasons for this. For example, the scapegoat is “bad, a trouble-maker”, etc. Not only do the siblings believe this at least somewhat, but they also don’t understand that they, too are being abused but in different ways from the scapegoat. They also don’t understand that while the house tyrant is telling the scapegoat misinformation about themselves, they are telling the other children misinformation about their identity too.
What about the other memory keeper, the surrogate partner? The other siblings aren’t able to see what the surrogate partner is going through at school. They hear the house tyrant’s version, that the surrogate partner is either “too sensitive, isn’t doing a good enough job ignoring bullies, too socially awkward, just doesn’t know how to stand up for themselves”. Never mind that no one bothered to go to the school and intervene or teach the surrogate partner how to defend themselves. When the inevitable happens and all the stress at school impacts the surrogate partner’s ability to concentrate, “slacker” and “learning disability” are added to the narrative. The other siblings accept it as though that explains all the problems that sibling has been having all along. Once again, misinformation about the child’s identity becomes the false-truth.
The Other Siblings
This article has addressed how bad memories have a stronger impact on us than positive ones. That’s why statistically speaking (see my disclaimer at the end just in case you identify as the memory keeper but you were not the scapegoat or surrogate partner) the scapegoat and surrogate partner tend to be the memory keeper. So, when we have one sibling who is touted as the “bad one” inside the home and/or one who is bullied away from the home, the other children secretly feel lucky by comparison. And that is key to our perception which has the power to alter our memory recall – feeling lucky compared to the one who suffered the “most” abuse.
Parentified Child
The parentified child was told that they were the “mature and responsible one” to the point where it became their identity. They accumulated enough so-called positive memories that confirmed that their value is measured by their usefulness. They won’t necessarily remember how they had to surrender their childhood to act as a pseudo-parent to the siblings and to their own parents. The parentified child is unlikely to recall being called selfish if and whenever they wanted to be a kid for a while. Their greatest challenge is understanding where their self-abandonment (Trauma Glossary 2) issues stem from.
Lost Child
The lost child is the one who is – statistically speaking – most likely to have major gaps in their memory. That’s because they dissociated the most through their childhood. The lost child was told they were the one who gave the house tyrant “the least amount of trouble”. That’s because the lost child learned to keep themselves as quiet and invisible as possible. Making waves or using their voice was dangerous. And so, the lost child’s greatest challenge is finding their voice and understanding where their fear of using their voice stems from.
Golden Child
The golden child got along famously with the house tyrant. And so, they grew up wondering why the scapegoat had to always cause problems. The golden child loved the scapegoat and also felt loved by the tyrant. If only those two would just patch things up, the golden child thinks. What the golden child doesn’t fully remember was how the house tyrant was feeding the golden child all the reasons why they love their golden child. Some of those reasons didn’t match the golden child’s authentic self. But in fear of losing that love, the golden child disowned parts of themselves to conform to the image the tyrant wanted. The golden child’s greatest challenge is to discover their authentic self and to understand where their crisis of identity stems from.
Mini-Me
The mini-me (golden child gone terribly wrong) was infantilized and toxically validated by the house tyrant. No matter what wrong-doing the mini-me committed outside the home, the tyrant was quick to tell the mini-me that it wasn’t their fault – it was everyone else’s fault. The mini-me grew up delighting in the scapegoat and/or surrogate partner’s suffering. That’s because the tyrant manipulated the mini-me into believing they deserved it. The mini-me grew up with so much enmeshment and toxic validation from the tyrant, there isn’t much hope for this one. That’s because the mini-me’s greatest challenge requires seeing their entire so-called great childhood through the lens of reality.
They would have to see their primary attachment figure as the house tyrant they were the whole time. The mini-me would also have to see the memory keeper siblings as the victims and see themselves as little henchmen to the house tyrant. They would have to accept that everything they grew up perceiving was a lie the whole time. And let’s face it. That’s too much cognitive dissonance for anyone to handle.
Citations and Disclaimer
[1] ‘Love hormone’ is two-faced: Oxytocin strengthens bad memories and can increase fear and anxiety
Disclaimer: When I speak of the scapegoat and surrogate partner as the ones most likely to remember everything, I do hope you understand I am speaking of statistics. This does not in any way imply that only scapegoats and surrogate partners remember. Nor does it mean that all scapegoats will always walk away. As a matter of fact, I know one golden child who walked away while her scapegoat sibling was the one who reestablished a connection with their borderline mother, the house tyrant. That same golden child was also instrumental in helping me understand the golden child’s perspective when I wrote the article on the 6 Assigned Roles in Family Dysfunction. So, understand there are exceptions to every household and individual within.
Tools & Further Reading
What can we do about the overkill of bad memories for the memory keeper? And what can we do about retrieving our lost memories? Well, apart from processing our trauma (which we will talk about next week) there is plenty we can do. First, I would like to offer this perspective. All these memory gaps versus those with long memories all began under triangulation in the childhood home. It’s a wonderful opportunity to build bridges with those siblings who are interested.
Look to the one who established the longest distance from the childhood home. Chances are that’s the sibling who is the memory keeper. Reach out and let them know, “I’m sorry for what happened to you. I am interested in healing now but I have trouble remembering what happened. Can you help me?” You just might be pleasantly surprised by the response!
Another thing we can do for our memory retrieval is starting with what we can remember. For example, can you remember your childhood mailing address? How about the years (dates or ages) you lived in that home? Then use your five senses, like what did the house look like? What sounds do you hear when remembering it? What about feelings (emotional or touch) or smells?
Finally, I would like to offer you a couple of articles I wrote in the past on our cognitive bias and what we can do about it.
Cognitive Bias: Impostor Syndrome and its Counterpart, the Dunning-Kruger Effect. If you want more information on the two most opposite extremes on cognitive bias and what we can do about it, clicking on that link may help.
Cognitive Bias to Cognitive Dissonance: How Our Beliefs Direct Our Lives. This article is a continuation of the one above.