As an adult, I consider myself to be quite curious, even inquisitive but when I think back to my childhood and adolescence, I'm dismayed that I don’t recall any such feelings from those years. It's as if I experienced that period of my life in some sort of senses-numbing fog.
It wasn't safe for me to ask questions. It wasn’t safe for me to wonder.
When you experience severe and repeated childhood traumas, you learn to accept everything around you because you fundamentally understand that you cannot trust your own senses. Everything around you becomes unreliable and, by extension, inconsequential.
It becomes vital for survival to understand that anything and everything can change in an instant. Moods shift, the meanings of words change, stationary inanimate objects suddenly become fast-moving dangerous weapons … it’s safer to accept the environment, the surroundings knowing that, expecting that the truth of the given situation only exists in that singular instance.
I think this is a large part of why survivors of chronic trauma experience such notable self-biographical memory gaps and why it’s often difficult to imagine, to hope for the future.
If what we know is unreliable, how can we possibly speculate, hypothesise, dream …
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