For a good many years as a child, I had a recurring nightmare. In the dream, I’d be staring at my hands, wide-fingered and bloody. In the dark, I could barely make out the blood or the outline of my hands and I’d strain my eyes so hard to bring them into focus.
My mother has always told me that I had severe sleep disturbances as a child. She told me of going into my room at night to check on me and I’d be sitting straight up in the bed, staring, wide-eyed and unresponsive. She’d lay me back down and tuck me in, but these moments were disturbing to her, as they would be to any parent.
I wonder if either of both of these experiences (the dreams and the sleep disturbanes) were born from a horrific moment in my childhood — which is my first concrete memory.
Few adults can remember anything that happened to them before the age of 3. Now, a new study has documented that it’s about age 7 when our earliest memories begin to fade, a phenomenon known as “childhood amnesia.” — Janice Wood Associate News Editor, Psych Central website
My memory serves me that I was three, despite the theory of Child Amnesia or Infantile Amnesia, which refers to the inability of adults to access memories before a certain age. Whether this is due to Freud’s theory connecting Infantile Amnesia to “the repression of traumatic memories occurring in the child’s early psychosexual development,”¹ or whether it is due to the inability of infants, toddlers, and young children’s cognitive ability to create and “store” memory, it is widely held that earliest memories begin around age 7.
I hold to the latter theory but will leave the conclusion to the experts. All I have to base my reasoning on is my own personal experience, which was a terribly traumatic one.
The Electrocution of a Child — ME
My family supports that I was three or four when the incident occurred. I recall very clearly my mother on the phone; the yellow rotary wall phone, a long length of yellow spiral cord hanging down the wall and stretched around the end of the wall to where my mother was having a conversation with her mother (my Mamaw) on the telephone.
I recall the sound of the phone cord moving back and forth across the wall as my mother moved around at the end of the line. I remember the moment quite vividly. I was playing on the kitchen floor an imagination game; my “Mamaw” was stuck inside that hole in the wall and I was trying to save her. I had something in my hand that would fit. I put it into the hole in my efforts to free her.
Keys into a light socket.
I am told the shock blew me across the kitchen and caught the wall on fire. I am also told I was treated at the hospital for shock, and that on the drive there I held my hands close to my face staring at them. My fingers and my lips were blue.
Although early memories are inaccessible to adults, early-life events, such as neglect or aversive experiences, can greatly impact adult behavior and may predispose individuals to various psychopathologies.²
I am certain that this event has affected my psychological development as an individual. I have had a life-long struggle with anxiety, OCD tendencies, Dermatillomania (Excoriation Disorder)⁴ and have been diagnosed with PTSD (understandably.)
Traumatic events have a profound sensory impact on young children. Their sense of safety may be shattered by frightening visual stimuli, loud noises, violent movements, and other sensations associated with an unpredictable, frightening event. The frightening images tend to recur in the form of nightmares, new fears, and actions or play that reenact the event.³
At the time of this event, being such a young child meant that I was at particular risk for developing issues later in life as a result. According to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, “Young children who experience trauma are at particular risk because their rapidly developing brains are very vulnerable. Early childhood trauma has been associated with reduced size of the brain cortex. This area is responsible for many complex functions including memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thinking, language, and consciousness. These changes may affect IQ and the ability to regulate emotions, and the child may become more fearful and may not feel as safe or as protected.”
Fortunately, I tested high IQ, maintained a successful school experience and went on to complete my college education in my 30’s. But the feeling of safety and ability to function socially, emotionally, psychologically and to some degree cognitively (difficulty retaining information, short term memory issues, psychological challenges, and sleep disturbances) were possibly impaired as a result of this event.
How much of these issues are genetic? And how much could be attributed to this traumatic experience? Could this have lent to the chronic pain and nerve pain that are so much of my life today? I find these to be fascinating questions and ones that would not be easily answered without intense psychological, physiological, and lengthy study by a battery of professionals.
For now, it is simply a day in my history that I’d love to know more about.
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