Trauma and Old Memories

I gave birth to my second child and maybe two weeks later resumed therapy. My therapist did a small role playing thing and I was suddenly in incapacitating physical pain so bad he wanted to call an ambulance for me.

This was in Germany, a continent away from my family and none of them were coming to visit me, not even my sister. In therapy in Germany I began having vague handwavy memories that my father did something, I wasn't sure what.

Children can suppress memories that they feel are threatening to their survival. And the memories may bubble up after they are adults and for some reason feel safer or stronger.

But those memories may be a bit difficult to parse. I remembered my mother looking at me on my father's lap and thinking she was mad at me. 

Most likely she was concerned for me and dealing with a lot of different burdens, like my father was recently returned from Vietnam with a fresh head injury, she's financially dependent on him with three kids in a foreign country she never wanted to live in, and she was raped as a teen and perhaps wondering if she's overreacting.

It's difficult enough to deal with the emotional fallout and try to sort everything out in therapy. In a court setting, it is likely to be even harder.

It would be some years before I concluded that I'm not sure my father exactly molested me. I think he came back from Vietnam and wanted to hold me on his lap and forget the war and things got weird.

There is an episode of Law and Order SVU called Denial. It has a character named Claire who is an addict and can't get her act together because she witnessed the brutal mother of her younger sister at the hands of her mother. 

I cannot find any YouTube clips. The synopsis linked above says almost nothing about the aspects I found interesting, which is the psychology of this extremely traumatized woman who felt responsible for the death of her sister which complicated solving the case because it keeps the cops thinking she's the murderer.

I basically remember two scenes from this episode.

The first is they arrest the mother when she carries the very old remains of the murdered daughter out to the trash. Once it's in the trash, they don't need probable cause or a search warrant.

Second, in probably the very last scene, Fin gives Claire a forensically recreated drawing of her dead sister because at some point she said she gets high to remember what the girl looks looks like. Fin says with a drawing to remember the girl by, she won't have any more excuses for staying an addict and not getting sober.

It's an excellent scene because most people wouldn't know how to make a meaningful difference in her ability to get clean and sober after so much trauma.

There was also a movie that I watched and I think it was based on a true story. It may have been made for TV.

Two adult women claim their young sister who died years earlier when they were still children was murdered by their mother. Law enforcement is initially skeptical because they can't agree on certain details.

One says she was buried in a lavender dress. The other says it was a yellow dress

Then they exhume the body and it's something like a yellow dress with lavender flowers.