I think that a lot of the misunderstanding concerning so-called repressed memory is the strangeness to express the memory verbally. Assuming you haven't received a head injury, you have no question in remembering the event. The trouble comes because the memory is locked up in the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain responsible for short term memory.
Recalling it, will alert the amygdalae, our old friend the fight or flight merchant! This is what makes it difficult or even impossible to talk about what happened, simply because it's a heck of a lot harder to speak during fight or flight.
It does not mean that the memory has been buried. The same goes for the reasons that are sometimes given for Panic Attacks and Depression. The fact that because clear things happened to you in your childhood that are unresolved, they must be 'discovered' before you can be cured.
There's other very telling example of why hypnosis is no longer permitted in a court of law as testimony.
A well known hypnosis researcher, Dr. Orne, made a video to demonstrate this. A young woman comes into his office, and he asks her how she slept the night before. She tells him she slept very well and was quite undisturbed. He's recording the conversation as the video rolls.
Then he hypnotizes her and suggests that she was awoken in the middle of the night by what sounded like an explosion, 'like a car backfiring.' While still in trance, she accepts this suggestion.
Then he brings her round and again asks her how she slept. This time, she reports she woke up in the middle of the night by what sounded like a car backfiring. Then he plays her the original tape where she stated that she slept right through the night.
If used properly, hypnosis has a great many life-enhancing benefits, but it is not a truth serum and should legitimately never be used to study 'repressed' memories!
David Cheek, M.D., who has vast contact in the field of hypnosis states;
"We can do more harm with ignorance of hypnotism than we can ever do by intelligently using hypnosis and hint constructively."
As we saw in the last article, unscrupulous or wrong-thinking therapists can cause no end of trouble by hypnotically placing suggestions in people's minds that are entirely erroneous. Just think of the terrible harm that was done to individuals and whole families through this company of them being taken to court for sexual crimes of which they were totally innocent.
This is where the danger lies. Hypnosis isn't going to turn person into a vegetable, or cause any sort of mental collapse. Quite the contrary. But as we've seen, in the wrong hands, hypnosis can wreak havoc with people's lives
