Memories from infancy

I only have one very vivid memory from under 5, and it's quite traumatic. The rest are just sensations, but I cannot necessarily ascribe them an age. I would say that they are from that same time, but I am not 100% sure...
I'm not certain I understand what you mean about those young memories. Mine are mostly of abuse, and sensations that go along with that...

I adopted my younger daughter (international adoption) on her 8 month birthday. One time when she was three years old she said "when I was baby I cried and cried but nobody ever came to me". Just out of the blue one day she shared that, just that one time

I feel confused and ignored in my earliest memories. Maybe around 3-4. The earliest one is being out side with a golden retriever, and not understanding what it was, an wanting to ask about. I remember it seemed so big, and kit kept chasing a Frisbee. My parents never explained what it was. And then I remember seeing a piece of cloth out the window hanging on a tree, and kept trying to ask my mother what it was, but I don't think she understood. I remember feeling frustrated and ignored.

Oh no, not literally. Sorry. It just feels that way since I hardly remember anything that happened for such a significant period of my life.

I think the article The Well posted mentions some of the relevant key points:

Yes, little children will have memories of the youngest years, we all do, but those memories are overwritten, lost by the time we reach adulthood.

"Memories" of those ages are often reinforced anecdotes: we see photos, hear family stories, see relics of those periods, etc. and those things all combine to form what we consider to be memories but are recreations. And if we try, as someone mentioned, to continually scrutinize something, that can actually reinforce a false impression- the mind searches for order- in the absence of order, we often try to create it. A simple example is the way I mght leave the letter i out of one of the words in this sentence and yet you all would read it clearly, no loss of comprehension, your brains filling in the blanks for you.

That's not to say no one has memories of any type before XXXX arbitrary number of days old, but that vague longings, sensations, somatic experiences, feelings, desires, and even sensory cues don't necessarily come from memory. I agree with the others who've mentioned it that regardless of source, messages we get can teach us something about ourselves and hopefully help us meet our needs and fulfill our desires better.

I think it was helpful to me to separate sense impressions as a concept from memories. Sense impressions, whether they're visual, auditory, whatever, I think can originate and persist from very young ages. But memories to me imply narrative, and that demands a certain level of cognition and is subject to the over writing influence.

I have a couple of sense impressions from young enough to be in a crib, but able to pull myself up and "stand" but before being really able to walk. But I was also told an anecdote about that experience, so the two together have formed a created memory.

I also have trauma impressions from an experience @ 3 years old that is more concrete, but still not really a memory because there is no narrative attached (never referred to by others, no anecdotal evidence to supply an over write).

I have definite memories from the age of about three. Really nice ones about not much in particular, such as going to kindergarten and the teacher taking us out to a huge field full of flowers on sunny days. And going back to that field years later and it being quite small in reality!

Something traumatic, engineered by a member of my family as a 'joke' happened when I was two - and the person in question took photos of me terrified out of my wits When I look at the pictures I can feel the rush of fear, but perhaps that's driven by having the pictures as evidence. I don't know. I really don't know what was going through their head when they were taking those photos.

Yes, that's a big part of it. Thank you for writing this. The narrative is missing because they are more like flashbacks. I think i'll refer to them memory fragments. And after all, my therapist is guiding the creation of the narrative.

This article doesn't have any special significance; it just happened to have come up at the top of a google search. It puts a label on the concept, and I have a need to label everything, all the lower-level things, so that I can think about it in more depth in the larger context of everything.

I'm still a bit confused, but I think what's contributing to the confusion is the labeling of these memory fragments as 'flashbacks', except for if they pertain to my experiences I had under 2 years of age. It defies logic that they are considered one thing for all experiences under a certain arbitrarily designated age, while being considered quite another thing for the exact same experiences that occurred at a much younger age.

I apologize to anyone who has responded without having the context and detail that is missing from my posts. Like I mentioned before, I don't feel comfortable posting the details. Thanks for all the responses.

i've seen this in my own children. my oldest is seven. when he was 3 or 4, he would express memories from when he was say, 18 months, but as he's gotten older, he doesn't remember them. but he does have reinforced memories. we'll tell him about something and he'll go "oh! i remember that." when i know he doesn't (and later he'll recount stories word for word how i told him as his own memory). and before anyone jumps on me, he tries to remember things from before he was born sometimes.

It's through scientific study and research that this has been established and not really arbitrary. The age at which we begin to retain memories that last through adulthood is just part of the time table of individual cognitive development, just like puberty or any other time-sensitive process occurs as part of physical development. There's some variation, but as a rule, certain things happen to the vast majority on a timeline, in a sophisticated interaction.

Agree with this. As far as I remember off the top of my head, the hippocampus develops enough to start laying down the memories.

Yes, I understand there is a timeline for different types of memories due to cognitive development, but we are talking about 2 different things. I am not referring to the type of memory (i.e. conscious recall) that IndestructibleGirl described in her post.

This is the research. Not just because I read reference to it in a few articles; that does not make something true. However, Alan Schore is a reputable researcher in the field and is cited by many.

Here's a link for anyone interested in this subject:

Dr. Allan N. Schore: Articles

I think part of the issue is that you've deleted a substantive portion of your earlier, clarifying comments, so the discussion is not going to be as on target with so much info missing.

I wouldn't really call what you'd described prior and deleted memory, but... if it helps you to see it that way, I hope it is a healing process to work through it. My own extensive work in that area suggested such framing was inaccurate and ultimately unhelpful, but I understand how compelling the need is to have it validated.

You deleted the portion suggesting I continue posting among others, haha, so I'll opt out at this point.

Actually, I never posted clarifying details to begin with. As I mentioned, much of this feels shameful, so I did not want to post about the details. The point of the thread, like I mentioned, was to see if anyone else had similar experiences who wanted to talk about this. I posted one small detail that I deleted (and that detail was only a tiny part of the whole experience) as well as deleting 3 minor comments, one of which is still there because you quoted it.

Yes, like I said, I don't want you to not post on my threads because we don't agree with something. But I have said the intent of my post was to find someone else to talk to about this. It had nothing to do with a need to be validated (although I do have that need in other contexts). However, i'm not sure why it's so important to you to continually say I am looking at my experience incorrectly.

You can continue to post or not post on this thread. It's your choice, and it doesn't matter to me either way. You're welcome to continue articulating your points as much as you feel you need to.

I think I already apologized more than once for submitting a thread that could be confusing without the details. But the point was to find someone to discuss this privately with, not to argue about the correct way to look at my experiences. If I was posting to argue for my point of view, I would have posted the details.

I just want to add that the early memories I am recalling right now from when I was in in the crib and in the hospital are from age two..one memory may be younger than two since I was standing and teething on the crib side rail. I was alone in all of them except for one...so no one could have told me about them or planted a false memory. I am certain these are memories.
Of course we are all different..what's possible for one person may not be true for anyone else.

What really matters in the end (I think) is how real the experience is to you. Emotional memory, flashbacks, images, smells... these things carry a lot of weight in who we become whether the actual recall/memory is there or not.

I hope that you can talk about this with your therapist or in a place where you feel more comfortable.

Further, I think the fact remains that, when it comes to things like this, there really is no truth. There is only what is true to us.

Several posts were being written as I was composing, so now I think I have a clearer sense of the ideas here.

I like the Schore quote. TBH I've never been comfortable with the term "flashback." I'm not even entirely sure that it originated in the professional literature, or if it migrated from popular usage in the 70's into the profession. I experienced what is commonly called "flashbacks," but they just weren't so clearly confined to a single past moment. I didn't have many such events, but they weren't clearly narrative memories, nor sense impressions ( or conditioned sensorimotor traumatic responses, in Schore's terms). They were a mix, a jumble, more than reflective of a discrete event. The "stuff" of them was clearly of the past, but which part would date to which event at which age would be difficult, if not impossible, to determine. And I have no reason to believe any such determination would have necessarily been objectively provable. For me, what was more important therapeutically was maintaining stability in the face of them, and the subjective emotional truth to be discovered through them.

My first real memory is from when I was 2. I got lost in the "woods" and couldn't find my way home. Anything before words (hearing/understanding/"knowing" can come before) would only be sense memories. I have a sense memory of being read aloud to, for example, and the scent of my mother's skin (Jergens lotion :-) You could be happy because of a smell, know yourself happy, etc. When I got lost, I could not find the bridge across the creek and knew what direction it "should" have been in, etc. but I doubt I could have articulated all that.

However, the main thing I learned from that experience is my puzzlement over where the bridge "went"/who took it was because I was too young to developmentally understand "corners" -- the creek curved and I could not see the bridge. Young memories are more like dreams, more of our unconscious than actual indications of what may/may not have happened.

I vividly remember trying to figure out how to get across the creek and I could not wade it because the "sea monsters" might get me. I did not figure out until my 50's that I had been read Dr. Seuss' McElligot's Pool and until then, I swore one of the fish was a monster, last page. I bought the book then and took it to one of my therapy sessions and the "monster" was a happy looking whale! But, my mother was in the hospital when I got lost, recovering from an unsuccessful operation on her brain. I was 2, supposed to be in charge of knowing where my mother was at all times (failed!) just learning to talk, just toilet trained (failed again, went backwards there when my mother disappeared into the hospital) and so my life was a bit stressful and full of sea monsters :-)

My son was 21 months old when his baby sister arrived. She was born in September and he remembers me walking to the park with him in a stroller that summer. Nothing emotional or traumatic about it. I also have some memories under 2 years old. I have many from under 5. I agree it is easy to get real memories mixed up with impressions or being told what happened, but I think snippets of reality get recorded accurately. I have also heard of a few who had memories from before birth...I don't know about that.

I've read all the articles now (googled some more) about how we supposedly can't remember under 3 (some articles said under 2). It's just not correct. Like I said, I have a ton of memories from age 2-4, and a few under 2. I believe I remember them because I made the choice to remember them.

My dad always talked about how he remembered the day World War II started because his dad told him it was important to remember. I did a lot of "reminding myself to remember" because I knew those things would slip away if I didn't.

They're all fuzzy/blurry like in a dream, but I know real. I remember being at the Space Needle and the table configuration was different. It used to be 2 tiered. I would tell people this for years and they were like, "huh???" because its been 1 tier since the 80s.

Well I recently found some old photos online showing the old layout that was 2 tier. There are no photos of that trip and my parents didn't bring it up -- I did. They didn't remember it being 2 tier, I did.

I just think it's bizarre that scientists have decided it's "impossible" when I know that's not the case. : shrug :

I can remember before my brother was born, I was just over two when he arrived