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Do I Have Amnesia?

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Tuesday, February 2nd, 2021
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There is something medicine refers to as dissociative amnesia. This is when a person blocks out certain information often associated with a stressful or traumatic event thus leaving the person unable to recall that part of their life.

What this means is that one could experience harassment and be so traumatised that they forget they had been raped or sexually harassed. Sometimes they never remember these experiences, sometimes they only remember fragments later on and sometimes they remember it all as time goes on.

There have been many instances where people recalled harassments they didn’t remember all along during a conversation or after inhaling a particular smell or walking down a particular street.  Some men have even realised in between conversations that they had been harassed. They had grown up thinking that such experience was a norm only to realise as they grew up that they were actually being sexually harassed.

I read the results of a study that was carried out to show whether everybody could tell if they had ever been sexually harassed at any point. At the end of the study, some women who had initially ticked the “no” box had gone on to tick “yes” to questions that indicated they had been sexually harassed showing that they had either forgotten that they were harassed or they never understood that they were being harassed.

Young boys have been sexually harassed by their football coaches without realising it, young girls harassed by their music teachers without realising it.

 This experiences then goes on to cause trauma, depression, anxiety, anger….and a long list of other things.

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