Even among professionals, beliefs about dissociation/DD often are not based on the scientific literature. Multiple lines of evidence support a powerful relationship between dissociation/DD and psychological trauma, especially cumulative and/or early life trauma.

Traumatic memories are hallucinatory and involuntary experiences consisting of dissociated sensorimotor phenomena, including visual images, sensations, emotions, and/or motor acts pertaining to past traumatic experiences that may engross the entire perceptual field (e.g.,Van der Kolk & Fisler, 1995).

The media-contamination hypothesis usually focuses on the book Michelle Remembers (Smith and Pazder, 1980) and the movie Rosemary's Baby;. These images were in the popular culture for centuries before survivor memories started to surface in therapy; therefore, the media-contamination hypothesis fails to account for the time lag and cannot provide a full account of the phenomenona.

Empowerment is something that happens throughout your healing, as courage and success in facing your memories build your self-esteem. Some of the strengths you get from taking on your buried memories does not show up in your life until long after the resolution has been achieved.

I opened my eyes and felt better, exhausted but relieved of a burden. The pressure to tell and the weight of the emotions had been with me for weeks. Now that I'd told what had happened, the burden lifted a bit.

Dissociation, a form of hypnotic trance, helps children survive the abuse…The abuse takes on a dream-like, surreal quality and deadened feelings and altered perceptions add to the strangeness. The whole scene does not fit into the 'real world.' It is simple to forget, easy to believe nothing happened.

Although false memory psychologists point to therapy sessions as the setting in which people commonly determine that they forgot, and then remembered, abuse. Elliott (1997) found that the majority of people who had forgotten a traumatic event and then remembered it identified the trigger as some form of media presentation, such as a film or a television show. Psychotherapy was the least common trigger for remembering trauma."KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING ABOUT TRAUMA: IMPLICATIONS FOR THERAPY

What most people call spontaneous recall usually involves memories that have been denied, not repressed. The survivor has always been aware that the sexual abuse happened, but he or she has studiously avoided thinking about it. A catalyst sets the memory process in motion, but the essential factor in the memory surfacing is the readiness of the survivor to deal with the reality of abuse.

Are any of these anxieties or beliefs about my past real? Maybe I'm just making them up⎯re-creating the past.I have to smile as I look at what I just wrote. I can tell when my solitary exploration becomes too threatening, or when I'm treading close to a memory too frightening to be remembered. Rather than push through unfamiliar brush, I stomp the well-worn path of "Maybe I'm making all of this up." But retreating there no longer makes sense to me.

Many survivors struggle to believe the abuse happened. They don’t want to believe it. It’s too painful to think about. They don’t want to accuse family members or face the terrible loss involved in realizing “a loved one” hurt them; they don’t want to rock the boat.