Chapter 14 — What Memory Did With It

Memory did not preserve my life as a continuous account. Some events remained extraordinarily clear while others survived only as fragments, later recognition or empty spaces whose significance I did not understand.

I once understood memory mainly by what it contained. I had not learned to recognise it by what was missing.

There were events I could describe, periods that seemed indistinct, and connections that did not become visible until much later. At times I could know something without being able to hold the whole of it in one place. At other times an event seemed to have no place in my life at all, even though its effects had continued.

This was not the ordinary experience of forgetting a name or losing track of a date. It shaped how I understood my own history, how I answered questions, and how other people interpreted the gaps they could see without knowing what had created them.

Islands of Memory

My recollections are not uniformly weak. That is one of the things which can make the experience difficult to explain. I can remember some scenes with remarkable clarity: a place, a person, the position of a machine, the words spoken or the way a vehicle responded beneath me. Around those scenes there can be periods which are indistinct or inaccessible.

The clear memory does not necessarily restore what surrounds it. It can stand alone like an island, visible in detail but separated from the rest of the landscape.

For much of my life I did not know that these separations had meaning. I assumed that memory was simply unreliable and that I had to work around it. When other people appeared to possess a continuous account, I had little means of explaining why mine could arrive in sharply detailed pieces yet refuse to form a complete sequence.

Recognition in Stanley Park

Canada remains one of those uneven periods. Some events are strongly present. Other parts are fuzzy, and I find it difficult to speak of them with certainty.

While I was in Vancouver, I stayed for a time in a place where I later understood that people had a habit of spiking drinks. At the time I did not know that anything had been put into mine.

I went to an Easter gathering in Stanley Park. There I knowingly smoked cannabis for the first time in my life. It was described to me as some of the best cannabis in the world.

The experience produced a disturbing sense of recognition. I felt that I had experienced something similar before. I connected that familiarity with one of the places where I had been staying and began to wonder whether I had previously been intoxicated without knowing or consenting to it.

I cannot reconstruct every occasion or say with certainty what, if anything, was put into a particular drink. What I can say is that the experience in Stanley Park caused me to recognise a state which did not feel entirely new.

That distinction matters. There is what I remember doing knowingly in Stanley Park. There is the recognition I experienced. Then there is the conclusion I drew about what may have happened earlier. They are related, but they do not carry the same degree of certainty.

Trying to Understand

When Alice and I began our relationship, we explored our childhoods deeply. We read Alice Miller, particularly For Your Own Good and The Drama of the Gifted Child, together with other work concerned with childhood harm and its consequences in adult life.

This was not a brief interest. Writing preserved on my earlier website describes Alice and me as exploring our histories for approximately ten years before our marriage. The exact dates still need to be tested against the surviving records, but the duration is important. We did not enter the marriage unaware that childhood experience could shape adult behaviour and relationships.

I was also assembling documents about my own childhood and trying to find a law firm willing to take up my matter involving the Catholic Church. The effort to understand was therefore personal, psychological and evidentiary. I was trying to find language for experience while also searching for a process in which that experience could be heard.

The Wedding Morning

Alice had told me parts of her family's history. As I recall it, her family had travelled from Peterborough in eastern Canada to Vancouver, then to Rio de Janeiro and later Fiji. In Fiji they waited for help from a clergy contact named Bill Morris, who assisted them in entering Australia.

Alice's grandmother and several uncles came from Canada for our wedding. On the morning of the wedding, her grandmother went to visit Bill Morris, by then the Catholic Bishop of Toowoomba, to thank him for helping the family come to Australia.

Until that morning, I had not properly understood that the Bill Morris in Alice's family story was the bishop in the city where we were living. The recognition was a considerable jolt. The story I had heard as part of another family's past suddenly joined the institutional world which had already exercised so much power over my own life.

When I asked about the family's connection with Bill Morris, Alice's description began to change. I was first told that he was simply a friend of the family. Later, he became someone the family hardly knew.

I could not reconcile those later descriptions with the earlier account of his helping the family enter Australia or with Alice's grandmother visiting him on our wedding morning to thank him. I did not know why the account was changing. What affected me was the movement itself: a connection which had appeared significant became progressively smaller when I tried to understand it.

Looking back, I believe I experienced a strong dissociative response around that time. It was not a short absence confined to the wedding day. Considerable periods remained blocked or inaccessible for much longer. I did not then understand what had happened to my memory or possess a language in which to explain it.

More Than Forgetting

“Switching off” had once been a means of surviving circumstances from which I could not physically escape. It did not announce itself as a clinical condition. It happened, and life continued around it.

The same protective capacity did not necessarily disappear when childhood ended. It could operate in adult life without my recognising it, particularly when present events connected with older danger, authority, religion or helplessness.

The Click of the Latch

I learned how seamless this could be during my assessment with Dr Georgiana Antoce. She encouraged me to speak about abuse by women. I tried to describe what had happened in the woodshed and bedrooms at the convent and then began trying to speak about Germaine, the nun who was said to be teaching me piano.

I did not realise that describing the memory had become reenacting it.

In the childhood scene, Germaine had fallen asleep after masturbating herself. I had it fixed in my mind that the click of the door latch might wake her. I was small enough that I had to reach upwards for the doorknob, and I had to open it without making a sound.

In Dr Antoce's consulting room, I repeated that action. I reached for the door and took myself outside the room. The moment the latch clicked, I looked around and realised where I actually was.

I heard Dr Antoce saying that I could come back. I did not return. I was already walking away towards somewhere that felt safe.

There had been no conscious decision to demonstrate the memory or leave the consultation. One setting had become another without announcing the transition. The small child trying to leave silently and the adult standing outside a consulting room occupied the same action. It was the sound I had been trying to prevent—the click of the latch—which restored my awareness of the present.

Dr Antoce's later report is disputed and contains interpretations and errors which I have challenged. It nevertheless records the broader experience of losing my grip on present surroundings and losing a sense of time. The latch episode is my own account of what happened in that consultation and of what I understood only afterwards.

That moment became a pivot point. It did not mean that I had mastered dissociation or could prevent it from happening. It was the beginning of recognising it. The click of the latch gave me one experience in which I could see the transition after it had occurred and begin to understand that other unexplained movements, absences and changes in awareness might belong to the same process.

Learning to recognise dissociation took a long time. Even then, recognition did not always occur while it was happening. Sometimes it came afterwards, when I could compare what had happened with the consulting-room door and ask where my awareness had gone, what had brought it back, and what I had been trying to escape.

Dr Julian Lim, who has worked with me for more than a decade, later identified the more accurate diagnosis as Dissociative Amnesia, secondary to severe and prolonged childhood trauma. His opinion also states that I do not meet the criteria for the paranoid-schizophrenia label which had been placed on my records.

That distinction changed the meaning of the gaps. They were not proof that the rest of my account was false. Nor were they evidence of psychosis. They were part of the way severe and prolonged trauma had affected access to autobiographical memory.

Dr Lim has also supported a careful approach to recall. Forcing memory is not recovery. Pressure can reproduce the loss of control which made dissociation necessary in the first place. A safer process allows what can be recalled to emerge without demanding that uncertainty be converted into certainty.

Writing Degrees of Certainty

This book therefore cannot honestly pretend that every part of my life is recalled in the same way.

There are things I know because I remember them clearly. There are things supported by documents, recordings or the recollections of other people. There are conclusions I reached only later when previously separate events came together. There are also matters which remain uncertain.

The answer is not to smooth those differences away. It is to identify them.

“I remember” is different from “I later understood.” “I was told” is different from “the record establishes.” “I believe” is different from “I know.” Each has a legitimate place in an honest account as long as the reader is allowed to see which is which.

The gaps are not empty pages which another institution is entitled to fill on my behalf. They are part of my history. The work is to place the surviving pieces carefully, preserve their source and allow the shape of the life to emerge without claiming more certainty than the evidence can carry.

When the Legal Process Misreads Memory

The legal process often expects memory to behave like a continuous recording. A witness is asked for dates, sequence, repetition and detail. If an account develops over time, or if one part is sharply recalled while another remains inaccessible, the change may be labelled inconsistency. Inconsistency may then be treated as dishonesty.

For a person living with dissociative amnesia, that assumption can reverse responsibility. The effect of trauma is presented as a fault in the victim's character. A person who cannot retrieve part of an autobiographical experience is accused of withholding it, inventing it later or changing their story.

Dissociative amnesia is not an idea created for a legal claim. It is a recognised clinical condition involving an inability to recall important autobiographical memories, commonly associated with trauma or severe stress. Research into legal practice has also identified continuing misunderstanding among lawyers and judges about trauma, repression and dissociative memory.

That does not mean every error, changed detail or gap proves that dissociation has occurred. Nor does a diagnosis establish the truth of every remembered event. It means that gaps and inconsistencies cannot competently be treated as proof of lying on their own. They must be examined in context, with appropriate knowledge of trauma and memory and with attention to documents, contemporaneous communications and other available evidence.

When a lawyer does not understand dissociative amnesia, the survivor may be advised that the case is impossible, pressed to produce a neat chronology which the mind did not preserve, or treated as though progressive disclosure demonstrates fabrication. That response can repeat the original injury: the person most affected is again required to carry the consequences of another person's lack of knowledge.

That is not the fault of the victim. It is a professional failure when a lawyer, investigator, clinician or decision-maker substitutes an uninformed assumption for competent inquiry. Professionals are entitled to test evidence. They are not entitled to begin from the proposition that an unfamiliar pattern of memory is a lie.

Procedural fairness requires room for the reality of traumatic memory. It requires a distinction between credibility and perfect recall, between deliberate deception and an inability to retrieve experience, and between a story being manufactured and a history becoming progressively accessible.

For me, this is why external records matter so much. Emails, medical notes, recordings, earlier writings and the dates on which fragments were first documented can provide structure when autobiographical memory cannot supply a continuous timeline. They do not replace my account. They allow it to be assessed without demanding that dissociative amnesia behave like ordinary recollection.

Only much later did I begin to understand how much of the past had remained present while being unavailable to ordinary recall. Then some of it began to return.