But, she said, "Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the laugh - the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense." While peripheral details about that night may, as Blasey-Ford testified, "drift away," the emotionally charged experience of hearing her assaulters laugh during her trauma was encoded in her memory. This is one explanation for why, when Stanford University psychology professor Chrstine Blasey-Ford testified in 2018 about being assaulted by now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and another man, she couldn't remember the date of the party where she was assaulted or how she got home. "Someone being sexually assaulted might remember a painting on the wall, but not whether the guy was wearing a condom." And that's a subjective experience of the person," Hopper explained. They didn't have much emotional significance attached to them. "Peripheral details are details that didn't get much attention.
Furthermore, Hopper said, there's no evidence that delayed memories are any less accurate.Įven when survivors do remember the assault right away, it's common that they don't remember every detail - especially peripheral details. The right combination of context and cues, like the reenactment ride Turkos went on, can help the brain retrieve those memories months, even years later.
They might feel in a fog, so that changes how the event is encoded in memory and it decreases the probability that it's going to be woven in with other memories." "In the midst of a traumatic experience, the person feels disconnected from their body," Hopper said, pointing to a widely cited paper from 2001 about how the lack of " meta-awareness" during trauma affects what a person remembers later. And for some survivors, like Turkos, it may be related to experiencing dissociation during the trauma. Memories may be consciously or unconsciously suppressed because they are too painful. There are myriad causes for why this happens, and while researchers have evidence-based theories, there isn't a simple explanation. People can go a long time without remembering traumatic experiences and then remember them," explained Jim Hopper, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and trauma expert who has been studying traumatic memory loss for more than two decades. Memory loss and delayed recall after the kind of intense trauma Turkos experienced is called dissociative amnesia, and it's not uncommon, particularly for sexual assault survivors. Why does trauma-related memory loss happen? "My body knew what happened, but my brain was like, We're just going to give you some time, because once you have these memories, you will never be able to forget," Turkos said.
AMNESIA FROM TRAUMA DRIVER
Details came flooding back: She had been kidnapped at gunpoint by her driver and gang raped by three men. It wasn't until late spring 2018 that Turkos started to have significant memories, after seeing a therapist regularly and doing a reenactment ride with police. For months, she had recurring night terrors. The day after the exam, her doctor called and suggested she go to the hospital for a rape kit. That, coupled with the visible physical injuries she had, convinced Alison to go to the doctor for an internal exam. They also looked at her step tracker and noticed some unusual spikes. She took a screenshot of the convoluted route of her ride from the ride-sharing app and sent it to two of her friends, who started their own detective work trying to understand what happened. the night before, which should have been a 15-minute ride home from one Brooklyn neighborhood to another, turned out to be a winding $107 ride that took her from Brooklyn through Manhattan to Jersey City and back to Brooklyn. Hours later, she opened a ride-sharing app to order a ride and noticed that her ride at 2 a.m. She was exhausted, unable to even stand in the shower. When Alison Turkos woke up on the morning of October 14, 2017, after a night out celebrating with friends, her body ached.
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