I’m just wondering like… suppose if my parents weren’t my real parents, and were actually my kidnappers, how young would that have to have happened?
I have very vague memories of like going to Hong Kong as a kid… and like… suppose I got kidnapped there, would I even have remembered?
How old do you actually remember the faces of your real parents? Can a set of imposter parents manage to trick you? Like somehow brainwash you to forget the kidnapping ever happened? And that you were always their child?
I read about like kidnapping stories where the kid just grow up normally in their adoptive family and apparantly never remember they got kidnapped? What?
(Just curious, definitely not paranoia… xD)
It depends – How old is the child you’re planning on kidnapping and where are you located?
Lol I sound sus as hell
I think you’re just asking when people form their first coherent memories.
This is about 2 to 3 years old.
Vaguely related anecdote: I have no memory of this of course but my mum had to have urgent brain surgery and was hospitalised (for half a year, I think?) very shortly after I was born. She barely got to breast-feed me for 3 months before she had to leave me with my grandmother (my dad wouldn’t be able to care for a kid on his own lol). When she returned, I was incredibly clingy and wouldn’t let go of her, they tell me, so I was already able to remember her. It’s apparently possible that some of my issues today (depression, anxiety, all that fun stuff) are in part caused by that very early traumatic separation (nothing anyone can prove). Which leads me to think that in your scenario you’d at least be more likely to have some psychiatric damage, no matter your age.
nothing anyone can prove
Attachment theory is well researched and developed. And if I understand it correctly, not having your mom around after 3 months is likely to be a significant trauma which could absolutely account for current “issues”
Source: am discovering some very early trauma of my own and working through all that means for me
Hang in there, friend!
Related:
I remember having a fight with my older brother and I kinda ran away from home, pretty sure this was after the Hong Kong trip, this memory was more vivid and… I was about 5-7 I’m pretty sure I returned home later that night, possibly explains why I get weirdly emotionally attached to parents, older brother = danger, parents = the next safest thing that I know, the outside world has just been so cruel to me, I sort of overlooked my parents emotionally abusive behaviors… there’s nothing I could do.
Like a bird who’s wings are damaged, never allowed time to heal before getting injured again, can’t fly anywhere, forever trapped.
Trauma is a hard thing to pin down. I think it depends on how traumatic the situation was and how the kid was treated after.
My broken neck and back thing is in a totally different traumatic scope, but the situation and magnitude is still something I struggle to process nearly twelve years later. I legitimately have an amnesia like gap in my consciousness for 3 hours due to the massive head injury. For the first 3-5 years, despite my limitations, I processed it like any of my other bike crashes and was confident I could push through, or that my limitations were psychological failures. I wanted to forget and move on without processing the things that happened. That reaction has reverberating psychological consequences to this day.
With a kid, their self awareness is limited in scope. So I imagine they may or may not block out the experience in a similar way. My point is that trauma is not logical or linear in how it affects the mind. Like the cause of most PTSD is an event that causes a loss of consciousness, that results in severe injury, and was unexpected or out of the person’s control.
My earliest memory is around three years old. I was a halfwit that thought I could fly when wearing my superman onesie with cape, if only I was brave enough to leap from one stair higher up and believe strongly enough. So I think I would have the potential to remember. But knowing how severe trauma affected me, it is entirely plausible I could block out the experience completely.
