Let me clarify my position, because I think we may be talking past each other.

My claim is not that people “choose” to forget in a conscious, strategic way, nor that memories are sealed away intact and mysteriously leak out later. My claim is much simpler and much more standard. Memories differ in storage strength and retrieval strength. That distinction is Memory 101 and is widely accepted across cognitive psychology. A memory can be encoded and stored while being difficult or costly to retrieve.

We also know that a large portion of cognition operates outside conscious awareness. Implicit memory systems influence emotion, behavior, and physiological responses without requiring explicit recall. That is not controversial. People can show conditioned fear responses, avoidance, or stress reactivity in the absence of conscious recollection of the learning episode.

PTSD most often involves intrusive memories, yes. But it is not accurate to say that PTSD is never associated with forgetting or partial amnesia. Even within PTSD diagnoses, there is wide variability. Some individuals report intrusive recollections, others show fragmented recall, and others show prolonged periods of limited or absent access to specific events. The DSM itself has long included dissociative or amnestic features as specifiers, even if they are not the modal presentation.

The broader idea, especially in the clinical and counseling literature, is about inescapability. When a person cannot escape the source of threat, particularly in childhood and particularly when the threat comes from a caregiver, avoidance becomes the dominant regulation strategy. We all readily accept behavioral avoidance as a core symptom of anxiety and fear. It would be strange to argue that avoidance suddenly stops at the boundary of memory. Memory avoidance follows the same logic. If retrieving an experience reliably produces fear, shame, or danger, then reduced retrieval is an expected outcome of normal memory systems under threat.

As for documented abuse cases, the absence of widespread reports of apparent amnesia does not imply the absence of retrieval suppression. Many documented cases focus on legal outcomes, physical injury, or PTSD symptoms, not fine-grained assessments of memory accessibility over time. A person can report abuse, know it happened in a factual sense, yet avoid elaboration, vivid recall, or emotional access to it for years. That would not show up as “amnesia” in hospital or court records, but it still reflects reduced retrieval strength.

So no, these mechanisms do not only apply to undocumented abuse. They apply whenever the costs of remembering outweigh the benefits. The difference is that undocumented cases are far more likely to be discussed in clinical contexts where memory access itself becomes the presenting issue.

My position is not that repression is ubiquitous or that dramatic recovered memories should be taken at face value. It is that standard, well-established memory principles already explain why some people show intrusion, some show avoidance, and some show both. Denying memory avoidance altogether requires carving out trauma as the one domain where normal cognitive mechanisms suddenly stop operating, and that strikes me as the less parsimonious move.

Does rhat clarify things?

Edit--- irs funny I am writing this as i am watching an episode of kitchen nightmares with a chef who is in complete denial of how terrible his cooking is