Reporting, Forgetting, or Reimagining: A Developmental Theory of Traumatic and Adverse Childhood Memories

The reliability of child and youth reports of traumatic events and adverse experiences is a critically important but highly contentious issue. This paper presents a developmental perspective for understanding reporting, forgetting, and reimagining such experiences. This perspective addresses the targeted question of how to conceptualize correspondence in reports across time that uses a psychometric starting point (the reliability of reports) and applies a developmental lens (both theory and data) to this data while also integrating relevant neuroscience data. I perform a critical review of 1) recent meta-analysis and data on consistency in reports of TRACEs and 2) critical review of systematic reviews of autobiographical memory in PTSD and 3) integrate emerging developmental and neuroscience research and theory to develop the perspective. The perspective emphasizes that there may be an evolution of the memory of a traumatic event and evolution in the perception of an event as traumatic over time. The perspective therefore emphasizes that the perception of an event or events as traumatic may be both a strict dichotomy of yes or no something happened but also a continuum from strong memory/perception of an event as traumatic to weaker memories and remembering the event differently over time. Implications for intervention and practice and a research agenda is presented.