Sophia, after working with me for a number of months, started to have intense memories of very severe emotional, physical, and sexual childhood abuse. Like many abuse survivors, she found it very hard to believe what her inner child was telling her. As a result of my extensive experience in working with abuse survivors, I knew that she was not making it up. I could feel in my own body the truth of what her inner child was telling her. The feelings were so intense - there was no way she could have been making it up. I had zero doubt that what Sophia was telling me was 100% true. Yet over and over she said, "How can this be true? I must be making all this up."

Sophia even went on the Internet and discovered False Memory Syndrome, which was made up by perpetrators who didn't want their children to be believed. They claim there is no such thing as repressed memories.

As any good therapist who has worked extensively with abuse survivors knows, when children are being severely abused, they often dissociate to survive the abuse, leaving their body as a way to manage the pain. In this dissociative state, they “forget” what happened. When they do get memories - often years later - it frequently starts with body memories: the body feeling the pain. They may begin experiencing images, often vague and dreamlike, which is one reason they believe they are making it up.

The thing that impedes healing more than anything is not believing that their inner child is telling the truth.

If you were a child who had just been severely abused, and you told a trusted adult about it, and the adult didn't believe you, you would be doubly devastated. This is what it is like on the inner level when your adult doesn't believe your inner child.

Most people, when these memories finally come up, would do anything for them not to be true. They don't want to have gone through all that. They don't want to be an abuse survivor. They don't want to know and feel what they went through. They want to be "normal" people with a "normal" childhood. They have no reason to make it up.

Yet I often need to spend a dozen or so sessions with my abuse clients, just helping them believe their inner child. Only when they do, can the healing move forward.

I can hear their little inner children crying out, "Please believe me. Please don't shut me up. It's taken so long for you to be here for me and listen to me. Please, please believe me!"

It breaks my heart when the wounded self takes over with rationalizations regarding why it can't be true, and even if it is, what good does it do to know about it now? I am sometimes brought to tears, feeling the desperation of the child to finally be seen and heard so he or she can heal.

If you are getting memories of abuse, please believe what is coming up. If someone you are close to comes to you with a sense of having experienced severe abuse, please believe them. If you are a therapist with a client who is starting to get memories, please believe your client. Please do not do more damage by not believing the horrible abuse that so many suffered as children. Acknowledging what happened opens the only path to healing.

Join Dr. Margaret Paul for her 30-Day at-home Course: "Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships."