Memories and Survivors of Chronic Child Abuse "Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories.They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing.So they fragment the memories into hundreds of shards, leaving only acceptable traces in their conscious minds. Rationalizations like "my childhood was rough," "he only did it to me once or twice," and it wasn't so bad" are common, masking the fact that the abuse was devastating and chronic.But while the kn...