It’s not just children who are suggestible with regards to memory. The Bugs Bunny at Disneyland is a famous study.
It’s definitely possible that if your sister says something about “remember how creepy cousin Johnny was when we were little?” you might put into context an event you hadn’t thought about in a long time and realize were molested. But if it’s a memory that was totally repressed and are remembering fully new now, I’d have serious doubts that it was a real, true memory.
I guess I need to be a little clearer. I had absolutely no memory of this until I heard that talk show. It was not something I had always known, and suddenly realized it for what it was. It was at least a decade before I remembered.
The original question started, “If you suddenly realized…” and that was what I tried to answer.
I know it’s hard to read tone into text. I am not angry, and this post is not meant to sound snarky. 
I would be totally fine. If I hadn’t had those memories until now, it would be like if someone told me I received some major injury when I was a kid but didn’t remember it. It changes nothing about me.
[Bolding mine.]
In my case, I idolized my middle step-brother. And when we had the opportunity of spending the evening (which included early bedtime for me) at my grandfather’s, I’d always jump at the chance because I thought that translated to him cuddling with me as I fell asleep. My grandfather disapproved, but didn’t prevent it and I really had no idea why. And as I stated in the other thread, even though as I reached adulthood with general uneasiness remembering it, I chalked it up under the same category (which always seemed harmless to me) as kids being kids, with a dash of “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
So, that’s where I was when I started having these horrible nightmares in my mid-twenties. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, seeing a man standing in the room. Every. Single. Time. Now, my step-brother was only 12 then, so I never made any connection. But when I started therapy after my first nervous breakdown, the counselor asked about any sort of abuse. And for some reason, I related the story above. I have no idea why, because it never would’ve occurred to me to consider it as such, but those frigging dreams were keeping me up at night and I was desperate.
Anyway, saying it out loud and not just excusing it away, made me finally start really examining what happened. Since I was no longer eight, I had a hell of a lot more experience to now compare to and I found that my earlier classification of the event was sorely lacking. And what I understood finally was the reality that my brother had molested me. Which made perfect sense. He’d been highly sexualized by his birth mother since he was tiny and he acted that out with everyone he met. (Not to mention that pattern continued on throughout his entire life [at least, until I lost track a couple of years ago], up to and including with his own children. I’m just sorry he never served time for that.) So, of course he wouldn’t miss an opportunity with someone who was even more vulnerable than he was. It was probably the first real power he’d had.
All that said to explain that, yes, I had a vague sense of shame and queasiness about whatever it was that had happened forever. But it wasn’t until I need to pay attention to the details and resolve my issues, that I truly understood the severity of the ordeal and its place in my life. Fortunately, therapy helped. The dreams stopped with a little CBT and I no longer have any hatred toward him. It’s pointless and he’s far more messed up than any anger I could send his way would that would hurt him. Nope, it’d just hurt me and he no longer has the option to do that.
Worth noting too that it depends on the nature and severity of the molesting.
I was myself sort of semi-molested as a kid, depending on your definition of “molested”. What happened was that when in my early teens I was in a school which had older (post-HS) students in their late teens (or maybe 20) give some instruction to small groups of early-HS kids. And the guy whose group I was in used to rub kids’ thighs under the table. That’s about it - there’s little doubt that it was sort of semi-sexual in nature but it didn’t get further than that.
We all found it creepy and joked/commented about it to each other and tried to position ourselves out of his reach. But no one complained to anyone in authority about it and I highly doubt if anyone was emotionally ruined and I certainly wasn’t, which is why it never crossed my mind for the next 20 years or so, until child molesting became a huge deal and everyone and his brother turned out to have been abused and I started thinking about how I was never abused and remembered this situation.
At that point I did a Google search to see if I could find the guy and see whatever happened to him. I was a bit handicapped by the fact that I don’t remember his first name, but his last name is extremely unusual. But I couldn’t find anything. I actually wish him only the best because he was a fine guy other than this one thing, and I imagine he got into a relationship and turned out OK in the end.
That’s another aspect. I grew up in the 70s and, at least in my world, things that didn’t meet, say, the classic definition of PIV sex, were pretty much no big deal. For example, I was about as overprotected (for then), as a kid could get. Yet even I saw some perv, parked not too far from the entrance to a Goodwill type place, beating his meat kind of nonchalantly, but slightly out of view. I don’t know if he meant me to see be or not, but I still didn’t tell anyone (although I guess I knew I should’ve) and it never meant anything to me. No scarring, no feeling victimized by that.
Now, I’m not saying others shouldn’t be or that it isn’t a big deal, but those were different times indeed. So much hush-hushedness about deviant sexual behavior was just simply not discussed, and it certainly wasn’t lamented over.
I remember my younger sister - in her early to mid-teens at the time - telling me rather nonchalantly that she got flashed all the time. Creepy guys would say things like “hi there, little girl” and whip it out as she passed by in the street. I found that extremely surprising, but she wouldn’t make stuff up. (My wife grew up in the same neighborhood and seems to have only been flashed a few times, but I think her parents were more protective than my parents were, and she probably traipsed around the streets of Brooklyn a lot less than my sister did.) I’m pretty sure it didn’t traumatize her, but then she’s probably the least traumatizable person I know and I’m not sure anything would.
You know, I had this whole response typed out about how it wouldn’t affect me - how what I’ve done/experienced/lived through/etc. since then is what makes me who I am and all kinds of things like that - but then I started giving it more thought before I hit submit. That’s rare for me - usually I post the first fool thought that enters my fuzzy little head as you all well know. 
Honestly, I can’t say HOW it would affect me. I just don’t know any more than I know what happens after we die. I can’t begin to imagine such a thing. So MMM I can’t answer your question - I just don’t know.
I agree, Missy2U. Anyone who thinks they have even a pretty good estimation of how they would respond to trauma doesn’t know a whole lot about trauma. There are lots of people who “knew” they would do such-and-such if such-and-such ever happened to them, and who found out, when such-and-such happened, that they were totally mistaken.
I think a lot of people in this thread are thinking about finding out this fact about themselves without considering that the fact would be connected to a real experience. When someone has this realization, it’s not just an isolated embedded fact in their head (the way that it would seem to be, for instance, if someone who this had not happened to tried to imagine what it would be like if it had happened). This would be a real human being, who you had whatever other series of encounters with, and a real event in your real life. It’s unreasonable to expect that you would be able to imagine in the abstract how you would feel about this.
If that happened to me, my first thought would probably be “oh, that explains so much.”
I expect I know myself better than you know me. Your assumption that since you experienced trauma and handled it, or didn’t, in a particular way gives you a universal insight is bullshit. Speak only for yourself and you will make fewer ridiculous generalizations.
I can’t imagine it would affect me much, just due to how my life went, and the possible suspects not possibly being anyone I currently know. Problems from more than, say, 8 years ago seem pointless to me now.
I have no such trauma, but I listen to podcasts like the Mental Illness Happy Hour, and it has been very eye opening for me. I think that for a lot of people that have such memories recovered, they are already dealing with affects of it (depression, suicidal ideations, lack of focus, anxiety, etc.) and it is impacting their lives. It seems from what I gather that the young mind has a way of protecting itself against things that are too traumatic. It blocks them, kind of putting them behind a wall, though blocking them doesn’t block one from the impact on some level. So the person that goes through life suffering from depression (as an example) might one day later in life be getting to a point where they’re finally strong enough to handle the event and the brain allows light to be shed up on it. It seems to have a way of knowing what you can handle to some degree and not giving you more than you can handle. That doesn’t meant that you’ll handle it well when it comes to light, but that you can at least face it on some level.
Just my 2 cents as a guy that listens to podcasts and books on lots of subjects and likes to hear the realities of people’s lives, dark as they may be. I’ve definitely seen later in life some things that had impacted me that I didn’t know where to put them, and some dots are connected and then I can see how my parents did something that messed me up in that area, but that’s more just perspective that I’ve gained.
My father molested me for a couple of years, when I was around 5 to 7 or so. I never didn’t know what happened but I didn’t realize it was molestation until I was in my late teens. What I didn’t remember until later, like just a few years back, is that one of my stepmothers did it too. I don’t think I imagined it. That would be a weird thing to make up in my head! I guess the memory was hidden from the front of my mind. It likely wasn’t as traumatic maybe because she just touched me, and she wasn’t mean like my father was. It was like 'special hugs and kisses". I remembered THAT part but during therapy for my PTSD I was going through some memories and it just hit me one day that she wasn’t just being nice and affectionate.
Remembering what she actually was doing was not a “meh” event for me, but then again I had a lot of other shit to deal with already so this just aggravated things. I had previously had happy memories of her and I felt betrayed and disgusted even more than I had with my dad, I guess because I’ve had years to work that through my mind.
I believe my memory doesn’t have holes in it, so for me a sudden recovered memory would be suspect. I’d be more worried how a new memory got planted in my head, and wonder if I were losing my sanity.
On the other hand, being presented with concrete evidence (like a super 8 movie of me being molested) would really mess me up, because I don’t remember anything like that. For me, the fact I had suppressed it that well would be more traumatic than the fact I had been abused. If I can’t trust my memory, what do I have?
I’d question if it really happened, but I’d probably also be really angry.
Not logical? Bite me.