Thank you for putting this discussion up. The post you wrote in the information section is really helpful!

A good example of what you have been talking about I have done before in the past. For example, I was abused at cadets, and we used to do a lot of military parades. There are bad memories I have that were on the days of those parades, or at the parades. However, I have such a bad memory and there were so many parades the only actual date of a military parade I remember is the 11th of the 11th Parade. This is because this was also something our school took part in, on the minute's silence. I can't remember a lot of the other dates because there were so many that weren't, I guess, reinforced by the minute's silence at school, and the date being two 11's (seriously, I am no good at remembering numbers generally!) That date, and bad memory alongside it stuck in my mind because of that.

As years went by, I noticed that around this time I particularly struggled with flashbacks. It was relevant to notice that I struggled around that particular time when first identifying PTSD in terms of learning that I was being triggered by that date, and why. But it made me try to remember other dates, and I couldn't, because that date was the only parade date I was ever able to remember, more becase of the fact that we also did the minute's silence in school, or work later, and also the numerical ease of remembering it, as opposed to it being more significant than the other memories.

I tried to place when another memory at a parade happened, that was a significant memory. As a result of thinking through dates with other memories in this 'parade' category, and failing to remember any other dates...now somehow all memories associated with parades sort of got lumped on that one representative date somehow.

Since then, I have purposely not tried to find dates...