Well, that's just my experience. I always felt something was "wrong" with my perception of the past, but I never figured out what that was until recently. I'm 25 now, and most my repressed memories are from when I was 3 to 7 years old. I realized that they weren't completely repressed until I was like 16 years old. Now that the memories are back, I can remember that I could remember some of them when I was like 9 or 12 years old. But never could I remember them all at the same time, chronologically, like I can now.
This is pretty consistent with my memories of abuse from around the same ages, 3-7, although mine was different in nature. I think because one's ideas of reality are still just forming while in childhood and really don't form until adolescence, there are those momentary lapses in repression until the mid-teens when one's sense of reality is more solid. Since my abuse was more sexual, I can remember the raging hormones and awkwardness of high-school inducing a schism in my personality. The memories were fully repressed, but I still had to function in a highly sexually charged environment and deal with advances from girls and such, so parts of my mind were "doubled" and I would switch places with this phantom person until I was in a "safe" environment. These doubles are something that I still struggle to integrate, and when I do I regain some of my former subjectivity but have to deal with an increase in intrusive thoughts that had been repressed for years and years.
Hypnotherapy is a lot safer then psychedelic therapy, but either way, its dangerous territory. You need to do this with a professional. I've had sever trauma in my early life, and in searching for the reality behind these experiences, I basically blew the real world apart. I had always wanted to understand the repressed memories, but I was not prepared for the violence of remembering them. Repression is not a very useful tool, but it is a tool nonetheless. We repress memories for a (not very good) reason; its an automated procedure that has evolved in humans and it serves a purpose. To unlock these old memories, you need to be ready for great difficulty. I don't want to think of what would have happened if I had retrieved my own memories with psychedelics.
That said, I knew the basically scenarios that I had wanted to recall, but not the degrading and terrible meat of the situations.
Good luck to you.
I will echo much of this advice, although I have never tried hypnotherapy myself beyond a simple guided meditation in my therapist's office. Psychedelics and repressed memories are indeed dangerous, with false memories galore, especially when other drugs are being used concurrently as the psychedelics. The many traumatic situations that poly-drug use can get one into, or that one might otherwise witness are another conflating factor. If you intend on confronting anyone about these memories, than your drug use will surely be questioned and will not help you in getting your memories taken seriously. That is IF your family/other know about your drug use, or find out about it in some way, which is possible as both revealing memories and psychedelics are known to drastically change one's attitudes and personality.
It's a very fine line to walk, I remember in my first year after uncovering my memories I tried slamming my mind with 4 grams of mushrooms alone in my room only a month or two after the revelation. Ended up calling my parents in tears, and had to get them to come pick me up from university as I shifted from complete wrenching sadness, to elation, to dissociation and forgetting my identity/sexuality even existed at all. I later tried lower doses of 2C-D to poke at the memories, but it ended up being a neutral, healing trip that simply patched up what had been rubbed raw by the harsh mushroom trip. I later went on to try 5-MeO-MiPT which was probably one of the more ideal psychs for this purpose, it helped but due to relationship issues I collapsed into dissociative abuse and failed to make any progress with the memories for years. More recently after a period of not tripping for almost a year, and witnessing other incidents of sexual abuse, I was able to piece together that another family member was possibly involved in my abuse. This was a serious "key memory" and I've managed to make much progress with this in mind. Up until this May I realized all I had been doing was dealing with the results of the first memory I realized several years ago, and nearly all my drug use in that time was self-medication for the results of this revelation. This is a hard trap not to fall into.
The main thing to keep in mind is that drug can never solve your problems, and if you treat them like this they will only cause problems. The most they can do is loosen boundaries, and they do this very well, you just need to be conscious of these boundaries and how well set they are. There's nothing worse than the emotional toll a bad trip can have on an already taxed and confused mind. Good luck and I hope my experiences help everyone along their paths in life
