My broken neck and back thing is in a totally different traumatic scope, but the situation and magnitude is still something I struggle to process nearly twelve years later. I legitimately have an amnesia like gap in my consciousness for 3 hours due to the massive head injury. For the first 3-5 years, despite my limitations, I processed it like any of my other bike crashes and was confident I could push through, or that my limitations were psychological failures. I wanted to forget and move on without processing the things that happened. That reaction has reverberating psychological consequences to this day.

With a kid, their self awareness is limited in scope. So I imagine they may or may not block out the experience in a similar way. My point is that trauma is not logical or linear in how it affects the mind. Like the cause of most PTSD is an event that causes a loss of consciousness, that results in severe injury, and was unexpected or out of the person’s control.

My earliest memory is around three years old. I was a halfwit that thought I could fly when wearing my superman onesie with cape, if only I was brave enough to leap from one stair higher up and believe strongly enough. So I think I would have the potential to remember. But knowing how severe trauma affected me, it is entirely plausible I could block out the experience completely.