My dearest @reinhard-schmid,

You know, in my head you are a character of a very good book: an artist who comes back home to his beautiful wife - in my head your wife's coffee bar is always full of delicious cakes (even at night when it is closed :D) - in a cold winter night!

I like your question very much, and the way you put it, yeah.. It does seem contradictory. But, let's see if I can address this in a satisfactory way:

-The first study mainly addressed poverty. When the author described the participants on his paper he focused on poverty aspects; and, even though he says the children were maltreated he doesn't explicitly state the kids were abused or treated with extreme violence. They were mainly neglected. In that study he was curious to find out how come some children who come from extreme poverty become fully-functional adults, while others enter a life of crime (unfortunately the majority). This is a social-psychology study. Further, from the way he describes the participants, I see -this may be a biased observation - even though those children were neglected and poor, they felt loved and protected by someone in their lives (by mothers, by teachers, social-workers etc..). While the abused women felt the opposite, none of them had someone to talk to about their fears. They spent a whole childhood in shame and feeling unsafe. For me, this is where the difference is. And, I base my conclusions on the findings of Harlow's attachment studies :)

As I said to the other readers, who like yourself, are kind enough to leave a comment and share their own experiences with low-mood and difficult feelings: Thank you for telling us about it. I find it particularly important because it is a real account of someone who overcame adversities and, therefore, gives real hope to those who are in the same situation now and reads it. The pattern seems quite clear to me: the recovery comes as a result of finding a new purpose in life.

Your question about memory is an intriguing one. This is one of the topics within my field that fascinates me the most and, hence, one of the topics I have studied more in-depth. Although, mainly repressed memories. But, to your question .... as you know * your memory is the product of your experience* and this is something that is not possible to be passed on through genetic materials. However, I don't want to limit you to my understanding only. There is a field Epigenetics that proposes this very notion, but for me there still lacks convincing explanation for how it happens, as well as experimental evidence (and this is the tricky part!). What drew my attention here, though, was the fact that you said you were 'haunted' by the memories, which makes me think they were bad memories. Epigenetics focus greatly in the inheritance of traumatic events. This might be something I should pay more attention to now, because of your account!

All the best to you my dear.
Have a wonderful weekend!