I believe that our memories store all our experiences right back to birth and possibly before then.

I would suggest that the reason we cannot access them is that as very young children we have no way of cataloguing or filing them. The reason for this is because we have no context to compare experiences, no awareness of the fact that time passes and no language to enable us to file and categorise.

As a young child, we experience every moment as though it is brand new. It's as though every moment is our entire world forever (since we don't know that change is inevitable). We have no option but to live in "the now".

Now is all we know.

We don't really develop memories that we can access for the rest of our lives until we have some understanding of time and language and it's a combination of these that enables us to begin to develop a sense of context. This is the beginning of us being able to store our memories in a way we can access.

For the majority of us this understanding of time and language that allows us to begin a mental filing system come together at around age five, though it isn't uncommon for this to vary by up to two years in either direction.

For small children with no awareness of how time passes their understanding of each moment unfolds as it passes. With no understanding of time, each moment may as well be forever.

Living in the now is not voluntary.

This is why a child's bliss and joy are so total and why, when they're upset and screaming blue murder it's as though their whole world is completely terrifying. It is!

Fortunately although hunger and wind means their whole world experience is of pain and discomfort, immediately that sensation is replaced by feeding or physical comfort the world is filled with joy and bliss again (and for most children, fortunately, this is what happens).

Babies and small children need someone else, ideally a loving parent to enable them to begin to become aware that things change.

This can be done by as little as a cuddle which distracts the baby and lets them know that the world is not all made up of that scary or unpleasant sensation or emotion ~ though of course sometimes it takes more than just a cuddle.

This is Donald Winnicott's Containment Theory in a nutshell. He suggested that when the carer touches or cuddles a distressed child this "contains" that emotion for them and stops it from being overwhelming.

Eventually children learn to do this for themselves. Those of us who didn't receive adequate containment from someone else when we were small can continue to be easily overwhelmed and to have what appear to others to be disproportionately large emotional responses. At the other end of this continuum are people who appear to be emotionally flat or inexpressive because as small children they abandoned hope of their situation ever changing.

Our ability to contain our own emotions often lags behind our language development and our awareness of time and is incomplete in a significant minority of adults. It can also come and go according to how much stress we are feeling.

But don't we feel great and in control when we are well contained, when we manage our emotions well?

People that it feels very "safe" to be around are often able to manage and contain their emotions appropriately and not allow them to spillout so that they might affect us.