Follow the evidence trail

What he is suggesting is that the stories I tell him are bread crumbs to a bigger picture that I do not remember. He is suggesting I was sexually abused. He flat out asked me if I was raped as a child and I flat out told him I have not a single memory of that.

I'm confused. Your memories suggest a sexualized childhood (the books, the non-age appropriate sexual info in the environment): that is enough to explain a trauma response. Add to this, you were assaulted when you were 12. Twelve years old is a child. Do you think you weren't young enough for that assault to count as trauma? Without any further recovered memories, these experiences reveal trauma.


If you have an intuition that you were used in child porn, I would trust that intuition. But you don't need to remember specifics beyond what you already do to work through the feelings arising from these experiences. I know my former T felt there was nothing to be gained and much to risk by trying to force memory. I've had spontaneous remembering of incidents in the years since therapy ended, I think because I am secure enough in myself for it to be safe for these memories to arise.

[QUOTE=feralkittymom;6549741]Add to this, you were assaulted when you were 12. Twelve years old is a child. Do you think you weren't young enough for that assault to count as trauma? Without any further recovered memories, these experiences reveal trauma?/QUOTE]

Funny thing is no I do not think I was young enough. I wanted the attention and was willing to do anything to get it. I allowed him to do that to me. Oddly enough I do not feel traumatized by that event.

T said why did I know about what to do regarding sex at that age?
He also said children really just want love and when they never get it will do anything to get it. He thinks my behaviors are driven by shame. That horrible feeling I have when I am alone and can not tolerate it to the point I have to shut it down by either wanting to self harm or I start the binge purge cycle has a name and it is shame. But I do not feel shameful.

Well, I think your T is right about the shame response. Of course, you wanted the attention: what 12 yr old doesn't? That doesn't mean you wanted to be assaulted. Or even that you wanted sexual attention. That kind of loss of control is terrifying for a child. It's why children unconsciously believe that they can control the universe--because the alternative recognition that we have as adults is that we control very little in life. That is psychologically terrifying. Children don't gain the capacity for logic until @ 16-18 yrs old. And that capacity doesn't fully mature until @ mid-twenties. Before that age, the illusion of control is preferable psychologically to the terror of knowing you have no control.


What you think you did that makes the assault your responsibility is part of the shame response. Because you weren't of an age to process what happened in any way except as under your child need to believe in control, the shame response has frozen you in that mind set. Those memories are separated from your later emotional maturity. That's part of what makes traumatic memory so vicious: the memory gets laid down in your brain as you experienced it then. It doesn't mature with the rest of you. You don't feel consciously like it's traumatic now because it's still trapped in the child mind.

Opening that frozen child mind is the work of trauma. My experience is that it was horribly painful, but unavoidable if I was to have any experience of life that wasn't filtered through depression.


I just wish your T would work with these memories and help you process them rather than looking for others or trying to convince you of a reality that neither of you know about at this time.

Wow you are so insightful. I wish my T would explain things like this to me. I think I am going to pass this one by him and see what he has to say. SCHOOLED T!

Like I said, I have some of the trauma related feelings you do, and I am sure there was no sexual abuse. I was neglected by my father, which I am not at all resentful of because he was MI. And I was only somewhat emotionally abused by my mother. I would never have even regressed back to ponder these early life experiences had it not been that I started really suffering emotional dysregulation triggered by my husband 30 years later. I did not have any emotional issues until then (99%).

I agree that whatever else you experienced was enough to promote the dysregulation you are suffering and there was not necessarily any other repressed memory of sexual abuse.

It is said every time we remember something, it changes slightly in our minds.

When the suggestion was put to me about if there was sexual abuse, I started to really search my mind for anything I may remember and felt like my mind was starting to play tricks on me.

My T says this is spot on. However sometimes it can actually be because a particular event just does not illicit charged response. I truly might not actually feel anything about that event.

Anything is possible, but an absence of response to an event that is so outside the normal realm of experience would be unusual. When such a non-response is also experienced within a context of other emotionally dis-regulated responses (whether of anxiety, depression, suicidal impulses, SH), it's more likely to be a defense. You remember the incident, but don't remember it as traumatic--but you also believe it to be your fault. That belief serves a protective purpose, the same as my memory repression/depression served a protective purpose. But ultimately, the cost of all that repression/depression was too high. It's a kind of denial defense.

I also had issues with dissociation in the first couple of years of therapy, probably because I dissociated during incidents of abuse. So those experiences were repressed and were never processed at the time. When they began to surface, all the emotion connected to the experiences surfaced, too. As long as the defenses stayed strong, the memories and their associated emotions, stayed buried. But a lifetime of depression took a toll.

What a great post by Feralkittymom. I have never been able to put those concepts in words like that, so thank you.

I thought this too until recently.

I dissociated and repressed my trauma for most of my life until therapy. Although I became aware of multiple trauma, I had a vague sense of something else; and I'd make connections of bits and pieces of thoughts and feelings, similar to how you are describing it here. Later, years into my therapy, I recalled the worst of the trauma in terms of severity. It came to me as a flashback in session where I felt the physical feelings of the event, then the horror. Then when I suddenly became aware of what happened in the cognitive sense, I gasped and felt shock. This was less than a year ago. Afterwards, I realized it explained so much about my life and how I've come to be and why I am the way I am. Though there are many bad feelings that surfaced and had to be dealt with, but overall it was very helpful.

The sense of completeness of my story was sort of like finding the last piece of a complex puzzle you've been working on for a long time. After I regained my breath and the volatile feelings settled, I instinctively blurted out to T "I'm done now". It was a strong, visceral feeling of closure.

Maybe you could just go along with your thoughts and feelings naturally and see where it takes you rather than try or not try anything. I like your Ts idea of breadcrumbs.

I hope you do not mind that i am sharing this with my T

T suggested if I could swing $50 this would be worth every penny and a next step for this.

http://https://www.dnmsinstitute.com/web4info/

What do you all think?

IDK. But I didn't have PTSD. That seems to be a bigger issue when children were abused at younger ages (like before @ 4 yrs old) and seems to correlate with subsequent developmental disorders like BPD. It seems like this program only addresses the emotional dis-regulation on a symptom level. It doesn't appear to actually deal with the underlying issues, but just manage the overwhelming nature of the reaction to doing the actual therapy. So I don't think it replaces therapy or makes therapy not needed.


I'm also not a fan of "inner child" or "parts" work. I realize it's become more popular now than when I was in therapy, especially as combined with somatic work. But separating the self into parts has never made much sense to me as a theoretical paradigm. I preferred to work cognitively. My T based his interventions on helping me to summon up my adult strengths to cope with the overwhelming emotions. But I was not impulsive and didn't have problems with ongoing SI or any sort of SH. I didn't experience the splitting that is more common with abuse at developmentally younger ages.


Would your T work through this program with you as the info suggests?

Understand all of this so well. I was actively bulimic for nearly 30 years. Have been in therapy for 30+ years. It is only **just now** that I am starting to understand how dissociated I am...and the bottom line I have had to brace myself for is, there may be memories revealed. And there may not. And the truth is, the memories themselves are not always needed to understand that we have that deep hidden unresolved "stuff." I have had many therapists over the years suspect sexual abuse. And it would explain EVERYthing pretty much. But if that is true, I have no access to the specifics and I have had to come to peace with mysel(ves) that I may never know or remember for sure.

All I do know is there was a before me, and an after me. Decades of all sorts of other trauma. And so, then a bunch of other me's were created to get Me to this point today. My T has me say "all parts, known and unknown..." and have a loving compassionate conversation with them. Even if they are never revealed. I need to trust it is to protect.


FearLess47