Incest Survivors Support Group
Incest refers to any sexual activity between closely related persons that is illegal or socially taboo. Consensual adult incest is very rare. Incest between adults and prepubescent or adolescent children is a form of child sexual abuse that has been shown to be one of the most extreme forms of childhood trauma. If you or a loved one is a survivor of incest, join the group...
Hello and warm wishes to everyone, I just came to this site the other day, and love all the contributions.
I'd always remembered some of the abuse, age 6, at the hands of my grandfather. But in the 1990''s a heap of images and memories came up that were of a younger age, and totally disturbing. Well, shattering. The feelings have gone on for years.
I was in psych hospital at the time, in a freaked out state. I was purposely staying off the anti-psychotics so that I could access what was coming up.
What I want to say is, I've always had trouble believing these images as memory. Especially if I'm not full of disturbance, it all seems like a dream. The one that really kills me, is I got an image that my father and not just my grandfather was involved.
What I've gathered is, this isn't accurate like conscious memory. Some of what came to me was stylised. Maybe my mind has my dad mixed up with my grandad. This is REALLY hard to live with. Did dad or didn't he rape me when I was little??
There, that's what it gets down to. I've googled repressed memory, and got all these articles about false memory. That really upset me, as if all what I went through I'd just made up. Not to mention the extreme feelings! Not to mention the ways I've acted out which are really self destructive.
can anyone relate? all the best
I'd always remembered some of the abuse, age 6, at the hands of my grandfather. But in the 1990''s a heap of images and memories came up that were of a younger age, and totally disturbing. Well, shattering. The feelings have gone on for years.
I was in psych hospital at the time, in a freaked out state. I was purposely staying off the anti-psychotics so that I could access what was coming up.
What I want to say is, I've always had trouble believing these images as memory. Especially if I'm not full of disturbance, it all seems like a dream. The one that really kills me, is I got an image that my father and not just my grandfather was involved.
What I've gathered is, this isn't accurate like conscious memory. Some of what came to me was stylised. Maybe my mind has my dad mixed up with my grandad. This is REALLY hard to live with. Did dad or didn't he rape me when I was little??
There, that's what it gets down to. I've googled repressed memory, and got all these articles about false memory. That really upset me, as if all what I went through I'd just made up. Not to mention the extreme feelings! Not to mention the ways I've acted out which are really self destructive.
can anyone relate? all the best
Just recently I reclaimed a new memory of abuse, involving both of my parents. Again, it seems impossible that this event could have really happened. But then I had been sensing for a long time that there was at least one more huge trauma locked away inside my psyche.
When recent progress in therapy began to crack that protective safe, I could feel the memory getting closer and closer. Once more, what had risen up out of my past was exactly the kind of thing that all the evidence was indicating it would be. Therefore, I pretty much have to accept what the shards of emotion, imagery and words are telling me: my parents abused me too.
The way I figure it - and I think this applies to you as well - is that even if my recollections aren't literally true, something must need a whole lot of healing attention in order for me to conjur up such horrible experiences. I at least have to treat these wounds as diligently and sympathetically as I would if I had been sexually molested multiple times, by different people, in a variety of places, at a number of ages.
In a sense, what happened doesn't matter as much as what we do now to heal.
May your process be as swift and painless as possible.
Thats is confusing...I did recover memories just recently they were like still pics of my nanny's abuse.Then i read that a lot of time that ishow they come not in motion just like still photos....
It is not necessary to have clear visual images of an assault for it to have happened. I have struggled with this for a long time, trying to believe what I knew to be true when I wasn't accessing visual memories. But eventually they started to pop up, all jumbled and weird, but in my heart I KNEW what they meant (I just was afraid to believe). I remember hearing about a study that showed that a large percentage of assault survivors who had to go to the emergency room for their assault did not remember the emergency room visit afterwards! Our brains do the best job of protecting us from the trauma that they can, and often even if a person does not have a visual memory of something happening, they have other sensory memories (like the way something felt, or smelled, or whatever that triggers a panic reaction or triggers dissociation).
I believe you! I know you are not making any of this up. It can be excruciating to try to figure out the specifics when all we have are fragments! Maybe you will get a clearer picture as time goes on, and maybe not. :( It is not fair at all. The abuse and abusers forced us to question our whole reality, to learn to never trust our own instincts or feelings or perceptions about things. We deserve to be able to trust our feelings as much as anyone else!! It is just extra difficult for us.
***big hugs to you!!*** you are not alone in dealing with this, we have ALL dealt with this to one extent or another
It's so nice to be believed. Take care.
It was hard to accept that memories I had always accepted as nothing more than "dreams" were actually real.
I've been through extremes of feelings, and acted out in self destructive ways.
I'm not sure if it works this way with everyone, but I had to gain the trust of the memory-holding parts of my psyche before they would allow me to know what they were hiding. I suspect there are deeper secrets too.
And one thought on the visual aspect of memory...I believe that the pictures in our minds that we are sure of were both reflected back to us by others as they happened (or soon after) and then refreshed in our own minds over time, either by looking at photographs, reliving the events with those that were there, or at least recalling them in our own consciousness with enough attention to detail for it to be retraced into our memories.
Recollections of traumatic events often don't get those reinforcing aspects, so they are more difficult to remember with accuracy. For one thing, all resources are shifted to survival while the trauma is occurring, leaving very little of our mental capacity for proper storage.
For another, our families - especially the abuser - didn't want us to recall, or dwell on, or even bring up the abuse. This left any images we may have retained without validation by others, and therefore not as easy to transfer from temporary to long term storage. And finally, the fact that we weren't able to access these pictures for years meant that we couldn't refresh them the way we would with most other memories.
So it would make sense that you're not certain who it was that particular time. But as I said, more clues may become available in the future.