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My trauma induced amnesia was diagnosed in 1974. I had zero memory of my childhood, save the phantoms that presented as nightmares, disabling flashbacks, etc. Nada. Zero. Zilch. I refused to see that as a problem until the late 80s when it was tearing my life apart and damaging young sons.
Predictably, the therapy work I have done since was focused on unblocking those memory functions and developing coping mechanisms for the yaddahs of the blahs. Currently I am in "maintenance phase." I am functioning at high levels and performing daily maintenance to keep it that way. My current support network is fully non-professional. Ya'll here at DS are part of that.
My last two "Remembrance Episodes" (more than a year apart) were connected to really nice and useful memories. One was my mother teaching me how to make thatch mulch with sweet grass. The other of my father helping me overcome my speech defect by singing what I could not say. The thing that is really odd about these "Remembrance Episodes" is that they were as painful and debilitating as the early managed episodes of remembering the trauma.
How freaky is that? Is it just me?
Predictably, the therapy work I have done since was focused on unblocking those memory functions and developing coping mechanisms for the yaddahs of the blahs. Currently I am in "maintenance phase." I am functioning at high levels and performing daily maintenance to keep it that way. My current support network is fully non-professional. Ya'll here at DS are part of that.
My last two "Remembrance Episodes" (more than a year apart) were connected to really nice and useful memories. One was my mother teaching me how to make thatch mulch with sweet grass. The other of my father helping me overcome my speech defect by singing what I could not say. The thing that is really odd about these "Remembrance Episodes" is that they were as painful and debilitating as the early managed episodes of remembering the trauma.
How freaky is that? Is it just me?
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My day...today...misplaced my debit card...didn't realize it until I got to the register after shopping to a full cart. Used a different debit card and pulled apart everything looking for missing debit card before I left parking lot. Got home, dropped keys. So now I have a missing debit card, missing keys. A full cartload to unload and put away. I got everything put away.Dumped purse for a...
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I don't really know how to label this but I having a rough week and I can't say it's one thing.... I have a lot on my plate which is nothing new and I try to cope in many positive ways and do but I still have my moments.My kids more so my daughters talk to me about everything which I know it's cause of comfort and we are close.... however I really struggle with the venting about their dad which...
I dont' think it's freaky at all. When good memories come up, for me, sometimes they confuse me as much as the bad ones!.
Or, in more tech-friendly terms, it's a sudden addition of code to the operating system. Takes a while to "debug" it again.
Soft healing to you.:-)
Still, in the quest for balancing of the yin and yang...
Being able to transport myself to another plane of existence has its potential strengths. This would be the very quality that makes me a hero in nearly any crisis. Whatever my personal condition or the chaos around me, I can be present and ready for action, or at least able to not contribute to the chaos. It is the quality which makes me able to patiently weather any storm. It does not become a problem until I am unable to come back from a dissociated state at will.
The contemplation shifted my focus from thinking my dissociation was a character defect to acceptance, appreciation and learning how to do it well.
Does that make more sense than finding so much pain in a good memory?
Well... Masters are not born. They begin with innate traits, such as our ability to dissociate, which are educated, trained and conditioned. I think my military training might have been my first training. Perhaps the seeds planted by the crazy old hippie who introduced me to Transcendental Meditation during my street years?
Whatever.
In the current incarnation, I am attempting to ease the fluidity of my memory so that I don't need to go through all this drama to remember useful and even pleasant tidbits from my childhood.
Partial dissociation is a survival skill in chaos and crisis, and having th ebreakdown after? Normal, healthy, typical, pick a word.
Dissociating wtihout reacting or being able to come back? That's the trick all right.
I am in the process of "debugging" because there are good things in amidst the bad--- but focusing on the bad was how I survived, so focusing now on the good memories? Just ocnfuses the healing, b/c let's face it, it's easier when it's "yes-no-up-down" sorto f thing.
That twilight between certainties is a hard place to be---and that's where we live. Which, for pTSD, is more or less that state of not-quite-panic some of us call daily living. I know how to handle blood, gore, illness, natural disasters, b/c those have certainty-based responses (911, whatever).... but the ide aof seeing my eye doctor? Yep, off in the Twilight Zone I go.... no certainty of where I'm at in space-time because no threat is flying at me....
Sounds sooooo weird and backwards, but therapy is helping me realize: That's how I'm wired. Now I have to re-wire, re-program, debug and run regular system checks.
Arfie, I admire your courage in talking about this.:-)
I am no master of dissociation. I am too scared of it to dissociate fully except in extreme fear/panic, apparently.
I posted mine about recalling me as a boy dodging bullets during the war I grew up in abroad. Usually I focus on how bad it is that I was in a war as a kid. Now the focus has been that, given that the war's a fact, that kid was pretty cool, really, to get through it.
Then I posted just today about a student from the distant past who was suicidal came to me when I was his teacher. I got him help. He's ok today. Another different one contacted me today. He went through an episode like that this past March. I was able to introduce to a support group that helped him, so we're going to lunch to celebrate tomorrow..
I still struggle with my own stuff daily, so it's good when I get to see a good side to long ago bad times, and get reminded of more recent good things, too. It really is daily strength.
Hope you get all the good memories you can.
Well... I guess that would be the very mechanism of that amnesia I carried for an unquantifiable number of years... It was diagnosed in 1974 and I treated it like a personal salvation for another 13 or so years. At the stage where I finally admitted it might be a problem, I had habitually avoided remembering for more than half my life. That is allot of habit.
As for mastery -debugging- of our dissociation talents... Meditation is the tool I am experimenting with to develop the talent. Don't know about the mastery biz, but in the current example I am attempting to use it to remain objective when a memory emerges; to still my own deeply ingrained habit of expecting negativity from memories and to watchfully let them unfold without expectations or judgement.
Or...
Maybe I am just courting another vacation in the looney bin...
Yep, Leo, the Twilight analogy fits. Those moments of clarity are few and far between.