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Just as we are all unique, so our experiences of dissociation are never going to be identical.

This is my understanding of dissociation NK — that it exists on a spectrum from day dreaming to DID and everyone experiences that uniquely.

Thanks for sharing

Hi wintersnow,

Welcome back. I hope you find what you're looking for here 

Sending you support,
dolly

NK, as an outsider, to me, it looks like you are perhaps seeking a "logical" explanation of why you don't like being around your m when perhaps you just don't like being around her, and you don't have to defend, or explain that. That's how you feel and it's valid. There are of course outcomes, not consequences IMO, of choosing to go with your feelings. These outcomes were presented to me as "the final answer," or no other path growing up because what I actually felt didn't matter.

I was often over "written" and over looked as not mattering. For example, the last xmas I spent with sgf, where he took a necklace from me (not what he did in his mind, but that's essentially what it was), and had zero interest in what I wanted. "People" (oh there's always people, but I think this is my gm's voice all along) would say that they're old, you have to allow them some grace because they can't change etc, and you know what, they were doing the same things when they were younger because it suited them. I think I tried telling him that that's not what I wanted to do, and it didn't go down well. Or I didn't say anything about the necklace because I knew how that would go, him feigning innocence and me feeling guilty. These are all really hard outcomes to face (ie me having to acknowledge their actual behaviour as well). Maybe I knew that saying something would only make it worse, since that's what I grew up with? I don't know. So, I didn't tell him I was going to stop answering his calls, and that's what I did. I feel better, but also "bad" I guess in other peoples' eyes. Is/was it the right thing to do? I don't know, but I feel better not having to manage someone not caring what I think.

Sending you support,
dolly

I'm sorry Slashy. This is a lot to go through at such a young age.

Sending you support.

Hi TBB,

I get what you're saying and glad you found something that works for you. I think the paragraph is a simplified version as well perhaps. However, I also think that people can function fully from the intellect where the underlying trauma is never dealt with precisely because it is never felt. Ingrid Clayton makes a good case for this in Fawning where she says that she managed to get a PHD in psychology, but never touched on her own trauma until she started doing somatic work.

What I do think she gets right is that one needs help and the brain isn't going to let go without being safe and supported. To me, that is the tricky part where the unearthing and layers come in, at least for me because it takes a lot of work to understand what I really need. I spent years at the therapist before I tried IFS, which actually felt like it was the first thing to bring me in direct contact with my emotions. I have basically been living my entire life in my head and it's very easy to continue to do that, but I don't think it's healing. Of course, just diving in and feeling things can be retraumatizing, which is why I think the safe and supported part is paramount.

dolly

This is an interesting thread. I commented elsewhere that I feel like I had more than an photographic memory where I was able to "rewind time" until an incident of abuse from my m that didn't have any context for me. This was around the age of 7 I think. Now, I think I operate with things in boxes, that are sort of compartmentalized from each other, and I won't always remember doing something, or my interest in something, and it's more like a process of "moving forward" (maybe getting on with it) if that makes sense.

I'm reading a book called Mother Hunger right now and she talks a bit about brain development and memory.

For those of you interested in the brain, you may already know how stress impacts the temporal lobe—specifically the amygdala and hippocampus. Stress irritates the functioning of the amygdala, where empathy develops. Cortisol poisons the hippocampus, which makes sense of incoming data and memory processing. The brain is adapting, keeping the necessary biological processes going, like our heartbeat and breathing, but filtering out less critical processes, like memory and empathy. During a stressful event or moment, the brain literally ignores information secondary to survival.

(p. 158)

It must compartmentalize fear somewhere outside your consciousness so that bonding can happen. Over time, the brain shrinks danger signals, like a mother's shrill voice or furrowed brow, so you can tolerate her proximity. Pruning alters perception and protects you when you are small and dependent, but over time, your innate ability to detect or discern risky situations is twisted. In this way, neuroception is altered, which is why exposure to early betrayal puts you at a greater risk of further victimization. Maternal abuse is a devastating betrayal because not only do you miss out on essential nurturance, protection, and guidance, but your neuroception and protective instincts are also damaged. Since you are adapted to danger, situations that would frighten a regular person don't raise a red flag for you.

(p. 159)

Earning secure attachment comes from replacing the three essential maternal elements that you didn't have. To help your brain do this, you need a sense of history. How did you get here? Think back to your earliest memories with your mother. Was she affectionate with you? Could you rely on her when you were afraid? Do you think she was happy? Did she inspire you? Learning your story puts you in touch with the missing pieces so you can put them back together. With a story that explains your behavior and your feelings, energy for new decisions, dreams, and goals appears. Renewed focus is a sign that your attachment style is healing. Healing happens by knowing what you didn't have so you can fill your empty spirit with the right ingredients. We simply can't change what we don't know. Knowing happens in two ways: cognitively and emotionally. Reading and learning about Mother Hunger is cognitive. This is your left brain in action. Cognitive awareness is the first step. But to create lasting change, you must feel the wound—the sickening emptiness that yearns to be nurtured, protected, or guided. Most of us can't feel this pain without help. After a lifetime of protecting ourselves, the brain simply won't let go unless we are safe and supported.

McDaniel, Kelly. Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance (pp. 168-169). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Perhaps acute experiences affect the brain and memory in a different way than repeated actions over time? I also thought the part about needing to go back and remember your history with your mother as a step to healing was interesting. I feel bodily, and mentally this is something I'm quite resistant to do.

NK, I'd be interested in commenting on this as a couple of interesting things have come up while reading Mother Hunger, but I'm getting the error that the post is missing or off limits to me.

It's a pinned to the top (I think) thread in the Co-Morbidities / Memory and Cognitive Issues section of the forum about memory and trauma. At any rate it should be easy enough to spot as there is quite a bit of recent activity on there now. Hopefully that gives you enough info to find it.

Thanks Nk and sorry to take up your journal Slashy! Funnily enough the sub section memory and cognitive issues doesn't show up for me, but Kizzie mentioned it might be a cache issue as I've had it elsewhere.

https://www.cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=10108.0;topicseen

I've added a few comments to this thread on how trauma affects memory

NK, I'd be interested in commenting on this as a couple of interesting things have come up while reading Mother Hunger, but I'm getting the error that the post is missing or off limits to me.

Slashy/John, I don't want to write in your journal when you're already anxious by what's going on. So, will save for another time.

It was really upsetting me to consider the notion that my early memories might not be real, but I've corroborated too many of them.
 Now that I better understand the mechanism and see that other sufferers of dissociative amnesia have reported a similar experience, I feel better about the whole thing.

I think I understand what's going on a bit better now.

I'm sorry that having this stuff come up causes anxiety. I'm guessing that was the part that you were hoping to "fix" by recovering everything. I used to think my t was saying a canned response, or didn't really believe it, when she would tell me that it's really hard to do this work, and commend me for trying. It is really hard to grapple with these things, and I hope you can give yourself some space to process what's coming up.

Sending you support,
dolly
 

[my]

Of course, but this doesn't fit me. If anything, it demonstrates the opposite. All of 5 of us kids were impacted and I'm one of the only two ho survived it intact. I don't blame myself for any of it. I was just a kid and it's all the fault of the grownups, my mother specifically. Even the blame for all the other bad actors comes back to her because she should never have allowed them to be around her kids. It's not my fault, it's HER fault. She was an unfit mother, no doubt about it. But she's dead and I'm the one left to clean up the mess.

Hey Slashy, to me basic fault is more nuanced than that. I think that I can recognize that my m was at fault for providing less than adequate care etc and the things she did as her fault. However, how basic fault shows up is more through interpersonal relationships (ie attachment style) and my relationship to myself (ie what I actually believe about myself). So, in relationships if something happens, do I immeadiately default to, I am unlovable or bad? If something happens does it become a problem that I have to fix, or I am unloveable (and not that the other person is being selfish etc)? Can I show up in a conversation where I talk about my needs, and actually have needs because I learned that having needs is bad ie therefore I am bad when I have them? I have also "made out ok" despite the odds, but these are also still big issues of my self at my core.

I wonder what would happen if setting yourself this impossible task, which doctors have said should be impossible (if I understand that correctly), and having others depend on you (despite being an adult herself), that if the "missing piece" doesn't arrive, or fix things in the way you are expecting, how that would show up for you? Would it be turned on yourself for not being able to do those things? I think others on here who have experienced repressed memories have had a foundational base for those memories to come up so that they were ready to process them. In Dissociation and IFS, Joanne Twombly talks about the structuring that is needed before one starts to dig into the dissociation. For example, there might be really good reasons why your body/mind has dissociated these things in the first place and that there is some part that needs to be grounded in safety. Though, if you're working with a therapist, she may have started on this to proceed with the DBR.

I don't feel like I need to see her because I'm sure I already know how that conversation would go. "Doc, it hurts when I do this". "Then stop doing that".

Well, as I've learned there's only one way to know what someone else is thinking and that is by asking. I think she might surprise you with her answer, or at least provide you with information (I hope) to better qualify what decision you want to make in the future. That being said, I have recently left a therapist because they were very "certain" about how things "should" go in therapy, and although we did a lot of good work together, it wasn't the direction I felt I needed to go in. (I wanted to explore feeling more regulated in the moment, and when I suggested that, she said that you can't "be" in therapy week after week. Anyways...)

Sending you support. This is all really difficult stuff that you're willing to look at.

But instead of doing that, I'm focused on identifying and rectifying specific faults. "These are the specific failures I've identified that were caused by my trauma and the symptoms that led me to them". Again... It's a "me" problem and I'm sorry. It's very possible that I may be the only one talking about my experiences and frustrations on a "systems" level.

Hey Slashy,

Can you say more about this? I'm not going on the defensive here, but trying to explain why I talked about these specific therapies. When you experience things as a baby, or preverbally, your brain does what it needs to do to make sense of what happened at that time. I am also very much a rational thinker, mind over matter kind of person because that's what I had to do to survive ie figure it out. What I've learned, is that intellectualization and figuring it out is a survival strategy. When you are in your head, you're not in your body, which is likely protecting me from the things that I had to experience. So, these therapies for me, are very much about figuring out what is going on systemically with me. It's like using the head to find the body, piece by piece. If you want, have a look at the connection survival strategy in Healing Developmental Trauma, which talks more about intellectualization.

Also, I don't know if you're actively in therapy right now, but one of the things that my therapist tried to hammer into me (probably not the best phrasing) was that it wasn't my fault. There is/was nothing wrong with me. Children will do whatever they need to do in order to keep their attachment to a parent, which means that they will take the responsibility in order to stay close to that caregiver because that is what is going to keep them alive. I have also been learning about the "basic fault," which means that children growing up in certain situations will believe themselves to be inherently flawed at their core and was developed by Michael Balint:

proposes that early childhood, pre-verbal discrepancies between a child's needs and environmental care create a fundamental, lasting structural deficiency in the personality. This "fault" causes intense anxiety, primitive object relationships, and regressive, difficult-to-treat character disorders.

It doesn't mean however, that you were flawed or different, but rather, that's what you had to believe in order to survive if you get me? It's a story that young you had to tell yourself about what was going on. Perhaps the searching through those memories now, is an effort to subconsciously undo that story?

Sending you support,
dolly

Be gentle with yourself NK. I think very much as adults who grew up as their children, I had to protect myself byy believing they were people who loved me and would do "this" to me. That at their core, they were good, loving and had just been through trauma themselves, which meant me taking the "stuff" on, and not saying, no you are responsible, which again is difficult because sometimes this "stuff" does fall under the spectrum of being a "good" person. As my second t said to me, there's nothing wrong with the way your heart works.

But for me, it's when you get there and find out things weren't as they were "presented" or "seemed" ie it wasn't this emergency, that the upset over emotional manipulation, and my "working" heart come in. How can I trust other people when this is what I had to deal with? And I still do, wanting to give people the benefit of the doubt because they have been through things (and I extrapolate this all in my head, looking for the evidence etc etc), but the reality is, they're not choosing me for example, and this is how they decided to show up for me. This person could very much change and this x,y,z could happen, and I don't have all the information, except that I know this is how they were showing up for me, and I need to face that. (Speaking with my own experiences recently here).

Hooray for adult NK for having that conversation and asking for what you need. I often feel/fear these conversations around our current politcal climate are so divisive and people are locked into their own beliefs. So, I'm glad you are your h were able to find a way around that.

Slashy, I think there's others here on the DID spectrum that can probably speak to your experience more than me. I have dissociated or frozen "parts" that I only discovered were that way after reading Somatic IFS. I grew up in an NPD family where my m frequently left me alone as an infant so she could go out to party. She also told me I wasn't wanted, or a mistake. So as an adult, I have the understanding that there was a lot of preverbal trauma where things don't necessarily show up as memories per se, but feelings and sensations.

In Healing Developmental Trauma by Joseph Heller, there is something called a connection survival style where as an infant, you develop the Self by taking your Self out of your body ie dissociation, intellectualization, spiritualization etc. Your mind cuts things off because it wasn't safe to be in those environments. As an outsider, what I am getting from your journal is perhaps an fragmented intellectual understanding of what happened, but maybe not the emotional connection to Self, or what happened to a certain extent? Speaking from my experience, it's like remembering you felt happy etc, but not feeling the full extent in your body, but more your mind.

I think everyone has their own process of doing things to connect the dots to our inner, "whole" emotional world. I am not there 100% by any means, but have found things along the way that have helped --IFS and NARM were two of them as well as EMDR, but to me, it's like a behind the scenes thing. I feel like IFS was the first thing where I felt an emotional connection to my inner world. (I've also helped my anxiety by dealing with things on a body level by addressing health concerns, but that's a whole other topic).

When I started IFS journeying on my own, I didn't understand anything really that was coming up. I think it's because my inner sense of self was so fragmented from a young age. It's also something I am finding more difficult to do right now, perhaps because I don't know how to approach these preverbal, somatic memories, but I think NARM has helped with that by helping bring my attention back to myself in a way, and start to recognize the sensations when they do come up. So, they're not just immediately "boxed away" as unsafe.

With inner children for me, when people would say take care of your inner children at first, it was blank. Like ok, I can pretend to do that, or feel like I'm going through the motions, but the concept is quite foreign to me. I think I have a sense and connection to different parts at certain ages now where it's not an "idea" of a part, but something that actually "popped out" that I can relate to in IFS.

I don't know how much you've read about these things, so apologies if I overlap or sound condescending. Please take what feels useful and leave the rest.

Sending you support,
dolly

his carried over to all my encounters with others and I kept losing myself. I did not know who I was and how to reside in my own body. I always allowed myself to be pulled out by others and the main strategy I had was to be overly interested in them and overly empathetic to anything they were going through. It was a kind of fawning response but it did keep me safe or so I thought.

Growing up in an NPD household as well, I find this very relatable. I really appreciated Ingrid Clayton's new take on fawning in her book Fawning. I think it reconfigures fawning as a trauma response, which is what I feel this "over-empathy/lack of Self" is. Also, I agree that it is so hard when you start to shift that focus and find that others aren't showing up for you in the way you'd like. For me, I think I have some scapegoat programming that leads me to think, it must be my fault, and start to shrink/doubt myself, or some sort of inner "basic fault" that believes that I'm not deserving of those things. It's hard sometimes to contextalize it, and begin to undo that wiring.

NK posted a video with Patrick Tehan and Ingrid Clayton a while back also that is very interesting. `
 

say all that to illustrate how deep my sense of self protection runs.
 So I'm not negating or minimizing anyone's quest for forgiveness or reconciliation. It's just that I cannot even remotely relate to such concepts. Most people don't get a first chance from me, let alone a second.

Hey Slashy,

I wanted to say that I don't think you're a "bad" person for this. A lot of the times I feel like the "burden" of forgiveness is placed on the victim in order to ease the burden or the consciousness of the other person. For me, in my family, I was expected to forgive people who didn't see a problem in how they treated me because that's just how they were. To me forgiveness is also something that's wound up in the fawning trauma response where you are pacifying or appeasing to survive. Not that that's the case all the time for forgiveness.

I just wanted to say that I can understand why you might have that response to your brother.

Sending you support,
dolly