So lost!

[Toya2007]

Hi guys,
       So for years I have suffered from dissociation so severe that there are chunks of time spanning years where I have very few memories. I have no idea who I actually am and searching just leaves me spinning round in circles. One thing that I have noticed is that whilst I have memories of most of my traumas I can only tell them like a story, I have absolutely no emotion around them. My therapist had me working connect to them and I may have managed 5 times to connect but only for a minute and then poof gone. I'm wondering does anyone else have issues with emotion memory?

[Tee]

I wish I could disconnect my emotions from my memories once again.  I've been there.  It's definitely a defense mechanism at least it was for me.  And when I got a point in recovery it all can flooding back.  That was overwhelming.  I've since worked through the crashing waves for the most part.  There are still days I wish I could go back to before though. It's a journey stay in therapy and keep working in sure piece by piece things will come back.  Good luck on this road remember to be patient with yourself.

[MoonBeam]

Hi Toya2007. Yes, this seems to be a pretty prevalent part of complex trauma, a way in which we protected ourselves from that which was/is simply too much to process and or remember--until we are ready. It is frustrating to not have those pieces or feel connected to so much of our lives. I could say I was abused as a child to someone with the same affect as telling someone my address or some other seemingly mundane fact about my life. It had no meaning because I had separated myself from it so completely.

A year ago, after many years of functioning seemingly "normal", eg. career, marriage, kids, things changed, big stressors happened and I began to feel a kind of deep depression and dissociation again from every day life in a way that scared me. My GP recommended therapy and honestly I was so alone (no real relationships in my life--another gift from cptsd) I gave it a shot.

Again, when asked about childhood trauma i said it was irrelevant, didn't mean anything to me, didn't matter. T asked me some details for the sake of history taking and then in the following weeks it began. I started to remember, fragments, shards really of a life lost to me and with those memories came all of the shame and fear I had been hiding from. Following that came the familiar pattern of "checking out", floating away, any time we got close to a feeling. I realized how terrified I was of going back there. I truly didn't know how deeply the trauma lived in my body, my being.

A year later, after much work on relationship building between my T and me, I am just starting to feel safe enough to explore the feelings behind the shame and fear. I am just starting to have compassion for me for what I experienced and am beginning to allow myself to mourn. And it is mourning. It is deep grief.

What I'm saying in this Toya, is that I completely understand and relate to everything you shared and that until I was ready to begin connecting to the trauma, to the me underneath it, with a very safe guide, I still very much protected myself with selective amnesia and dissociation. I still do. Some things are still too much to look at. I have pushed myself to try to work through things more quickly--to get it out and it has not been positive or productive.

Recovery is a process with many twists and turns and it's hard. I also have hope in rediscovering who I am in ways I never have before. I'm looking at it as discovering me now and who I will be as I process what happened, as I found I was trying to get back to something that essentially never existed. The who I would have been had I the safe upbringing we all deserve.

Hang in there. A lot of support and patience and compassion for little and grown up me, to emerge as I am ready, has gotten me further so far than any effort to push ahead in any other way. The emotion will come when we feel safe enough to experience it. So glad you are here.

[Tee]

I love the way you said that MoonBeam

I have pushed myself to try to work through things more quickly--to get it out and it has not been positive or productive.

Recovery is a process with many twists and turns and it's hard. I also have hope in rediscovering who I am in ways I never have before. I'm looking at it as discovering me now and who I will be as I process what happened, as I found I was trying to get back to something that essentially never existed. The who I would have been had I the safe upbringing we all deserve.

Hang in there. A lot of support and patience and compassion for little and grown up me, to emerge as I am ready, has gotten me further so far than any effort to push ahead in any other way. The emotion will come when we feel safe enough to experience it. So glad you are here.

I don't have a slow my mind races through everything all the time.  My T says I have done ten years worth of work in three.  It exhausting.  I agree I'm not sure it's always been the best results. 

[Blueberry]

A lot of support and patience and compassion for little and grown up me, to emerge as I am ready, has gotten me further so far than any effort to push ahead in any other way. The emotion will come when we feel safe enough to experience it.

I have pushed myself to try to work through things more quickly--to get it out and it has not been positive or productive.

Recovery is a process with many twists and turns and it's hard.

In fact I've been pushed over my limits a few times by non-trauma-informed Ts / docs and have also pushed myself over my own limits (or got myself into situations where FOO did it again) and the results have rarely been good. Mostly it's caused months of destabilisation, sometimes even retraumatisation.

I used to be able to talk about what happened to me. I can remember a counsellor (a long time ago when I was in university) saying wonderingly "Wow! You can just talk about these things with no emotion." It took me a long time to realise that that was a protective measure, as others have said. It wasn't bravery or anything I had any control over.

Mostly I think I had memories with no emotions attached. otoh once I started T decades ago I couldn't talk about lots of things in detail any more. Probably because we were being reconnected with our emotions in that type of therapy. It would have been too much to feel all of it and to find words for it.

I still don't like to feel emotion so I can understand that you don't or can't reconnect for long at all in T. Try to be patient with yourself.

I'm looking at it as discovering me now and who I will be as I process what happened, as I found I was trying to get back to something that essentially never existed. The who I would have been had I the safe upbringing we all deserve.

    Really well expressed MoonBeam. Glad I can simply borrow your words

[Toya2007]

Thanks everyone!
     I definitely think patience with myself is something I need to learn, I do get incredibly frustrated with myself because I just want to feel normal.  I think especially knowing that I have a time limit on therapy, I'm in the UK and my therapist can only give me 20 sessions max and I'm on 18 now. I'm trying to soak every bit of information I can I have bought and read every book recommended to me, I guess I feel like I am going to be forever broken built I don't want  to let my kids down. I guess forcing myself isn't going to work.

[Tee]

Toya that's rough. I hope that you can get the help you need.  I've never heard of a Max like that before.  But I live in the US and they just want money and to see progress.  Good luck.  Hugs.

[Blueberry]

Toya, I've realised from reading on here that conditions are really tough in the UK. That is really unfortunate. I've lost count of the number of sessions of therapy I have had, but not in the UK obviously.

Have you checked here? https://cptsd.org/forum/index.php?board=266.0 These are country specific resources, the ones we know of anyway. There may be something in that to help you. Good luck! And keep coming back to the forum. There is a lot of information and support on here. 

[MoonBeam]

Toya, just wanted to say I'm thinking of you.

I hope you can get all the support you need and deserve. I don't know the system in the UK, but hopefully there is room for more care and perhaps some of the other supports Blueberry suggested can help you in the meantime. Plus, we're here for you as well. Not being alone in this and feeling understood here at OOTS has made such a difference for me.