Trigger warning: Physical abuse and neglect of infant/child.
The other day, I read some of this thread:
https://cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=7916.0This week is very hard for me because along with my impending Thanksgiving dinner with my mother for the one day a year I have contact with her, it is also the anniversary of the death of my baby nephew a few years ago. Not only is there all the understandable sadnesses surrounding losing a precious beautiful 8-month old because he got croup, stopped breathing and was revived too late, but today I had an emotional flashback of being pressed almost but not quite to death in the crib, and I'm really pretty darn sure that it was a memory, and not my imagination.
I believe that the flashback occurred because I've been thinking about my poor little sweetheart and how much I will always miss him, and the underlying knowledge that he died from oxygen deprivation combined with all the feelings I've been trying to process about seeing my mother to produce the memory. I believe that it is a memory and not imagination because it adds up so well with what I remember about the time when I was about 10 and my mother put her hands around my neck and choked me until I started to black out. That memory came back to me several years ago after what I didn't know at the time was an emotional flashback, which happened because I was doing some of what I called emotional archaeology. In an attempt to understand what happened to me as a child, I was at my mother's house while she was away going through the basement finding artifacts from my childhood such as photographs, school reports and letters exchanged by my divorced parents. After a while, I became overwhelmed by this, and then I found myself sobbing uncontrollably on a bed while having a clear feeling of being a baby in a crib, wet and cold and hungry, crying for help at the top of my little lungs and no one coming to help. When I talked about that incident in therapy, I qualified it with disclaimers about how I knew I couldn't say for sure that that had actually happened to me as a baby, but it FELT like it had really happened. Then, a few days after that flashback, I had a dream that caused me to remember the time that she choked me with her hands. That I knew right away was a real memory of something that actually happened, and I recalled that my reaction to it when it happened had entirely lacked surprise. I remembered that I'd had an internal voice say something along the lines of "Yes, your mother just tried to kill you, but you're still here. So just get up and move on," and then did just that. As if nearly being asphyxiated by my caretaker was something I had already survived at least once before. All this adds up with everything I've learned about CPTSD in the past six months to convince me that yes, these things happened to me.
This happened this morning, and all day I've been coping well, taking care of myself, and My Person is here and also taking care of me, and thankfully will be home all week, but physically I feel like I've been hit by a truck. Literally. My entire body hurts. Medication and exhaustion are helping to keep me calm, but my diaphragm won't relax. I feel confident that I will make it through and be okay once I do, but right now every moment is clear crisp crackling only thinly tolerable utter discomfort in every atom of my being.
