PreciousChild
MyPTSD Pro
I suddenly became confused between being triggered and dissociating. I saw Love, Actually again the other night. I loved the movie, but I was triggered or something. I've been irritable with my son. I think it's that I never got love, but give him lots of it. I was and am having what the author of Healing Developmental Trauma calls "protest behaviors" (aka getting mad and calling out for my need to be met). When I sat down tonight to write out my thoughts, I could tap into what was triggering me and I felt this huge sadness for myself. I realized how I have never actually been shown love, not even by the man I married (now divorced). I was writing how as the lack of food makes a body perish, does the lack of love make anything perish inside? Will I always be capable of love or have I lost it? These thoughts were part of what was triggered and I cried a lot.
But then I came to the insight that the lack of love also probably left me feeling like it was my fault. That I was not loved because I was unlovable. Then, all feelings left me. This is dissocation, I suppose. Or is it? I always thought the experience of dissociation came with a background of intense emotions. I thought that the dissociation part of it was that I wasn't able to articulate what that feeling was - that it remained the "nameless dread". But what I observed in myself tonight is different. I was thinking back to all the years when I was probably hiding this deep dark secret that I am unloveable. Intellectually, I understand that it's a painful thought, but I'm not feeling it.
I remembered a section of Body Keeps the Score when the brains of a husband and wife are scanned during their episodes of ptsd. They had the same traumatic event - a car accident in which they heard a little girl burning to death above them, but they couldn't get out of their own damaged car to help her. The husband's brain became highly reactive during these episodes, signified by dark patches every where. The wife's brain became completely white. It was startling. It's dawning on me that it's not so much the intense emotions that speak my truth because these things are available to me. It's the things that I have no reaction to at all. Or not? If my mind goes completely white, and my secret self goes completely under cover, how am I supposed to recover it?
But then I came to the insight that the lack of love also probably left me feeling like it was my fault. That I was not loved because I was unlovable. Then, all feelings left me. This is dissocation, I suppose. Or is it? I always thought the experience of dissociation came with a background of intense emotions. I thought that the dissociation part of it was that I wasn't able to articulate what that feeling was - that it remained the "nameless dread". But what I observed in myself tonight is different. I was thinking back to all the years when I was probably hiding this deep dark secret that I am unloveable. Intellectually, I understand that it's a painful thought, but I'm not feeling it.
I remembered a section of Body Keeps the Score when the brains of a husband and wife are scanned during their episodes of ptsd. They had the same traumatic event - a car accident in which they heard a little girl burning to death above them, but they couldn't get out of their own damaged car to help her. The husband's brain became highly reactive during these episodes, signified by dark patches every where. The wife's brain became completely white. It was startling. It's dawning on me that it's not so much the intense emotions that speak my truth because these things are available to me. It's the things that I have no reaction to at all. Or not? If my mind goes completely white, and my secret self goes completely under cover, how am I supposed to recover it?