I Keep Killing My Kids... What Does It Mean

[Virtues]

You could also take it as processing, that it's in a run being a good thing?

(Or cough, at least I do tha...

The question I keep asking myself though is: why my kids? I never killed any kids while I was deployed, and the dreams started after I came back. I dealt with a lot of children while I was over there but it was only in a positive light (passing out candy, soccer balls, etc...) That part of the dream has to mean something else. Is it the fear of being able to keep my kids safe? Because, after the war, when I came home, I never stopped being afraid for them. Is it the death of my inner child? Because, certainly I left him over there.

This dream puzzles me during the day and haunts me at night. I am so tired of waking up in a cold sweat, waking up in tears. I just want to be all right again. I have come to terms with the fact that I may never be whole, but I just feel like if I can figure this out than maybe the dreams will stop and at least I can sleep at night, you know?

 

[Ronin]

Yah, gotcha Florian.

Thing is, can it be something completely else, not having in common with kids, real, imagined, or parts of personality symbolizing, at all? Can it mean something that simply nags at you deep and drives you mad by its intensity, and children being only a front, because it's an image that just usually gets people's attention and caring?

 

[scout86]

why my kids?

What do your kids mean to you? Start simple. Don't look for a complex explanation. Just ask yourself "what do your kids mean?"

My T says to look for things in the dream that remind me of parts of myself. I've had 0 luck with that. It might help you though. How do you experience all this? Are you "living" it in the dream or watching yourself from the outside?

 

[Powder]

I actually read Freud's Analysis of Dreams. Yet, this is a challenging one.

I should really marinate this one before I respond.

 

[Virtues]

Is it bad that I studied psychology in college? I thought it would help me get a better grasp of what was happening to me. Clearly I wasted my time as there's no way in the world I could ever be a mental health professional with my issues, but I'm not sure I got the insight I was looking for either. I don't know just my thought for the day I guess...

 

[Neverthesame]

These kinds of things are hard to figure out. If you ever do.

Don't be too hard on yourself. I can't say for sure that your psychology class was a waste or not, but you mentioned your issues being in the way of a mental health career. I think that's a bit unfair to pin to yourself.

After all, your T is a mental health professional. They haven't been able to tell you exactly what these dreams represent either.;)

Maybe it's just a difficult puzzle to solve. Hopefully you figure it out.

I hate those dreams. Though for me the failure to save the child, is far more literal.
I was never in combat, but you can chalk me up to one more person who has dreamt this miserable nightmare.

 

[Friday]

Any dream where it's my fault someone I love is dead, or someone who's my responsibility is dead... Guts me. Ties directly into trauma stuff. Whether they're flashback style nightmares, total fiction, or a combo of the two.

Then there are the parenting-nightmares :rolleyes: From putting my baby in a dresser and forgetting about him for a few years, to come back and find either the body or a completely healthy toddler-adult in the drawer (or nothing, and instead of a grief & blame nightmare it becomes a desperate search and can't find nightmare) and all the other myriad Parenting Fail! ones... To every situation under the sun, no matter how ridiculous and improbable. They're hurt/dead/gone whether it's my fault in the dream or a toilet falls out of the sky. Ugh. Grey hairs man. Worry about my kids waking and sleeping.

To me, your dream reads like either a combo of the above (Any chance you've been stressin over how your combatPTSD is hurting your kids?), or straight up parenting nightmare : your fault your kids are dead, using nightmare fuel from combat to frame it.

 

[Virtues]

or straight up parenting nightmare : your fault your kids are dead, using nightmare fuel from combat to frame it......

I like what you said above ^^^ and I think there is something to this. Just before I was medically retired my daughter had a bad fall from her bunk bed. She landed right on her face crushing the floor of her right orbital, breaking her nose, crushing both the floor and roof of her left orbital, left side basilar skull fracture, and a broken occipital bone. She started seizing on the floor and there was blood everywhere; I thought she was going to die.

Me (as a firefighter) I should have known what to do, but I didn't. All I could do was hold her and rock her back and forth like she was a baby. (I'm welling up with tears writing this). It was after that day that I was pulled off the fireline for the inability to do my job anymore (I was afraid to touch anyone). There is a huge part of me that feels like a failure, failure as a firefighter, and failure as a father.

I think as you put it my mind "uses nightmare fuel from combat to frame it"

So much violence in my life, it's so hard to thread this needle, but there may be something to this. The thing about complex PTSD is everything is so closely interwoven it's so tough to pull out what's what.

 

[Friday]

The thing about complex PTSD is everything is so closely interwoven it's so tough to pull out what's what

Very much agreed. Its like a spider-web, my life, sometimes I think. I swear it all made sense at the time, each strand laid out in order... But now they're all stuck together. Tug any piece of it, and the entire thing reacts / can't just take the strand and unwrap it. Have to deal with the entire web.

*** ETA

LOL... Including periodically walking through it face first half awake in the morning ;) and running in circles/ random lurching/ waving my arms & yelping like a lunatic. Even worse if...Ack! Spider! Strip!

It only looks crazy. It makes perfect sense the moment you know why someone is...oh. Yep. Spiderweb. Shudder.

 

[Powder]

What happened to your daughter would kill me. I can't type through the tears.

Okay, trying to calm down.

Is this child recovered? I hope.

Is she the one who you are so close to, or is this an older daughter?

Thank you for sharing such an intense and moving memory that I think any parent would find traumatic and difficult to process with PTSD without such kind of nightmares.

 

[Virtues]

What happened to your daughter would kill me. I can't type through the tears.

Okay, trying to calm down....

This is one of my older daughters, my middle daughter actually. She has made pretty close to a full recovery. There was obviously some facial deformities due to that much trauma; her left eye sits slightly lower on her face than her right eye. There was also some optic nerve damage and some vision loss, luckily most of the vision is correctable by the use of glasses. There is also some TBI/Post Concussion Syndrome issues such as concentration problems, headaches, and disrupted sleep architecture (she now oversleeps and gets tired easily). But, other than that, her recovery was rather remarkable.

The biggest problem, I feel, has been me. Since the accident I have emotionally shut down with her. My T thinks it's because I'm afraid I might lose her so I "shut off". Anyways, I'm not able to harbor any loving emotions for her anymore since that day. When she hugs or kisses me I have to fake my way through it; it really makes me feel uncomfortable. I just kind of turned off since that day. As a matter of fact the only feelings I feel about her is sorrow when I start to replay the incident in my head. I'm trying to get past feeling brittle but I don't know if that will ever happen.

I did a pretty good job of hiding my PTSD from the military, from the world, until this event happened. I really came unglued after it happened. Granted there were a bunch of underlying circumstances that helped me along to "cracking", but this was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

 

[scout86]

My T thinks it's because I'm afraid I might lose her so I "shut off".

That makes complete and total sense. (sorry! :()

You sound like such a cool dad (I know you probably don't think so). I hope you & your T find a way through to the other side of this!