For me, some of what I would clasify as my torture memories have only fairly recently materialised to me, with the result that much of what I am feeling and experiencing is currently still very raw and unprocessed...
What is very difficult is that a lot of what I am currently experiencing seems to defy communication or articulation and takes on the form of pure, almost wordless or nonverbal, agony. Perhaps this is just a symptom of the unprocessed nature of the experiences, or perhaps it in part is derived from the fact that the torture itself likely dates back to a pre-verbal time in my life when I was very young. But whichever way, this fact is currently only adding to the horrific sense of unreachable aloneness that I am struggling with, when I actually want badly to find a way to communicate what I am feeling and experiencing and to thereby dislodge the toxic mass of horror inside of me, yet feel genuinely unable to figure out how to do so.
I can relate so much to feeling unable to articulate how this made/makes me feel. It's something I worked on a great deal with my previous T and it was one of the hardest things, because for me a big part of healing is processing, and a big part of processing is expressing what happened, saying it and having a witness. But I felt this was not only inexpressible, it was incomprehensible.
My breakthrough with this has been using metaphor and imagery. On another site I came across a healing exercise where you take a feeling and come up with a metaphor for it, then describe that metaphor. So, I might say that my anger is like a dragon. Then I describe that dragon, what it looks like, how big it is, how heavy it is, whether it moves or is still, what it does, what it thinks and what it says, and what I would like it to say.
This exercise might not sound like much, but I would put it in the top five things that help my healing. There was a time, for months, when I did this exercise every few days. I did it with fear, dissociation, hope, dread, revulsion, horror, despair, grief, loss, disonnection, everything. I've done it several times with the same feeling but it was different because of how I felt on Tuesday compared to how I felt on Friday.
Ive also written poems, never to be shared with anyone else (except maybe my T) so they can be as "bad" as I like in terms of poetry. In one poem I found myself writing the line, "No-one in that room was human in the end" and it made me realise what that meant to me - they weren't human and nor was I, not from any idea of humanity/compassion but from a very fundamental point of human-ness and existence as an individual. They weren't human because they had opted out of what that means, and the baisc responsibility to others that brings, and I wasn't human because they had decided I was something else to them, and I had retrreated into a different kind of existence in order to survive.
I've also done art - particularly collage - that has helped me use the same kind of symbolism to express what normal words can't.
These are ways I've been able to express things that are seemingly impossible to express. The fact that i've been able to put words and ideas to something, to understand something, to convey something... this is so incredibly powerful. The way I feel about what happened and the power my attackers had over me is - they think they have/had power because this was beyond imagining, beyond understanding, beyond expressing and beyond surviving. But I'm here, and i'm accepting it, understanding it, epressing it, being heard and witnessed and - finally - surviving it. So... where is their power now? Because what happened then is what happened then. What's happening now is what's happening now. They had the power then, and I acknowledge that, but that was then. This is now.
