How Do You Accept That It Really Happened?

[anonymous]

I don't know what to do. I am sitting here once again going back and forth from one topic to another trying to write something down that others will respond to. I need help and I don't know what help I need. I was on this site regularly a few years ago and have only popped back her once in a while.

I have done something I rarely ever do, I posted a topic and then deleted my posts. I could not stand to see what I wrote. I think a part of me still wants to be in denial but then I have a flashback and I know it is absolutely true and it really happened years ago. I bottled it all up for that long with only an occasional flash of knowing the possibility before now. I have stepped back to where I was 3 years ago trying to wrap my brain around what happened, trying to accept this thing has always been a part of who I am. I have physical clues, scars, that it is real but I still wish it was an overactive imagination, that the reasons for the scars remained unknown.

After everything else I remember of that morning now my mind and body keeps reliving the torture.

 

[Joan]

Just wanted you to know that I "hear" you and am here sitting with you. It is painful to relive over and over!
I understand knowing that you need help, but not knowing what that is. So just know you are not alone. You are brave to reach out and please try to be kind to yourself and give yourself some credit for that.
peace to you

 

[annveg]

I don't know what to do. I am sitting here once again going back and forth from one topic to another...

By crying about it, venting to a safe enough person, when it overwhelms you maybe to let the subject for another time... I think it takes much, much time. Ptsd might be like a lifetime illness we need to continue on our cure, somedays it's awful, others are happier but we need to adress it everyday, work on our healing.
You might be in the denial phase but when we are on that phase we are not healing so that's why I think in my opinion contemplating, grieving about your trauma from time to time might get you out of the denial. It is true and it happened, I'm sorry but denying it is not being compassionate and loving to yourself.
I say this from a very lovely place, I blocked somehow something for more than 2 decades, when I first started flashbacking I couldn't take it was real cause it was too awful a thing for a mother to do.

 

[Seasounds]

Thank you for your words. I share your process. In fact today, I allowed myself to relate to an early memory-that keeps pestering me, as true. It was as if I finally dropped into my (emotional) body. For a moment I couldn't speak, due to being welled up with the experience.

You are courageous to approach your memory.

It seems like so many memories need to be dealt with numerous times before they will fade into the background. And even then, a current event can bring it into the foreground to process once again.:cautious:

 

[NoWhereKnowWhere]

I just came to read if anyone else has the answer it this. Sometimes I accept what happened whole heartedly and others I try to convince myself I made it all up. It's so hard somedays but other times I have good days and I try to collect all the memories of the good days like a squirrel and try to remember them for the bad times.

 

[Friday]

Yes. I was there. I know it happened.

Where I fight with is wanting things to have happened differently.

 

[Valincognito]

I understand how you feel. It took me almost three years to admit to anyone that I had been involved in a domestic violence situation. It also took me two years to admit to myself and others that I was raped by the same man. I lied to everyone about it. I would get mad if anyone implied that I had been battered and I would defend him even after I left because he was hurting me. I finally forced myself to ask for a restraining order two years later and I filed a police report. Getting the restraining order really helped me because I felt validated and empowered to go wherever I wanted to go without fear. I needed time and I needed to have confidence to accept my own story. I'm sending you love and light so that you can find your way to a safe space.

 

[Seasounds]

@NoWhereKnowWhere, once I have the safety to really see a 'maybe' memory as a 'real' memory, due to comparing memories with my older sister, I pretty much know it is true.

Regarding, gathering the good memories, mine are rather few; however I do remind myself of my best memory a few times a week, and in my worst of times: being a baby resting on my grandmother's chest, and being held in her arms. My gem, my angel.

 

[Ronin]

There's some things I doubted happened but confirming them was only risky to me.

With most, I just wish they were different, the reality of them isn't in question.

 

[anonymous]

It helps to know I am not alone in this. I was a very young child when this happened and I totally blocked out most of it for decades. There is no way to confirm any of what happened. I didn't tell and no one noticed I had even been missing. It was a stranger that I never saw again and someone else I never saw at all and unless they confess all these decades later no one will ever know the truth, there is only my murky memory that still has a lot of holes.

I need to talk and try to acknowledge this but I find myself doing what I did back then. I clam up and save everyone else's feelings and hide how much this hurts. It is hard to make someone who has never had to deal with PTSD understand that something that happened years ago can still affect you now. That what happened to you was even possible because even though they know monsters do exist, they only exist for someone on the other side of a newspaper story, never to someone you know.

These body memories hurt and the deep burning pain is both familiar and foreign. There are only internal scars, ones only found through an unrelated surgery. There is nothing in my history that explained them, except what I remember now and those memories still come back as just flashes, moments in time that are out of order and sometimes make no sense. It makes it really hard to know what is real and what my mind is filling in. The flashbacks though, I feel them and I am terrified, my body reacts and I hear them laughing. I have been having more of them today and I know when they happened. It is later, when my mind is quiet that I begin to doubt, when the walls begin to go up again.

 

[anonymous]

I wish I understood this. I had to walk away from my desk at work and find a quiet room for a while. I just can't tell if this is anxiety from the flashbacks or a part of the flashback itself. There are things I am feeling that I have felt before but so much more that is still new, too terrible to be real. I try to tell myself that it happened and it is past and I am all right but it doesn't help much. I try and tell myself that it isn't my imagination because my imagination doesn't cause this kind of feeling but I still can't bring myself to really say that it happened. I am looking for any other explanation of what this means. Is there some medical condition that explains this? Is it just age and the dry air of winter that is causing this? I am grasping at straws, anything that tells me this is a lie ..., but it is only straw.

 

[NightSky]

This is the hardest part for me. I will never know if the flashes are real. I will never have input from others because I won't ask. All of the signs are there. The PTSD is alive and well. But I don't know how to truly heal and accept it when I feel so detached from it and get stuck in analyzing whether it's real or not. I don't have advice. But you are not alone.