I'm sorry I didn't respond sooner.
Therapist and I talked a lot about trust before I think I felt safe enough to talk about it.
I think it's so hard because when we are very young, things probably didn't feel wrong, we didn't know they were wrong, and in some fully objective sense, and i mean taking out morals and just leaving my body and what happened, while I may not remember it all fully, and the young rememberer doesn't attribute wrongness to any of it (the body responded as it responded), there is a way it permeates the adult self. The adult self or selves have the lens of looking at something remembered and thinking "that was wrong" - but if there is something not remembered, or unremembered or buried, then it's not possible to use that lens.
So I talk about body memories. I know there are adults who maybe know more but I can't ask them. And on another level, I think there were things no one could have been complicit in, but it still happened, and I can't remember it. But it's there in my body. So I can talk about my childhood to my therapist, and then body stuff starts to happen, and it doesn't make sense to me. And so I talk about it. Even if at first, or sometimes, I say that I'm having a dry throat, or feelings of pain or tingling between my legs, and why is it, because I'm talking about how we used to go to a relative's house for whatever holiday, or that when I was in preschool I remember nothing except the class picture and the teacher holding the back of my neck and squeezing because I was bouncing up and down on the spring horse. For instance. Sometimes it's not because of memories of the past.
I think
@Simply Simon is right about how if you were found being kissing men when you were very young, it's something that happened, even if you can't remember anything else, and it's not about making a larger deal out of something that wasn't anything. I think it's very common for me to discount my own instincts, even in the sense that I have pervasive trust issues, like I can't feel safe in the world, and the only way to heal from that is at least talk about how I don't feel safe, even if I can't unearth every single memory that would explain why my past makes it so. However, it has helped me to honour that -- there are real reasons I don't feel safe, or open; there are real ways that the trauma affects me, and working with my therapist on this is much more the work than trying to uncover memories.
So I'd say that it's better if, rather than worry about the memories, trust instead what comes up. You can even start by having a conversation with your therapist about how slippery memory can be, and agree that maybe things that come up are real, maybe they're not, and either way it's okay. Your therapist should be more concerned with the meaning of what's coming up, and how to process it, than the veracity of what's coming up.
Hm. I'm not sure if that's too clear. I just mean to say, like, even with dreams, which we know aren't real, they can be very useful to therapy work... so why not all the ways the mind experiences things, including memories we can't be sure of?
It's absolutely hard work. But I can say from experience that I went through stages, at 14, 15, 18, 25, 34, and 37... each time feeling like I'd "dealt" with it all. And now at 37 I'm feeling a whole new stage open up that is deeper and more challenging than anything before it. But I know from experience myself, and with others -- burying this kind of thing can sometimes result in it rearing itself in all kinds of very problematic ways including panic attacks, seizures, and other somatic experiences. I can shut things out of my mind but my body ends up having to deal with it.
