Breakthrough With My 3 Year Old Self!!

[Survivor2Thriver]

Thank you Macca. Truly beautiful! Thank you for sharing. :joyful:

 

[macca]

@Bedbug @Hope4Now I forgot to say, my mother also said I became generally fearful, including things that I'd never been scared of before.

 

[Hope4Now]

Thank you @macca

This helps validate some stuff I know about myself (major nightmares, secret play, a period of bedwetting, a change into a super-serious intense child).

I am so glad for you that your mother was able to respond differently this time, and that your child self seems to have gotten what she needed. I think I'm probably going to have to go the harder route. My mother is alive, but she has extremely selective memory (she thinks she had a wonderful marriage...makes me want to throw up when she glorifies it) and if I say anything that upsets her, I "pay for it" for months afterwards. It is an ugly situation from which I wish I could remove myself. Nothing like feeling responsible for people who abused you. Oops, but that's an entry for my diary, not for here.
Joyful (and safe) hugs to you.

 

[Bedbug]

Thank you, @macca. You have got me thinking about what changes my parents might have seen in me too. Lately I have found myself feeling quite angry and unforgiving towards them for not seeing the truth. With hindsight, it seems so obvious that I was being sexually abused that I think they, as adults, should have been able to see that too. But I don't think I can really blame them. There were other, equally plausible explanations for my "symptoms" and, like you said, there was less awareness of sexual abuse back then.

My parents ignored or didn't acknowledge many big things that happened to me, a few life-threatening situations and also being home alone with a known paedophile trying to break in when I was 13-14 (thankfully my brother came home). So it was very, very significant that she finally acknowledged the stuff that she did. I'm still not sure how it happened that she did. .

I was just reading one of your older threads, from when you had just told your mother. You wrote:

Anyway, I'm really wondering if something happened to my mother as well. She said when she was 2 or 3, she would panic and refuse to enter a certain room in her house. She also described a symptom of depersonalisation that I used to get strongly at 4ish. She described that as a kid, she'd felt like a weight sat on her chest and she was terrified - I wonder if that was a flashback. She believes it was an evil ghost. She was never "present" when I was a kid, always drifting off in a trance-like state, and now I'm wondering if it was really dissociation, it really seems like it. She really got that I felt (my T is certain) that I'd kind of put anything that might have happened to me in the "vault", and locked it off. I think she has done it too. She might then have chucked anything related to mine in there too, because confronting it might have meant opening her own "vault".

This seems like a good explanation of why your mother didn't recognise the things that happened to you. It could also be a good explanation of why she finally did recognise them. Perhaps you opening your "vault" gave your mother the key to hers too.

 

[Echo]

@macca - you are very brave to face that with your mother and I am so delighted that she was able to respond that way for you. How intensely frightening to have been that little girl with that going on and your parents apparently oblivious, and you unable because of your age to voice it and get help. A nightmare. People were ignorant back then, but parents also have a vested interest in things being fine and perfect in their families. As @Bedbug points out, though, if your mother had been abused herself, maybe her 'normal' parenting skills were subdued in particular ways that meant she just didn't see the danger, or thought it was somehow the norm.

Thank you for your kind wishes. Yes, validating myself would seem to be the way forward. I think this was why it was so devastating last week, when I spoke out in my letter to my parents and e-mails to my sisters, to have my sisters immediately invalidate me and have my boundaries yet again be so comprehensively disrespected. It is hard to stay on sure ground though, isn't it, when the manner in which memories emerge leads to such confusion, such partial telling of the story and somatic sensations without narrative or emotional content along the way. I guess it all just gets clearer as we go.

Thank you so much for sharing and for your support.

 

[HelenB]

I also want to thank you for sharing @macca. I am so glad this has been such a massive breakthrough for you, and am so glad that you were able to get the validation which you truly deserve in that child part, which must have been so terrified for so long.
God bless
Helen

 

[franciemarnie]

In ref to @Bedbug ref to @macca 's ref to her mother's possible trauma too at the same age, I was rereading Invisible Heroes last week by Naparstek and she mentions that children can also sort of inherit or soak up and experience parental trauma too, which really compounds a child's own unique trauma(s) in their own life.

I can't remember how she put it. I have to recheck the reference, but that was the gist of it. As if we need someone else's trauma on top of our own!

 

[macca]

@Bedbug @franciemarnie Yes, I still think something may have happened to her. She had a very harsh, dominating mother too. Who in turn, had an absolutely terrible father. Goes right down the line. Her possibly dissociating explains a lot of why she never felt "there" and why she could drift through days and how she seemed to not notice my existence. I am lucky though, because underneath that I know she loves me. As a child, I didn't feel loved, which was exacerbated by my father's emotional abuse. Yet, he had PTSD we didn't know about, and had himself been emotionally and physically abused. He doesn't know about me, and his health is fragile, so my mother and I agreed that it was of no benefit to anyone to tell him. I do love both of them, as I know that for a large part they didn't realise/couldn't help how they treated me. I did deserve someone to at least say "are you ok" though, when stuff happened to me, but I have forgiven them.

About passing down the trauma - I read an article (maybe New Scientist?) that they have run a mouse model and found that mice whose parent (I think the parent was the male) was traumatised by something (I know, cruel to mice :(, I think it was electric shock), showed avoidance of things that were relevant to that trauma. Even though they'd never had contact with the father, and had never had anything happen to them. I worry about this, as I was in a bad patch with PTSD when I was pregnant with my 19 year old, and would get triggered and flood him with adrenaline too. That's when I first felt him move, I was 18 wks along and woke in a panic to my alarm (of all things) and he just started kicking and kicking, frantically. Poor baby. He is well-adjusted now, except he has problems with anxiety that we just can't find a reason for, and he's always been that way. The problems interfere with his sleep. My youngest has social anxiety and OCD, so anxiety that has come out in different way.

 

[HelenB]

@macca I am sorry to hear that you worry so much about your children. I know I fear a lot about the things I have also passed to my children, but do also know that it is true that the relationships which a child has, do make such a difference to anything they go through even when they experience the trauma themselves, and do really believe that the concern and love which you do undoubtedly give to them, will go such a long way towards overcoming this, and am so glad you do know they are well-adjusted, and really believe this does show that they have had many positive things, which is so important.

I had also been looking at the thread which you posted not that long ago called that "inner child" stuff - is it real? and was just thinking so much how massively far you really have come in such a short time, when on there you had said "Accessing myself at 3 is terrifying to me, and I seem to do everything I can to not go there". I really am so pleased that you finally have been able to access so much of that part, when it was so so terrifying to you and really am so glad that you really have been able to have that voice so validated, which is what you deserve so much.

God Bless
Helen

 

[macca]

Thanks Helen! I honestly don't know how I got there so fast either, from that point a few weeks ago. It was my T who has been really instrumental in my being able to do it though. Without her, there's just no way I would have thought I could ask.

 

[HelenB]

I am very glad that you have got her, but also know that it is you who has had to find the courage to really be able to face this, and really am proud of how massivly well you are doing.
Helen

 

[Bedbug]

@macca, did you ever read John Bradshaw's book "Homecoming"? I remember you mentioning it in the inner child thread. Something is stopping me from opening my copy.