Grieving Losses In Childhood

[James B.]

Maze wrote:

My therapist has been talking about that void left by trauma's when they have been dealt with.

This feels something like where I am at now. Maybe. Over 30 years of having to hide horrible feelings, and deny them.

Loloma wrote:

My total breakdown was at 42. I ended up spending nearly one and a half years in hospital. Lost 15 kilos in 5 weeks and went back mentally to the age of 4. Refused to eat, couldn't read or write anymore and after the continual panic attacks that damaged my liver, I slowly started to come back down to earth.

That's quite a story Loloma, so sorry you had to go through that. I can really relate.

Sammy wrote:

Anyway, I think by the time I hit my 40's I was just tired of keeping it all in and pretending I wasn't hurt at my very core.

My rivers or oceans of grief are large, huge and I am still very much finding them, and "traversing them" to get to the other side. I do indeed feel like I could "fall into" the grief. Also agree w/ Sammy about my brain letting me have it in bits and pieces. With a feeling of (a large internal) "void" so strong, pretty sure this is what's going on.

 

[Loloma]

((((James))))

It is so hard, somehow we manage to bury it for so long. Then something happens that triggers it off. And the explosion occurs with feelings like a massive tidal wave that we have no control over. Once it happens we can't "switch" if off.
The feelings of grief, sadness and hopelessness can overwhelm us.

I am still fighting to recover and every day is a battle.:mad:

 

[Tinyflame]

Somewhere or 'somehow' for the moment(s) I've lost my recollection of the past, which is good in so far as the grip of the negative parts, just feel very much more so 'in the moment'.

However, I still can feel the 'void(s)'- more like chasms, I would call them, or sort of deep canyons/ valleys are there, that can't be crossed. But, -it's ok.

 

[Helliepig]

The void is pretty horrid. There's a choice - sit with the void, push into the dreadful grief, or flee back into dissociation.... tho the latter is not an option anymore I can so feel the urge just to pretend it all isn't so. But it's a shock to no longer have the option of "let's pretend" To have no escape from your own, very real, worst case scenario

The grief that has been dissociated, from way back, doesn't feel like grief. It feels nightmarish and unsurvivable.

The void was back there too, I remember it. Feeling jittery and scared because of the void tinged with dread and darkness round the edges.

 

[BloomInWinter]

The grief that has been dissociated, from way back, doesn't feel like grief. It feels nightmarish and unsurvivable.

Well put!

It feels raw and bottomless.

 

[Helliepig]

It's so hard not to feel you are the only one who has to relive a living hell...... you hear everyone else's pain an still think, yes, but.... the trouble is, there aren't really the right words in the english language to describe how it feels, you hear people talk about their pain and terror, but that sounds like "just pain and terror" not the earthshattering, reality deforming, life threatening stuff hidden behind dissociation, and so you feel like noone else can possibly understand.

I bet so many of us feel like that

 

[Abrasky]

The grief that has been dissociated, from way back, doesn't feel like grief. It feels nightmarish and unsurvivable.

That is how it started to feel at my last appointment. I went through this experience that was horrible. I felt this anger like I'd never felt before. My psychologist used a link to my memory I had been working on for 2 1/4 years. I must have been too scared to use it own my own (haven't had that problem inbeing able to do this for previous 13 years of therapy for 200 links. (A link is a phrase which gets in contact with a feeling that allows back my memory in bits) In 10 minutes all the personalities and voices from my trauma and a feeling like a horror movie just clouded my mind and the reaction was huge, I couldn't raise my head. I hadn't been through this huge reaction before. My psychologist said it was the memories from my long term memory coming to flood my short term memory. She distinctly described it as being absolutely horrid. So she must have known this to happen to me and others. That is the first time I'd been through that in 13 years of therapy. Just all the inner core of the trauma coming together.

It feels absolutely horrid, and reality just almost goes, I haven't described it to my husband, as I don't want to share with him this horrid suffering in the part of my recovery. It was scary, luckily I settleddown in 10 minutes. But I just can't describe how awful it is. And it washed me out for the rest of the day.

It's been happening a few times since then, but on my own, and then it should go away. I think I had the horrid feeling today and then it slowed down to all the stages of the trauma again in a more real logical fashion. I'm up to that stage where the my trauma is finally becoming a nightmare. Oh yay.

 

[Helliepig]

I think it's termed flooding and it has happened to me. It is truly unspeakable. But it goes. And it is a sign that things are moving.

The loss of reality is terrifying. I must admit I'm at the stage of thinking, come on you b******d, I've gotta feel it sometime, might as well be now. And then you sit back.....shocked at what you have wished onto yourself....

Hang in there Maze

 

[Abrasky]

flooding, thanks Hellipig. Going to look that up now.

 

[Kb3]

I have had a lifetime of negative memories catch up with me in my 40's. Maybe I was finally grown up enough to deal with them. Maybe it was triggered by my most recent trauma. Perhaps it was realising that if I didn't deal with all my crap now that my kids would be in lifelong therapy too...

I identify with the "void" that is left by resolved trauma. I remember plaintively asking a NLP therapist what I would think about if she helped me resolve it. I needn't have worried - she didn't. It's only now that I am really starting to resolve some of it that I sense my brain being willing to free up some space for other thought processes. I still live in terror of having nothing to obsessively mentally massage, but I have begun to trust the process enough to know that I shouldn't worry, whatever happens will happen naturally and there will be other thoughts that come to take its place - nice ones I hope:).

Bloominwinter, thank you so much for that quote by Judith Lewis Herman. I think that she's one of my new heroes now too, and like you I am in the mourning stage with some of my traumas - the old stuff. I think that over the course of the weekend alone though that I indulged in all three fantasies that she talks about with the newer stuff. Sigh. I'll be happy when I can get past them. They are really holding me hostage.

 

[Truckinjoan]

I hear you. Was told that my crappy childhood contributed to my PTSD. If I had a better foundation, I probably would have endured the stabbing okay. Now, hurt and pain and rage are all I feel most days. Except for my cat Charlie Bear, I still loooove him! My partner is a b****!

 

[Phoenix_Rising]

There was so much in this article--which I have not even finished the very last one--that was so exactly ME that it is overwhelming.

I think this is what I am most struggling with now in my therapy.

I am starting to recognize some of the things my parents did--my dad in particular right now, whom I have had a pervading sense of numbness for years.

I'm afraid of acknowledging it, because I am afraid of how much it is going to hurt, and I am afraid of getting angry. Even though I know that that process will improve my self esteem and help me let go of a lot of guilt and self blame and shame, it almost seems easier to remain this way.

Another thing I realized--only last night, before I went to bed--is I'm really afraid of being angry because I don't know how to cope with my anger and I don't want to be like my father. I feel like by being angry I will be him. He is my strongest association with anger (rage). And my mother--she just doesn't deal with hers. She stuffs it and becomes depressed, or it comes out sideways as crankiness and little jokes that aren't really jokes.

Like saying she felt homicidal towards my dad the other day. She was half kidding, but she really wasn't, because she did feel that way.

When you are the child of an explosive parent and a parent her represses and or suppresses their emotions, what do you do? When I was younger I'd stuff it till I exploded (lol) but I always got rejected for that. Now I don't know how to cope, if I got angry.

Phoenix_Rising