intrusive thoughts?

[zarae]

apologies if this has been overdone in asking.

had a session with talking a bit about my CSA abuser, which meant spending that night's sleep attempt with unwanted snippets of disgusting images. so been struggling with trying to determine what's "memory" versus what's "imagination". I cant figure out if I am having actual flashes of memories or an overactive imagination that is trying to grasp at anything to fill in all the blank gaps because there is currently only pieces of memories with little to no chronological context, no means to external verification; and being a very highly visual person, bombarded with images like TV, movies, books, and survivor boards, or just life in general, there is so much doubt and uncertainty of any validity to these images.
from Psy classes, general information, and hearing about false memories and ability to input faulty information, studies that show how unreliable a witness' memory is and easy to corrupt, how do you figure out a means to verify intrusive images, or to figure out if they connected to memories or when to discard them?

I hope this makes sense. sorry to bother yall with stupid questions

 

[Kubash16]

I go by feel. When it’s my imagination taking off there is a different feel to it. It’s not as heavy, doesn’t hurt as much, just doesn’t quite ring true.

Real memories-you can feel. You just know.

 

[Sideways]

There’s no line.

Always our memory is using its knowledge of the real world to fill in blanks. How much is information that was accurately stored away at the time and is now being accurately accessed by our consciousness, v’s how much is our brain filling in details that it didn’t/couldn’t accurately store at the time? Is more feels than science.

For myself? The question needed to shift from “what is factually accurate?” to “What am I going to accept as my truth?”.

That distinction seemed to me to allow for a bit more self compassion, since I whenever I turned to “is that factually accurate?”, I was actually just looking for reasons to invalidate myself and where I am now. Which wasn’t helpful for my healing.

 

[Mach123]

Yes I am like this because I still have repressed memories or things that happened when I was so young I can't remember. So I've always pictured abuse happening along with memories and partial memories. I don't find it ugly though because I'm hyper sexual and I never thought of any of it as abuse.

So yes I've dwelt on it endlessly and searched you know to try and "let myself see what happened." The therapist has said "something really terrible happened to you." I know what she means, but I don't know what it was.

Sometimes I'll be doing something and I'll have a feeling and I think "that's a feeling about a repressed memory," or "that feeling is a repressed memory," even though it seems to refer to what's going on in the moment. It's really haunting sometimes.

 

[Ronin]

By what things link to.

The personal ones are an overwhelming web.
The not personal are a sort of network, filed away, no worries. Not like something just went off and whole my life is scattered around.
Not personal things do not feel like space and time just decided to collapse on me and block me in (helloo, pretty dark in here.)

Edited: I think it is a brilliant / useful question, in fact.

 

[zarae]

thank yall for all the reading and responses.