Often, if I'm really going to understand something, my best chances seem to come after being able to describe something however it works. And it can get a little crazy. Even when I'm not serious but need to describe intensity...like telling my therapist I wanted to cut out my uterus with a butter knife, which was also somewhat related to some nightmares.
I'm smiling (compassionately mostly, but also selfishly because your example just totally validated an ongoing and upsetting thing that's happened to me). First, I want to say that I am the same way in terms of thinking metaphorically
@Chava and
@Springer80. It seems to be the only way I can even begin to understand or express the chaos and intensity inside me. I have so many metaphors going they even confuse me--because they never really quite capture the experience. I've shared some of them with my therapist. Some I'm trying to write about in essays and stories (I'm supposed to be a writer, but I've been blocked up for a long time. Have only managed to write for work, and even that has been tough going). Sometimes I feel like writing about it is just obsessive compulsive and puts me into deeper disconnection from my experience, but other times it frees up something in my brain and gives me new insights.
I don't remember many of my dreams--they've only just started emerging into consciousness occasionally in the past few months. All hideous nightmares filled with obvious symbolism, but with almost no emotion attached other than kind of shock. I'm trying to write about those, too, so I remember and don't push them aside (which I tend to do and convince myself it never happened).
Second, I'll tell you a story. I hope it doesn't trigger you. I'm hoping, because you gave the example about the butter knife, that it won't trigger you but maybe make you feel validated? You can decide whether you want to read on from here.
I have these weird kind of vision-y things that happen to me. They're kind of like waking dreams...definitely not real in the literal sense, but very real in that they happen. They often precede different kinds of fragmented memories (bits and pieces of voices, and emotions, and visuals, and sensory experiences). It has been happening to me since the first weird experience with cranial-sacral therapy. In one of them, all my exiled young child parts (and there are lots of them) were freaking out and trying to kill themselves. The one child part that I've spent the most time with in therapy, used a knife to cut out her whole abdomen and then tried to hide from me. It flipped me out but, as usual, I just slogged through using my imagination to calm everything down.
This happened about two days before my son, a 17-year old actor and director, directed a show called
Gruesome Playground Injuries (by Rajiv Joseph) that I went to see. It's about two childhood friends who bond through the years over their self-imposed injuries. The girl ends up in a psychiatric hospital after she tries to cut out her stomach (it's implied that she has been sexually abused). Yikes, if ever I had to disconnect from my own self, it was watching that play. The synchronicities were deeply disturbing. Not long after that, just after a therapy session that sent me into a really, really vulnerable place, this same child part (about 3 or 4 years old) appeared to explode in her middle with all sorts of hideous stuff emerging. That required several desperate calls to my therapist over the next few days, in which I asked him to call me, then couldn't actually talk to him on the phone. Eventually it settled down. Then about a month ago, I had a flashback in which I did some visible "damage" to my own abdomen...left myself with a whole bunch of nasty scratches and bruises and a clear memory of something I kept saying over and over again. Since then, in therapy, we've slowed way, way down and are working with some other parts that aren't child ones. That's been helpful, but all the child stuff keeps overwhelming me.
Anyway, one of the points I wanted to make with all this rambling story is that when I can stay in some sense of my self, and just see what's happening, and believe it's true, and feel compassionate to those parts, and not get overwhelmed by it (all way easier said than done), magically, my pain dissipates some. Along with my therapist, we've figured out that the sacral pain is, for me, all the fear--from back then and fear of experiencing the pain now. And the head/neck/jaw pain and terrible tension is from my attempts to deny and escape all of it.
