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Piecing together your life through official papers?

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Has anyone here ever tried to piece together their life by acquiring as much as possible of official paperwork (papers and journals from medical/psychiatric history, schools, social services, court cases, etc)?

There's no one who's been present through all of my upbringing, and the one person who gets the closest is my mother and she's over half the reason I have PTSD and probably the least reliable person I ever met, AND I haven't talked to her in 4 years. My own memory is shit. All my relatives are chaotic and all the relations going on in there are chaotic, and I barely talk to any of them. My case from child services is kinda...shady and questionable. Etc. So there's not really any consistend thread going from any starting point to any endpoint, it's just a mess, and I've started the process of trying to piece it more together through paperwork now - by trying to get ahold of some old mental healthcare paperwork.

So I'm just wondering if anyone has done a similar thing for similar reasons? What was your process, how'd it go, any pits of "OH SHIT BAD IDEA" you encountered that I should be aware of the risk of? Aside from the obvious high chance of triggering the crap out of my PTSD by digging into this stuff.
 
Has anyone here ever tried to piece together their life by acquiring as much as possible of official pa...
I've tried to find someone who helped me years ago. I wanted to thank him for believing in me. It changed my life and helped me more than he could ever know. But, I don't even remember his name and I wouldn't know where to even start.
 
I've tried to find someone who helped me years ago. I wanted to thank him for believing in me. It changed...
I want to trace down someone who my father heard something about my case from a few years ago. My father doesn't remember who it is, or which region it was in or anything. So I can relate to that. I'm starting with the easiest papers and sources, though. Some paperwork I'll need a lawyer to get.
 
I want to trace down someone who my father heard something about my case from a few years ago. My fathe...
Yah, I used to have his card and he told my parents that I could contact him if I ever needed anything. I tried about 5 or 6 years ago, but I haven't contacted a lawyer to get the records. I don't know for sure which state he was from, but I know the area.
 
So I'm just wondering if anyone has done a similar thing for similar reasons? What was your process, how'd it go, any pits of "OH SHIT BAD IDEA" you encountered that I should be aware of the risk of? Aside from the obvious high chance of triggering the crap out of my PTSD by digging into this stuff.
Yes, I have. I am adopted. I had been told a lie about the circumstances of my adoption. That my birth parents 'loved me SO much.....' blah blah blah blah blah.

When the flashbacks started coming at me 10 years ago, I went to a trauma specialist. He assessed the situation. Told me not to pursue Children's Aid documentation until I had learned many more coping strategies. I did what he asked me to. I am glad that I did. Even shored up it was a heavy, heavy blow to see that paperwork.

BTW, the provided information was full of black marker, jammed with conflicting information. Lots of things that weren't right. So be careful, I would suggest, to not take everything at face value.
 
I haven't done it for myself, but I've performed that service for people a few times. Investigations firms usually handle deep background for vetting or adoption purposes, but it's the same skill set. Find out everything you can about a person from birth onward.
 
I didn't track the records, because there were records for mostly unproblematic years of my life, not those I needed, but I tracked the people, and people that knew other people.

Mostly it filled in /why/ I have the blanks I do about years/events/other people.
And that some people I thoroughly believed in were my false memory to hold onto sanity for years, but I had the activities right, otherwise.
 
@shimmerz My psychologist only said she supports the idea of me digging up my paperwork, didn't even mention coping strategies. Then again, I don't think I've ever had a good psychologist. All the help I've gotten I've given to myself through researching psychology as a way of learning to understand my own psychology. It's a clinical and colder approach, rather than ways to cope that are based on feeling and dealing with emotions. I don't have the emotion, either not even a slight sign of it, or I've blocked it before it's grown, and rather go by my behaviour and symptoms in relation to what I've researched to analyze and understand myself from that perspective. (And I know it can be argued practicing emotional regulation abilities and allowing oneself to feel and process those feelings would be better, but then again, if I went by that approach I'd be drowned by years of built up stuff that would probably crush me and steal even more time out of my life. I lost enough years, so no thanks to that.)

Yes, I'm prepared for things that are wrong, and things that are both correctly and uncorrectly censored. When I called the Child/adolescents psychiatry clinic where I used to live on Tuesday, they said there were papers from two years as well as a crisis and that if I wanted them, I'd have to send a written request. In the letter I wrote them I specified that I want a written and signed confirmation from them that a copy of my journal, all of it, has been sent to me upon my own request, that the original papers are still unchanged in their archives and information about to what degree they censored material and a juridically rightful reasoning for the censorship. To me it's important that they don't censor the original papers, in case anything goes to court and those papers will need to be presented in full format. When I go to get my papers from child services in that region, I'll bring a lawyer to have them oversee that the papers aren't excessively censored, destroyed or tampered with in any other way, because those child services have broken so many laws I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to break archiving laws as well.

I haven't done it for myself, but I've performed that service for people a few times. Investigations...
Any tips?

@Ronin There are some people I know I want to track down as well, but it'll be hard and I might wait with that until I can get a car/motorcycle of my own so I won't have to depend on anyone else or public transport to go physically see people.
 
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