Questioning my memories

[someo]

You sound like you’ve reached this conclusion for yourself. Acceptance. It’s so incredibly important.

What am I going to accept as ‘real’? Here’s the thing: it didn’t happen exactly the way you remember it. It didn’t. Memory is an incredibly flexible, relative, fluid and constantly imperfect thing. It’s not perfect. So acceptance is about coming to terms with “This is my truth, and I accept it”. Doesn’t mean you like it, or it’s not a big deal, or that it hasn’t had some serious lasting consequences. It just is.

The other thing about acceptance is that the only person who needs to accept your truth? Is you.

Lots of Ts won’t take a position on whether they believe our memories, because it can influence a lot of people on a subconscious level in ways that can do a lot of damage. Some Ts embrace ‘validating’ their patient and enthusiastically support every recovered memory as absolute truth. But a lot of them don’t. A lot of them will stay neutral.

From the T’s perspective, they aren’t treating a person’s memory (that’s for a neurologist). They aren’t treating a person’s trauma (that’s for a historian). They are treating the consequences. The person and package in front of them today. And that’s pretty much irrespective of how accurate the memories are.

Your body seems to give you a very clear message when you try and go down the path of denial. Listen to that. But don’t get hung up on persuading people of your truth. You’re the one who experienced it, and you’re the one living with the consequences. So your acceptance is the only one that matters.

As for reading up on the false memory debate? It’s incredibly political, and misses much of the incredibly interesting, evolving knowledge we have about how memory actually works. So in terms of your recovery and what you need? Investing time in reading about largely politically motivated claptrap probably just isn’t a helpful thing for you to do (which would make you like most of us!).

Very wise words. You basically wrote exactly what I have been thinking about, but what I have been having serious difficulties in accepting.

First of all, what triggered all this in the first place was that when I had been feeling safe and more present and connected to myself for a couple of weeks, new memories (I already had memories about sexual abuse but by now its clear that I had a ton of memories still missing) about the sexual abuse started surfacing. So I had a lengthy discussion with my T about my memories and the sexual abuse, and basically the conclusion was that she said that she thinks that I was sexually abused, but that as you pointed out, she said that memories are not 100% accurate and your mind is always trying fill in the gaps, so she said she will do everything to avoid suggesting me in any way. She also said that since that its her style to be extremely direct and outspoken, had she at any point thought that I was having false memories she would have immediately brought it up as a subject.

I definitely agree that it doesn't matter what other people think about this, and that I should accept the fact that other people might not believe me. The thing with this though is that even though I am very good in lying and keeping secrets, I absolutely hate doing that, and its especially tough to keep this hidden from my parents since I live with them. I think this is one of the things thats driving the denial, I would really want to tell my parents but I know that at least my mother is in denial about a lot of things (we have discussed this in relation to some other trauma stuff like school bullying, she keeps pretty much insisting that I had a perfect childhood with zero trauma) so I think they would just brand my memories as false memories, so at least at this point telling them would not be helpful.

One other thing also is that I am soon graduating from a course (set up by the local healthcare district) to become a sort of mental health advocate (theres not a word in English that would capture what I exactly am going to become), basically means that I will be talking about my experiences openly to the public (although mostly I will be educating health professionals and working to improve the quality of the services provided by the local healthcare district) and even with all the stigma attached to this kind of traumas, I find it difficult to tell my story while refusing to comment on what kind of trauma I have had. Of course I could go and talk about the other trauma I have had to face and explain my ptsd with that, but that would feel like lying because those traumas are not the ones that triggered my ptsd in the first place.

So I think these issues are what are making me to think about all this again. I think at this point the conclusion would be that I just need to accept the fact that its not the right time to tell my parents, and that its definitely not the right time to go public on this!

 

[EveHarrington]

Of course I could go and talk about the other trauma I have had to face and explain my ptsd with that, but that would feel like lying because those traumas are not the ones that triggered my ptsd in the first place.

Trauma is trauma and you can’t say that the only one that counts is the one that “triggered” your ptsd. It just doesn’t work that way. Trauma has a cumulative effect and it all needs to be dealt with in one way or another.

You don’t even need a trauma to trigger your ptsd. You could have a criterion A trauma way in your past and then be triggered by something as seemingly benign as a blue sky which is the same shade of blue on the day you were traumatized.....and it all comes flooding back. Crazy how it all works!

So feel free to say your trauma is whatever you feel comfortable discussing.

 

[someo]

Trauma is trauma and you can’t say that the only one that counts is the one that “triggered” your ptsd. It just doesn’t work that way. Trauma has a cumulative effect and it all needs to be dealt with in one way or another.

You don’t even need a trauma to trigger your ptsd. You could have a criterion A trauma way in your past and then be triggered by something as seemingly benign as a blue sky which is the same shade of blue on the day you were traumatized.....and it all comes flooding back. Crazy how it all works!

So feel free to say your trauma is whatever you feel comfortable discussing.

Yeah you're absolutely right. Thinking about it now, I did a lot of work myself on the "less serious" traumas like the school bullying (which is serious trauma now that I think about it, it was very physical and I feared for my life) so thats probably why nowadays its the sexual abuse that causes the the majority of the symptoms (thinking back, I had pretty severe trauma symptoms regarding the later events like the bullying before I started to work on those events). Thats something I never effectively dealt with and I have to say at least in my case it also was definitely way more traumatizing than the other stuff. When i say "it triggered my ptsd" what I basically mean is that when the sexual abuse begun thats when I think I first started to have ptsd-symptoms and dissociation.

In any case saying that its because of school bullying is not lying even in the sense that I am pretty confident that it would have caused me to have ptsd even without the earlier events happening.

 

[someo]

Okay this is all definitely denial in work. Now that I started to question all of my recovered memories and since the memory suppression is directly related to my dissociative symptoms - now I'm kind of starting to think that I never even had dissociation (which would mean that all my memories are false, because I have been dissociating all the time since the school bullying started again at the age of 14, and I dissociated a lot even before that), and that I don't even have ptsd or anything like that. I would really like to believe that theres no trauma and nothing wrong with me ??? I think this is a good development because it shows its all about denial.

I mean, now that I am not psychotic there is absolutely no question about whether I have ptsd since no other disorder can explain the symptoms. I basically fit all the symptom categories of ptsd - we actually did the M.I.N.I interview with my therapist and I "scored" full points when it comes to ptsd. By the way even my psychiatrist thinks I have dissociation (he wrote in my medical records that I have it but that he doesn't want to speculate on its origin) and once indicated that he does think that I have ptsd - he just doesn't want to take any position because that would have legal consequences if I would one day press charges against my abuser.

So maybe I should stop the denial, but unfortunately the idea that theres nothing wrong with me is extremely tempting. I will actually have to work on this.

 

[MyWillow]

Ah yep. I hear you. I can’t bear the word “trauma” - written is just bearable, spoken is definitely not. My psydoc respects this. Dissociation is the only explanation for why I can’t remember so many of my sessions with my former T (now equine T). Flashbacks are the only explanation for the stuff I see. But not mad keen on either of those two terms. As I said to my psydoc I’d much rather she declared me “crazy” and drugged me up.