I feel a little silly asking this question, and I'm not sure why, and I hope it will make sense to the rest of you.
The thing is that I have always had very vivid, very clear and, I thought, very complete memories of my childhood trauma. I remember key events in great detail and have never had much difficulty in recalling these to conscious mind.
The nightmares and flashbacks always used to make sense, ie, they would be in relation to events that I could recall and were consistent with what I could recall of those events.
Sometimes there would also be random nonsense nightmares of fear and violence and suffering, but these were never the same twice and always felt to me just like emotional trauma shrapnel or something similar.
I suppose, for that reason, I always assumed there was nothing significant about my past that I couldn't remember.
And then I started having nightmare images and flashback type moments which included images that aren't familiar to me - moments of an event without any context or any memory of what happened before or after etc. They are usually just fractured momentary images, such as being slammed face first into a wooden gate by my father, though I can't remember where we were, what caused it etc.
And now, over the past couple of weeks, I've been increasingly having nightmares involving the same images I don't recall. They are increasing in their frequency and intensity and I usually wake feeling overwhelmed with raw terror and experiencing all sorts of physical sensations of revulsion and pain and... well... violation. It's so hard to describe, but it's different to the fear or the pain that I associate with my accessible memories.
I guess I'm just asking for others' experiences on accessing, or recovering, memories of the past after you have been in therapy/recovery for some time. How did this happen for you, ie, all at once in one great moment of recall, or gradually and inconsistently and with great efort, as though you're constantly feeling as though there's something just out of reach that you can't quite grasp... the latter is my current experience.
This has become terrifying for me, more than I could have imagined. I was so sureI remembered everything significant. What I do remember, I remember so vividly, which is very unusual according to T and my psychiatrist.
Is it possible that I was wrong about that all along? Are there huge chunks of memories that aren't there? And if so, could this just be because I was too young at the time to have encoded them properly, or is it more likely that they are of things so horrific, so horrible, that they have actually been repressed from my conscious even when other memories have remained there?
I fear I'm blathering, but I would appreciate anyone else's experience of having come to terms with lost memories, or whatever term you want to apply to them.
I'm actually really scared of what I don't know. I feel as though perhaps my whole memory is a lie.
Maddog
The thing is that I have always had very vivid, very clear and, I thought, very complete memories of my childhood trauma. I remember key events in great detail and have never had much difficulty in recalling these to conscious mind.
The nightmares and flashbacks always used to make sense, ie, they would be in relation to events that I could recall and were consistent with what I could recall of those events.
Sometimes there would also be random nonsense nightmares of fear and violence and suffering, but these were never the same twice and always felt to me just like emotional trauma shrapnel or something similar.
I suppose, for that reason, I always assumed there was nothing significant about my past that I couldn't remember.
And then I started having nightmare images and flashback type moments which included images that aren't familiar to me - moments of an event without any context or any memory of what happened before or after etc. They are usually just fractured momentary images, such as being slammed face first into a wooden gate by my father, though I can't remember where we were, what caused it etc.
And now, over the past couple of weeks, I've been increasingly having nightmares involving the same images I don't recall. They are increasing in their frequency and intensity and I usually wake feeling overwhelmed with raw terror and experiencing all sorts of physical sensations of revulsion and pain and... well... violation. It's so hard to describe, but it's different to the fear or the pain that I associate with my accessible memories.
I guess I'm just asking for others' experiences on accessing, or recovering, memories of the past after you have been in therapy/recovery for some time. How did this happen for you, ie, all at once in one great moment of recall, or gradually and inconsistently and with great efort, as though you're constantly feeling as though there's something just out of reach that you can't quite grasp... the latter is my current experience.
This has become terrifying for me, more than I could have imagined. I was so sureI remembered everything significant. What I do remember, I remember so vividly, which is very unusual according to T and my psychiatrist.
Is it possible that I was wrong about that all along? Are there huge chunks of memories that aren't there? And if so, could this just be because I was too young at the time to have encoded them properly, or is it more likely that they are of things so horrific, so horrible, that they have actually been repressed from my conscious even when other memories have remained there?
I fear I'm blathering, but I would appreciate anyone else's experience of having come to terms with lost memories, or whatever term you want to apply to them.
I'm actually really scared of what I don't know. I feel as though perhaps my whole memory is a lie.
Maddog
