What Did It Feel Like When You Started To Remember?

[predicttheweather]

hi everyone,

I found this forum by Googling "am I remembering abuse or making it up?" which directed me to Sqweak's thread "Maybe I'm Making It Up?"-- It was really helpful but I have kind of a follow-up question--I'd like to know what it felt like for some other people when they started remembering things they hadn't been able to access for a long time.

In the past couple of years I've started to realize that some things that happened when I was little were not right, for lack of a better term. From the time I was born until I was about ten years old, we had these family friends, and they had a boy about four years older than me, and I think some things happened, but I don't really remember a lot. In the past six months or so, I think I've started to remember two or three new things, but it's hard to tell if I'm remembering or just imagining. Can anyone offer me some advice about how to tell? (Ordinarily I'd ask my therapist, but I just moved to a new city and don't have one yet.)

 

[SimplyComplex]

Since I started therapy, I have spent as much time trying to talk myself out of my memories as I have trying to accept what has happened to me. Its been a long denial road for me but I just sort of hit a break through. I would rather be right, learn to accept my feelings and be able to trust my instincts and memories then be wrong at this point. Is every memory 100% accurate? Nope! I know that. But how I feel about them, how it has affected me...that isnt even open for debate. It affected me, I struggled, I got PTSD, and I am in recovery. None of that depends on perfect and 100% accuracy in my memories.

 

[pontifixmax]

For me, my memories of the abuse are accurate, as in I've never doubted or questioned whether the incidents actually happened, but what has come flooding back are the feelings attached to the memories. Like you I often wonder if I'm not just imagining, not the events themselves but the feelings to do with them I mean, since I've gone so long with no feelings whatsoever about the abuse, although I'm recognizing now thru therapy that cutting off feelings related to trauma is a natural survival technique. Where this leaves me now is trying to integrate what feels like two different people - the adult I am now with the child I'd forgotten that I was, so to speak. I just have to trust that when feelings come that make me feel like that vulnerable boy again that they are real and not to shove them aside like I have for so long. I'm learning that doing so is the only way to heal.

 

[Kendra]

When I start remembering some things that I have seen when I was little I thought that these were just memories of dreams that I had. The memories were not painful for the first 1/2 year that I start getting them. Then after the 1/2 year past, more and more memories began flooding my mind. These memories were painful and caused intense negative emotions. The memories did not seem like memories of dreams, it seemed like memories of a life I have lived.

At first, I kept on thinking, "No way could this have happened to me!" But after getting more memories, especially remembering how many nightmares I had about the sexual abuse when I was little and after having a flashback of me being little and having a nightmare, the memories seemed to make more sense and seem more real to me.

When the memories surfaced I was deathly afraid of telling anyone about them because I was scared that nobody would believe me. But I told someone and the person did believe me. The person who I told was my doctor and he told me that he recommended that I get therapy for it.

It took about 4 years for me to believe that my memories and my past was real.

 

[intothelight]

I just started remembering events a few months ago. Basically they feel like pounding surf. One wave will wash over me and I feel like I am "going", then there is a break, and the next wave pounds me down.

Hopefully, as I work through them, they will become calmer.

 

[kayak]

Been there, doing that. I doubt my memories all the time, and my therapist says it really doesn't matter how accurate they are (or if they're all that real) because whatever it is I'm thinking and feeling needs to be dealt with either way. But because I doubt my memories, when I talk to my therapist it feels very much like I'm lying to her. I got to a point once where I went into a session and told her that nothing was real, that I'd made everything up, I'd been lying the whole time, and that since I couldn't trust my memories therapy was pointless. Needless to say, she didn't buy it one bit. Anywho, I don't know how to help you except to say that a lot of us struggle with this.

 

[ronin47]

When the memory of being sexually molested began to surface, it was a little jarring. I hadn't totally forgotten it, it was just that whenever the memory surfaced I repressed it almost instantly. I was very reluctant to talk about it because I still had a hard time acknowledging it as abuse. And even though I'd never discussed it with anyone before, certainly not even my abuser, I felt like if I talked about it I'd be doing something wrong. I felt as though if I spoke about it I'd be sharing something that I'd promised someone else to keep secret.

I remember it well. The first time the memory wandered across my mind and instead of brushing it away I felt a jolt of recognition and apprehension.

 

[shell]

The worst thing about remembering for me, is that it now feels like I have been living in an illusion. I've always known I was abused, but I forced it all out of my head within a couple of years of moving out of home. The only thing I remembered in any detail was the one memory I've always remembered in great detail in which I copped a beating for something I didn't do. I had a memory in which I knew some things happened to me on a very regular basis, but it was a thought rather than a visual memory. Now I touch things, and dream things and memories come rushing back, not the whole memory just flashes of parts of the abuse. I always knew in the back of my head I was abused everyday, and my mother confirmed it, but it was just a thought rather than a real acknowledgement of my life. I am starting to realize how much I've forgotten as I talk to my brother and feel like I no longer know who I am anymore. In therapy she kept talking to me about dissociation and I didn't think it really was relevant to me, but now as I read more I realize it's very possible as I start to remember more and more.
One of the worst things has been that I recently recalled a memory that 3 different kids at high school had mentioned seeing someone on the train that was absolutely identical to me, but it was only after talking to her and realizing she didn't recognize them that they felt stupid and they kept telling me about this person they thought was really me. Now I really starting to worry that it was me, was i dissociating and not even knowing? It feels like I know nothing, its my life and yet my brother and friend from high school were able to tell me so much more that what I remembered, stuff that happened to me that I should never have forgotten.

 

[Gamereign555]

I didn't feel good or bad but rather intrigued. Though I will say the memories began to haunt me until I told my girlfriend about them, still I felt stupid for talking about it and I got a feeling that I was being petty when talking about it, I haven't had more flashbacks since but I believe they will come again.

 

[Laur16]

Kayak-

I did the exact same thing in therapy. I thought all the memories were lies and that I was this awful liar who made the entire thing up. I also began to find therapy pointless because I felt that all my memories weren't real. But then I realized that all my behaviors pointed to the abuse and the way I would react to certain scents and situations. It's hard to believe that something so awful happened, but over time I started to understand why I did what I did.