What Do Your Memories Feel Like????

[Lucille]

he vague memory of my instances always involved me looking at myself from a distance and usually from the side view. I have pictures of what I was wearing, how I was feeling, and little random objects in the memories.

That's a perfect description of an "out of body" experience. It's a real memory, but you don't see it as happening to your current self. That's exactly what happened to me

 

[ashdawn8287]

Is it just crazy? It's almost as if it didn't happen. Like how did I do that? So weird.

 

[Lucille]

No, you'll come to find through your healing journey... that none of these things are crazy. None of the breakdowns, none of the struggles, none of the questions we have are crazy. It may feel crazy or irrational, and you may feel helpless to change it.

But none of those things are true. We are experiencing our mind trying to protect us, to keep us living in spite of the trauma and horrible things we've experienced. It's frustrating because we weren't given the choice of whether to remember or forget... but it's what our mind did in response to those experiences. It takes time to work through everything, connect the dots again. But we will!

 

[Abstract]

This is the problem with anything experienced whilst dissociating or whilst being traumatised. They can't feel like normal memories because they are not normal memories. Add amnesia and it just rubs salt in the wound.

It is so hard to believe things or seperate truth from imagination.

I have pondered a lot on how this should be tackled and am still not sure but my best guess is that things should not be forced or suggested; that we need to be able to accept the memories that come up in whatever form they are in and accept that they may be a little distorted because of fear but that we can still still trust and process our feelings.

 

[ivyrose]

Thanks all so much for comments. I have starting getting more memories back this week. More details of what happened...right now up to 4 instances. The fragmented images that didn't seam to fit were from separate attacks.
Now what is weird is that, I finally remember,at least some. However, I'm still numb. I even remember quite a bit how I was feeling. But even my emotions confuse me. I don't think it was the first time, like I was already used to all this.. (does that make sense).

 

[Abstract]

Yes it does.

Its worthwhile noting that not feeling emotions can be a type of dissociation. I think of dissociation as a type of disonnection of one part of functioning from another. One of those things can be emotion.

Remember it is all a form of self protection and your mind is evaluating how much you can deal with.

Try not to push yourself and be kind to yourself.

 

[lala]

My dissociated memories do not feel like real memories at all. I have lots of bits and pieces, I have drawn really disturbing pictures. I can write the dialog, ID the smells, the time of day, the position in space, but all of these things feel seperate, not unified at all. It is really disturbing. My therapist explained it to me as an adaptive response to an overwhelming situation. The mind can not process the trauma (particularly a child's mind). So a real memory is never formed. It sorta gets stuck on a loop. I think of it a corrupt computer file. It may never feel like a real memory. I have also found EMDR helpful.