We talked about the sound of barking dogs, why it's upsetting and a dog I remember not remembering.
We talked about being afraid of taking a shower and why that might be (this was when I started to zone out because of some words that triggered something when I heard them spoken out loud by the therapist).
We talked about my old hometown and how long I lived there.
We talked about how I did not know who my grandparents and aunts and uncles were when I got a card from them for my sixth birthday. My mother didn't believe that I didn't remember because we had been very close and had just moved away from the hometown a few months previously. And we talked about how she acted the same way a couple of years later when I didn't remember the dog mentioned in the first sentence of this post.
We talked about how it might be so-called normal for sex and intimacy to go together, but I find the combination to be completely disgusting.
Yeah, I could not recall all these things from therapy with New Guy Tuesday night. Now I do. Probably because I was feeling just the same way right before I remembered as I did in that appointment - anxious, scared in a mostly low-key but dreadful kind of way, trying to hold it together and feeling some dissocative spaciness trying to move in - and then - I remembered the details instead of just a very basic overview of a couple of topics! I wanted to write it down and tell other people so it can be mine to keep. Yeah, the shower thing was especially upsetting and now it is time to take a shower. Murphy's Law, right? Still, I'm so glad I remember. But I still dread taking a shower.
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I don't know if this will help you or not, Lynn, but I thought I would mention it anyway........
ReplyDeleteAbout 15 years ago, I worked on a series of cases involving psychiatric malpractice - which is only relevant because as a result, I ended up "auditing" a couple of seminars put on for therapists and doing research on the effects of trauma on memory.
One of the authors that stuck in my mind said that the emotion associated with events can sometimes interfere with memory, in the sense that memory is like data encoding, and the presence of (usually intense) emotion associated with some events can interfere with or prevent the encoding on a person's memory.
The memory might still be there somewhere, but the data could have been corrupted because of the intensity of the emotions associated with it.
There are whole chunks of my and my family's time in Argentina that I just have no idea what happened. I remember vague isolated bits, but there is no real continuity of the 9-10 months we spent there. I went to 6th grade there, but I have very little recollection of the school, and none at all of how I got to and from school.
I don't remember arriving at the airport, I don't remember how we got from the airport to where we were going to stay, I don't remember that my dad was so sick that a doctor had to be called to the house, or that it was kind of touch and go for a week or so, and I don't remember going to the airport to leave. It's just not there.
I have little to no memory of a trip we took to Uruguay while we lived there, and I recall very little about our arrival in Venezuela until we got to a house where the people who lived there let us stay and it was just us and we could relax.
Knowing that the emotional impact of that entire time probably interfered with my brain's ability to retain that information makes me feel a little better, but it's still troubling that I don't recall such a huge chunk of my life.
As I said: I don't know if that helps you or not - I hope so.
Memory is a tricky thing. The emotions can be over whelming. Take care of yourself.
ReplyDeleteThank you, ladies.
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