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NK, I'd be interested in commenting on this as a couple of interesting things have come up while reading Mother Hunger, but I'm getting the error that the post is missing or off limits to me.

It's a pinned to the top (I think) thread in the Co-Morbidities / Memory and Cognitive Issues section of the forum about memory and trauma. At any rate it should be easy enough to spot as there is quite a bit of recent activity on there now. Hopefully that gives you enough info to find it.

Thanks Nk and sorry to take up your journal Slashy! Funnily enough the sub section memory and cognitive issues doesn't show up for me, but Kizzie mentioned it might be a cache issue as I've had it elsewhere.

https://www.cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=10108.0;topicseen

I've added a few comments to this thread on how trauma affects memory

NK, I'd be interested in commenting on this as a couple of interesting things have come up while reading Mother Hunger, but I'm getting the error that the post is missing or off limits to me.

Slashy/John, I don't want to write in your journal when you're already anxious by what's going on. So, will save for another time.

It was really upsetting me to consider the notion that my early memories might not be real, but I've corroborated too many of them.
 Now that I better understand the mechanism and see that other sufferers of dissociative amnesia have reported a similar experience, I feel better about the whole thing.

I think I understand what's going on a bit better now.

I'm sorry that having this stuff come up causes anxiety. I'm guessing that was the part that you were hoping to "fix" by recovering everything. I used to think my t was saying a canned response, or didn't really believe it, when she would tell me that it's really hard to do this work, and commend me for trying. It is really hard to grapple with these things, and I hope you can give yourself some space to process what's coming up.

Sending you support,
dolly
 

[my]

Of course, but this doesn't fit me. If anything, it demonstrates the opposite. All of 5 of us kids were impacted and I'm one of the only two ho survived it intact. I don't blame myself for any of it. I was just a kid and it's all the fault of the grownups, my mother specifically. Even the blame for all the other bad actors comes back to her because she should never have allowed them to be around her kids. It's not my fault, it's HER fault. She was an unfit mother, no doubt about it. But she's dead and I'm the one left to clean up the mess.

Hey Slashy, to me basic fault is more nuanced than that. I think that I can recognize that my m was at fault for providing less than adequate care etc and the things she did as her fault. However, how basic fault shows up is more through interpersonal relationships (ie attachment style) and my relationship to myself (ie what I actually believe about myself). So, in relationships if something happens, do I immeadiately default to, I am unlovable or bad? If something happens does it become a problem that I have to fix, or I am unloveable (and not that the other person is being selfish etc)? Can I show up in a conversation where I talk about my needs, and actually have needs because I learned that having needs is bad ie therefore I am bad when I have them? I have also "made out ok" despite the odds, but these are also still big issues of my self at my core.

I wonder what would happen if setting yourself this impossible task, which doctors have said should be impossible (if I understand that correctly), and having others depend on you (despite being an adult herself), that if the "missing piece" doesn't arrive, or fix things in the way you are expecting, how that would show up for you? Would it be turned on yourself for not being able to do those things? I think others on here who have experienced repressed memories have had a foundational base for those memories to come up so that they were ready to process them. In Dissociation and IFS, Joanne Twombly talks about the structuring that is needed before one starts to dig into the dissociation. For example, there might be really good reasons why your body/mind has dissociated these things in the first place and that there is some part that needs to be grounded in safety. Though, if you're working with a therapist, she may have started on this to proceed with the DBR.

I don't feel like I need to see her because I'm sure I already know how that conversation would go. "Doc, it hurts when I do this". "Then stop doing that".

Well, as I've learned there's only one way to know what someone else is thinking and that is by asking. I think she might surprise you with her answer, or at least provide you with information (I hope) to better qualify what decision you want to make in the future. That being said, I have recently left a therapist because they were very "certain" about how things "should" go in therapy, and although we did a lot of good work together, it wasn't the direction I felt I needed to go in. (I wanted to explore feeling more regulated in the moment, and when I suggested that, she said that you can't "be" in therapy week after week. Anyways...)

Sending you support. This is all really difficult stuff that you're willing to look at.

But instead of doing that, I'm focused on identifying and rectifying specific faults. "These are the specific failures I've identified that were caused by my trauma and the symptoms that led me to them". Again... It's a "me" problem and I'm sorry. It's very possible that I may be the only one talking about my experiences and frustrations on a "systems" level.

Hey Slashy,

Can you say more about this? I'm not going on the defensive here, but trying to explain why I talked about these specific therapies. When you experience things as a baby, or preverbally, your brain does what it needs to do to make sense of what happened at that time. I am also very much a rational thinker, mind over matter kind of person because that's what I had to do to survive ie figure it out. What I've learned, is that intellectualization and figuring it out is a survival strategy. When you are in your head, you're not in your body, which is likely protecting me from the things that I had to experience. So, these therapies for me, are very much about figuring out what is going on systemically with me. It's like using the head to find the body, piece by piece. If you want, have a look at the connection survival strategy in Healing Developmental Trauma, which talks more about intellectualization.

Also, I don't know if you're actively in therapy right now, but one of the things that my therapist tried to hammer into me (probably not the best phrasing) was that it wasn't my fault. There is/was nothing wrong with me. Children will do whatever they need to do in order to keep their attachment to a parent, which means that they will take the responsibility in order to stay close to that caregiver because that is what is going to keep them alive. I have also been learning about the "basic fault," which means that children growing up in certain situations will believe themselves to be inherently flawed at their core and was developed by Michael Balint:

proposes that early childhood, pre-verbal discrepancies between a child's needs and environmental care create a fundamental, lasting structural deficiency in the personality. This "fault" causes intense anxiety, primitive object relationships, and regressive, difficult-to-treat character disorders.

It doesn't mean however, that you were flawed or different, but rather, that's what you had to believe in order to survive if you get me? It's a story that young you had to tell yourself about what was going on. Perhaps the searching through those memories now, is an effort to subconsciously undo that story?

Sending you support,
dolly

Be gentle with yourself NK. I think very much as adults who grew up as their children, I had to protect myself byy believing they were people who loved me and would do "this" to me. That at their core, they were good, loving and had just been through trauma themselves, which meant me taking the "stuff" on, and not saying, no you are responsible, which again is difficult because sometimes this "stuff" does fall under the spectrum of being a "good" person. As my second t said to me, there's nothing wrong with the way your heart works.

But for me, it's when you get there and find out things weren't as they were "presented" or "seemed" ie it wasn't this emergency, that the upset over emotional manipulation, and my "working" heart come in. How can I trust other people when this is what I had to deal with? And I still do, wanting to give people the benefit of the doubt because they have been through things (and I extrapolate this all in my head, looking for the evidence etc etc), but the reality is, they're not choosing me for example, and this is how they decided to show up for me. This person could very much change and this x,y,z could happen, and I don't have all the information, except that I know this is how they were showing up for me, and I need to face that. (Speaking with my own experiences recently here).

Hooray for adult NK for having that conversation and asking for what you need. I often feel/fear these conversations around our current politcal climate are so divisive and people are locked into their own beliefs. So, I'm glad you are your h were able to find a way around that.

Slashy, I think there's others here on the DID spectrum that can probably speak to your experience more than me. I have dissociated or frozen "parts" that I only discovered were that way after reading Somatic IFS. I grew up in an NPD family where my m frequently left me alone as an infant so she could go out to party. She also told me I wasn't wanted, or a mistake. So as an adult, I have the understanding that there was a lot of preverbal trauma where things don't necessarily show up as memories per se, but feelings and sensations.

In Healing Developmental Trauma by Joseph Heller, there is something called a connection survival style where as an infant, you develop the Self by taking your Self out of your body ie dissociation, intellectualization, spiritualization etc. Your mind cuts things off because it wasn't safe to be in those environments. As an outsider, what I am getting from your journal is perhaps an fragmented intellectual understanding of what happened, but maybe not the emotional connection to Self, or what happened to a certain extent? Speaking from my experience, it's like remembering you felt happy etc, but not feeling the full extent in your body, but more your mind.

I think everyone has their own process of doing things to connect the dots to our inner, "whole" emotional world. I am not there 100% by any means, but have found things along the way that have helped --IFS and NARM were two of them as well as EMDR, but to me, it's like a behind the scenes thing. I feel like IFS was the first thing where I felt an emotional connection to my inner world. (I've also helped my anxiety by dealing with things on a body level by addressing health concerns, but that's a whole other topic).

When I started IFS journeying on my own, I didn't understand anything really that was coming up. I think it's because my inner sense of self was so fragmented from a young age. It's also something I am finding more difficult to do right now, perhaps because I don't know how to approach these preverbal, somatic memories, but I think NARM has helped with that by helping bring my attention back to myself in a way, and start to recognize the sensations when they do come up. So, they're not just immediately "boxed away" as unsafe.

With inner children for me, when people would say take care of your inner children at first, it was blank. Like ok, I can pretend to do that, or feel like I'm going through the motions, but the concept is quite foreign to me. I think I have a sense and connection to different parts at certain ages now where it's not an "idea" of a part, but something that actually "popped out" that I can relate to in IFS.

I don't know how much you've read about these things, so apologies if I overlap or sound condescending. Please take what feels useful and leave the rest.

Sending you support,
dolly

his carried over to all my encounters with others and I kept losing myself. I did not know who I was and how to reside in my own body. I always allowed myself to be pulled out by others and the main strategy I had was to be overly interested in them and overly empathetic to anything they were going through. It was a kind of fawning response but it did keep me safe or so I thought.

Growing up in an NPD household as well, I find this very relatable. I really appreciated Ingrid Clayton's new take on fawning in her book Fawning. I think it reconfigures fawning as a trauma response, which is what I feel this "over-empathy/lack of Self" is. Also, I agree that it is so hard when you start to shift that focus and find that others aren't showing up for you in the way you'd like. For me, I think I have some scapegoat programming that leads me to think, it must be my fault, and start to shrink/doubt myself, or some sort of inner "basic fault" that believes that I'm not deserving of those things. It's hard sometimes to contextalize it, and begin to undo that wiring.

NK posted a video with Patrick Tehan and Ingrid Clayton a while back also that is very interesting. `
 

say all that to illustrate how deep my sense of self protection runs.
 So I'm not negating or minimizing anyone's quest for forgiveness or reconciliation. It's just that I cannot even remotely relate to such concepts. Most people don't get a first chance from me, let alone a second.

Hey Slashy,

I wanted to say that I don't think you're a "bad" person for this. A lot of the times I feel like the "burden" of forgiveness is placed on the victim in order to ease the burden or the consciousness of the other person. For me, in my family, I was expected to forgive people who didn't see a problem in how they treated me because that's just how they were. To me forgiveness is also something that's wound up in the fawning trauma response where you are pacifying or appeasing to survive. Not that that's the case all the time for forgiveness.

I just wanted to say that I can understand why you might have that response to your brother.

Sending you support,
dolly

nd she'd probably have done it to him, too, if she could have been bothered to get up at 4am to catch him on his delivery round.

hahahaha I have an image of your m getting up at 4am to greet the milkman and to try and solve his problems.

When I read this, I could imagine myself in your shoes and seeing how it would come across as vindictive a little bit, not that there's any truth to that being the motive. For me, I could also see it maybe touching on a point of anger that's like, see all the things I have done for you, and now that I'm not doing them what are you going to do? Which is kind of like a reciprocal hurt when you've been hurt in the process for perhaps doing too much in the first place and not having it acknowledged. But that's what I was trained to do    This is the unhealthy enmeshment and perhaps the really difficult realization is that it's never going to be acknowledged, and that a big part of my identity is somewhat hollow. There's a lot of pain beneath that.

As an outsider, I can also see how it's hard to not press the button, and run through all the ways that FOO might punish you for not "helping out," but you're letting FOO fail on their own if they need to. On the other side, if they don't fail, you are left with the lack of recognition for how you helped them in the situation, which is probably the important part. How do I keep showing up in this relational dynamic and what do I need to address that because if I don't I'm going to keep feeling x way? This of course, is just my problem solving part, and I'm sorry that there's a lot of emotions that are probably going to come around that. 

Hey Mamatus,

I just wanted to say that I read what you wrote and am hearing what you're saying.

It's a difficult journey to embark on the stuff you're doing right now, and over time as you peel back the layers, you will learn different ways of coping with the things that are coming up. Not that it makes it any less easy.

Sending you support,
dolly

Hey Teddy Bear,

I've had a life long issue with body image and weight despite being, at times, in probably the under weight category. My FOO had a lot of ideas about body image and shamed me a lot as a child for being a normal weight at the time.

Recently, I have been looking into scapegoating in families and found that a lot of scapegoated children can perpetuate the scapegoating dynamic on themselves through body image ie they carry the story the family told them that they are not doing something "right" if their body image doesn't live up to some imaginable standard for example.

I also know what it's like to have a condition and have weight gain as a result of that despite doing all the "right" things. It really, really sucks. I feel like most people look at you as (and this is probably the scapegoat story popping up here again) as it's something that you've done wrong.

So, once I moved countries where there is a high proportion of rental properties that contain black mold, and no recourse for landlords who don't address it, I started gaining weight despite eating relatively the same diet. I have "sensitive genetics" and this can lead to a whole host of issues from weight gain from mycotoxin exposure to MCAS. I spent 10 years trying to figure out what was going on, and came to a point where I was following a strict calorie (1800) and strength training regime and, more crucially, living in a mold free environment, that I lost some weight. Only to have it come back again, with a bunch of other issues, when I moved into an apartment that had mold behind the walls. So, genetics play a big part in how your body decides to do things, which is unique for everyone, including how people metabolize caffeine. What works for her might not work for you, and a gentle reminder may help her digest that (no pun intended).

Like you said, BMI is not an accurate measure of what is going on. Because I do so much strength training, I have to adjust the BMI calculator on my scale. To me, weight is also not an accurate predictor of how healthy you are, and I prefer body fat percentage instead. I think it gives you a more accurate description of a "healthy" build because you can be 120 pounds and still be 28% body fat for example. Weight gives no idea of how much lean muscle mass you have.

With all these factors in mind, it's helped manage some peoples' reactions to me and what I look like, and if they're just talking garbage. It's incredibly sad to me that as I've lost weight, peoples' reactions towards me have changed, but I'm still navigating that one. Like TBB said, having your body treated as a topic of conversation can be activating, and I've found that having more of a framework about what is/may be going on as well as what is actually healthy (and what can also be someone else's projection about their own issues) helps give you some more agency to deal with it.

Sending you support,
dolly

Ooof so not quite sure to put this one, but received this email this morning about the above summit that really sparked my interest as somatic healing is something I want to do more of. Not sure on pricing etc, but seems to be a free sign up if you attend "in person" online and don't request any recordings. I just copied and pasted, so the layout might be a bit wonky.


Today, we have a short article for you from Tracy Jarvis, who was a lead teacher in our last edition of the Integrating Somatic Techniques in Therapy training.

Tracy is a psychotherapist and a trainer of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and is currently researching interoception and its applications in therapy. Enjoy!

--

When we talk about trauma, we often focus on memory, attachment, and meaning.

But underneath all of it is interoception, the ongoing perception of signals arising from within the body: heart rate, breath, muscle tension, gut sensation, temperature shifts, subtle visceral cues. These signals form much of the raw material from which emotion is constructed.

Emotion is not just a story or a cognition. It is a patterned interpretation of bodily change.

From a trauma-informed and parts-oriented perspective, this becomes especially important:
Some parts amplify internal signals, scanning intensely for cues of danger
Some dampen or mute sensation to prevent overwhelm
Some organize perception around learned expectations, so the body feels what it has historically needed to feel in order to survive

In this way, interoception is not merely "accurate" or "inaccurate." It is adaptive. It reflects learning. The nervous system predicts what sensations mean based on prior experience, particularly relational and traumatic experience, and those predictions shape what is consciously felt.
This has several clinical implications:

Prediction shapes perception. Clients often experience what their system anticipates rather than what is strictly occurring physiologically. A slight increase in heart rate may be experienced as panic, excitement, shame, or threat, depending on context and parts activation

Attention is not the same as attunement. Simply directing attention toward the body does not automatically increase regulation. For trauma survivors, unstructured attention can intensify protective activation. Regulated interoceptive awareness requires pacing, safety, and sufficient Self-leadership

Signal and noise are learned categories. What one part experiences as intolerable noise (e.g., visceral activation), another part may need to access as a meaningful signal. Helping parts differentiate these layers is often more useful than increasing raw sensation.

Embodiment is relational. The capacity to stay with internal sensation develops within safety. Without relational support, internally and externally, turning toward the body can feel exposing rather than regulating

When we understand interoception as a dynamic learning system shaped by trauma, attachment, and protective organization, we move beyond simplistic models of "disconnect" and instead work with how the system has intelligently adapted.

For those who want to explore this more deeply: at the upcoming free Interoception & Trauma Summit (Feb 27–28), we're sharing two bonus interviews with leading researchers on how interoceptive processing develops, how it's measured, and what it means clinically for trauma work. These interviews are available to registered participants, with lifetime access included in the VIP package.

Register for the summit here.

Warmly,
Tracy Jarvis, Co-Founder & The Interoception International Summit Team
Interoception International

Hey Slashy,

I just want to say that I have been reading your entries and what you wrote. I'm sorry that you had to go through that at such an early age. It breaks my heart to read that, but you also made it out the other side and are a strong, capable adult processing what had happened.

Sending you support,
dolly

A big hug PC  (and this is coming from someone who is not feeling very huggy right now).

You don't have to apologize for anything, you don't have to be sunshine and light all the time and take care of everything for everybody. This is your authentic self and I'm here for it and, given all the things you've been through in your life, it's no wonder that you feel this way sometimes.

As an outsider, it could just be your self calibrating what's going on after years of hearing the negative scapegoat story, where for the first time you are looking at not being that person, and not being that fawn. Again, given all the things you've been through in your life, it makes sense that these feelings would be coming up. You had to be alone your whole life to survive because of how people treated you. I remember once that my friends from long ago suggested to go out for my birthday to dinner, and I was physically astounded that they would be there and want to do that. And I still haven't gotten over that feeling.

In Fawning by Ingrid Clayton, she talks about a client who finally had all the blinders come off in an abusive relationship  that she was in, and had a whole nervous system reset (what I'm calling it - she needed to take time off of work etc because her reactions were so strong). It's not easy to do these things, and when you're doing it you can support yourself in as many ways as you need. Somatic thereapy 2x a week? Seems excessive, but why not? Just an example, but you get it. Maybe part of you is still fawning by setting up the campsite and doing cooking for everyone? It's a very "normal" thing to do, but perhaps there was a part that didn't feel like doing those things at the time, but felt compelled to do them, and there was some self-abandonment in the process, which led to those feelings?

I have also been reading Mother Hunger that NK has talked about, and it sort of goes into how important the bond is between infant and mother, and the kinds of feelings/aches/longings that can happen if the baby is not supported, protected, and nurtured. Given what you have said about your m, it might make sense of some of those feelings as well (though she talks about mother hunger directed towards women, I would think that to a certain extent those feelings would also come up for an male infant, but not a psychologist).

Sending you support,
dolly