Feeling my trauma as if it happened to someone else

[Asche]

[I'm not sure whether this goes in this section (as a kind of dissociation) or in the Affect Regulation section, since it's kind of like depersonalization.]

I've noticed recently that I seem to be able to tell about my traumatic experiences, and I think I know most of them, at least in outline.  But there's no feeling attached to them.  It's as if I'm talking about what happened to someone else.  It's not a freeze reaction, because I can get angry about what they did to me, but it's the sort of anger I feel when I read about someone else being abused.  I can even remember that back during my worst years,, I was overwhelmed with dread, etc., but I can't feel it now.  It's like I split myself into two people: the abused, miserable child, which is still sealed up in the crypt inside me, and the rational adult who can talk and relate to the outside world.  But the child feels like she's someone else, not me.  I remember that at the time, whenever I wasn't being forced to deal with the outside world, I would put my mind somewhere far, far away, either by reading books (I regularly got in trouble for reading in class) or by daydreaming about something that had nothing to do with me (or at least the me in the world I was physically in.)  Like what it's like to be an ant or a bee.

One time rather recently, my therapist tried to do some EMDR with me and asked me to try to remember back to those "* years" and try to remember what it felt like.   At first, I felt sort of like I was suffocating, like being in a chamber where the air was getting unbearably hot.  And then my conscious mind simply disappeared.  I was talking, but couldn't remember what I was saying.  I'd get to the end of a sentence and not know how it started.  When I remember the experience, I was aware of my surroundings and even responding to the therapist, but at the time, I wasn't consciously aware of much of anything.  When I came out of it, the memory was pretty dreadful, but at the time, I wasn't capable of feeling much of anything.  My therapist's conclusion was that the experience was still too painful to bear and my mind was kind of tripping its circuit breakers.

Lately, since I've retired, it feels like my subconscious is very busy doing -- something.  I feel the "power drain" all the time.  But I also notice that I feel this need to  keep my conscious mind busy with more or less mindless stuff, and I have the impression that my mind is trying very hard not to see/hear something.  It's kind of sticking its fingers in its ears and saying "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!"  And I sometimes imagine that maybe my subconscious is deliberately obscuring stuff from my conscious mind.  Like it's saying to my conscious mind, "just run along and play, dear, and don't worry your pretty little head," so my conscious mind will stay out of its hair while it's dealing with hard stuff I'm better off not knowing about.

I also suspect that there's nothing for me to do about it but just keep plodding along, one foot in front of the other -- like I've done for most of my life.  And hope that I'm somehow getting somewhere better and more whole than now.

[Kizzie]

It's like I split myself into two people: the abused, miserable child, which is still sealed up in the crypt inside me, and the rational adult who can talk and relate to the outside world.

I can so relate to this Asche, I still feel like part of me is locked away although I think it's my teen self in my case.  I do think we've locked them away for good reason becasue of how we felt then. It's beyond frightening, it's terrifying.

I've come to see that going slowly is the only way (right now) I can come to terms with what I felt as a child - it's called titration, dipping your toe in and then taking it out when the water feels too hot. I don't like it as I'd rather rip the bandage off and be done with all this, but I've learned the hard way that all those protective walls/strategies are there for a reason.  I've had a few occasions, one quite recently when I was thrown into an situation that triggered what I felt what I did as a child and teen - overwhelming. 

I guess all this is to say that right now, based on the therapeutic strategies available, many of us end up having to accept and to a degree respect the need to go slowly.  We all developed CPTSD for good reason, what we suffered was deeply traumatic and life-threatening, if not physically then to our psyche.  Our whole body reacts to that and it takes time to learn to calm it so we can feel safe in the present. 

I hope this is helpful knowing that you're not alone in reacting to your pain as you do