Death by a Thousand Cuts

[sanmagic7]

like many others here, i, too, have many, many incidents in my background of abuse and neglect that might not qualify as traumatic to some, but, yes, the wise words ' if you have symptoms of c-ptsd, it was bad enough', and i questioned it from time to time.  i've gotten better at accepting, but it takes practice sometimes.

as far as 12,000 different troubling events, something i've come to realize is that they often can be huddled under one umbrella or another.  for example, how many times were my feelings dismissed (many preverbal, i imagine)?  each may have its own situation, but they were generally in the same category.  that might take care of a few hundred examples.  and so on.  EMDR can often deal w/ puddles like that of similar instances w/o having to go thru each one individually. 

just a thought.  love and hugs

[MiaBailey]

Thank you for all of your responses. 

[Kizzie]

 

[MiaBailey]

One thing that I found interesting was that I have strong memories of witnessing the kindness of others when I was little.  I have a very distinctive memory from when I was 2-1/2 years old and it was from the man from the moving company that moved our company from Alabama to Missouri.  He saw me standing at the back of the moving truck and he climbed all the way back into the back of the moving truck and grabbed my red tricycle.  It is probably my first memory in life.  A positive memory.  I attempted to share that first memory with a therapist and she insisted that early memories such as this usually were from trauma.  She didn't like that fact that I disagreed with her.  I said that actually, I had been so neglected that witnessing someone acknowledge that I existed, acknowledge that there was something that I may want or need that could bring a smile to my face, was wonderful -- I absolutely cherish that memory.  I thought it was odd that she tried to say that it was probably related to trauma.  Maybe someone whose life is full of neglect grabs these examples as mental life rafts, I'm not sure.  I know that I did.  I know that I'm 62-1/2 years old and I still smile about it 60 years later.

[Blueberry]

I said that actually, I had been so neglected that witnessing someone acknowledge that I existed, acknowledge that there was something that I may want or need that could bring a smile to my face, was wonderful -- I absolutely cherish that memory.

I have a memory sort of like that too, from about the same age. I would've been almost 3yo. It's always stuck with me. A Greyhound bus driver lifted me down from the bus steps onto the sidewalk. I'm not sure what I felt at the time, all I can say is: no fear, no pain, no sadness. Maybe a little happiness? I think it was something about the fact that he lifted me down without me having to ask or plainly state I needed help. That wasn't actually the worst phase of my life back then, but I do have memories also from a couple of years later that my parents just seemed so clueless. Me, terrified of fireworks on the ground, trying to get my dad's attention to pick me up to save me from these fireworks jumping all over the place and he just continued chatting to somebody oblivious till he finally cottoned on and picked me up out of the way of the fireworks. We'd just moved countries and fireworks were new to me.

Anyway just want to validate that I too have some good memories from way, way back, and because we moved and/or spent only particular time at our grandparents overseas, I can place these memories to a pretty exact year and even month or two. Early memories may often be traumatic, but it doesn't mean they ALL are.

[sanmagic7]

Early memories may often be traumatic, but it doesn't mean they ALL are.

i agree, mia. I have a wonderful memory of walking with my M to a store about 2 blocks from our house. I must've been quite young, maybe 3 or 4, and she bought me the most beautiful doll i'd ever seen.  that was a happy memory, one that i can still picture, including the doll sitting on the shelf in the store.  there's a trauma memory about that doll at a later point in my life, but having my M buy her for me, something i chose for myself, always has an inner smile to it.

i also have one from when i was younger, probably around 2.  we had a record-making machine at the time, and my folks allowed me to record my voice. i still recall what i said, which was really nearly pre-verbal, and i can still hear my little girl voice saying my made-up words, and i remember feeling very grown up doing that.

so, yeah, not all family memories have to be traumatic.  i think it's good to find some of these that made us smile when we were so very young, whether they were FOO-related or not. at least it's one thing we can look back on and feel something pos. about in our life.  love and hugs

[HannahOne]

Hi Mia, late to the thread here, wanted to add that many of us what caused CPTSD was more a traumatic _environment_ than specific events. If it's one event, there's no discrete beginning and ending to the danger, we never get away from the people who did it, we live with them, so we don't recover from the trauma. Or it's hundreds and thousands of events, so again the trauma doesn't end. Either way, our nervous system stays on alert.