I've noticed that sometimes I'll look back on something that happened to me (usually not even sexual), and feel different ways about it. One time I might say, "I hated seventh grade. It was boring and nobody liked me." Other times I might find myself thinking, "Ooh, I was a mean little booger then, it's amazing they put up with me as nicely as they did!" Sometimes I wonder which of those was "really" true; other times, both seem to have been.
multipixie9, could you say a little more about how you went about discovering these memories (recently) and how (for want of a better word) you interleaved them when you were younger? I'll explain in a moment what I'm asking. We may be able to this in a way that expands on
muffi's topic without distracting too much from it.
If you don't want to go into this any further here, of course you don't have to.
Quote:
Originally Posted by multipixie9
as a result of abuse, i lived life on several levels at the same time. on one level i believed my life as a child was "happy and ok". on another level i had some sexual experiences that i could not really understand or deal with so i coped as best i could and then forgot them. on other levels not known to me until later, i had extreme sexual experiences that were severely hurtful to me as a person.
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Are you saying that you now remember (maybe in bits and pieces) that as pretty much the same sort of things kept on happening to you for a while, on different
occasions you experienced them in very different ways (sometimes "happy and ok", sometimes kind of strange, sometimes downright nightmarish, sometimes you didn't even remember them afterwards? Or do you mean that when you'd recall these things later, you'd find yourself with some very different reactions to the
same incident, maybe depending on what mood (or something) you were in when you looked?
Do these different ways of looking at something now seem equally real to you? Do some seem more like it's the everyday you looking, others as if you were looking from a nightmare or something? Or, on the other hand, does it seem like the incidents mostly really
were ugly and scary but you learned to cover them over and make them seem happy and OK?
You seem to remember some of these events, like the biting-the-wart one, clearly enough to fit them onto a timeline. Do the others pretty much fit on a timeline for you, too? How about your different ways of remembering them -- any timeline for that?
Best wishes for you, working through this, and thank you for anything else you might care to share about it how you remembered it.
(
muffi, does any of this ring any bells for you?)