ncal,

I am sorry that I do not have any info to help you on this area of need and I can see why you would need it. It sounds so horrible to live with such instability and danger every day/hour as a child. It must have been so scary and so confusing to live this way.

Like you I do not have many good memories at all, though I could real off horrors until someone shut me up. I would gladly tell anyone good stuff only first I have to HAVE IT. Then I need to be able to remember it.

Memory is what it is and childhood memories are felt as much as remembered and we were too little to explain things to ourselves and so many times what happened was just overwhelming and we did what we could to survive and that is it.

If your T doesn't understand that it is "can't" remember, not "won't" remember then he/she needs to grow as a therapist. I do believe that as I heal I may be able to recover some more good memories that got overshadowed by the pain/fear and abuse that surrounded me. If you are "beating yourself up for not having more good memories" I urge you to stop and just be kinder to yourself. You can't fake what is not there - nor should you ever feel you should. I've been in groups where they did "icebreakers" to get people talking and they were miserable for me because I DIDN'T have the kind of "feel-good" stories they sought. After a while I stopped going because it embarrassed me to be consistently unable to find a good thing to say about myself. That is not a good thing to keep going through. I hope you can maybe explain to your T that you don't want to fake something and you just don't have it.

My mother was severely abusive and cruel and she also was DID as I am and so I know there are some times when she was kinder than what she was most often (which was cruel). I had no security, no safety except what I could invent in my head. It was a frail shelter against a storm of abuses, but it got my through until my adult life got too much for a set of childhood defenses - then I began to breakdown and need help badly. Thankfully, I am now getting it.

I hope you can find any resources that exist for children dealing with the horrible unpredictability of mentally ill parents. I wish you well.

Leslie and her Pixies