I know this topic has been discussed before here, so I've been looking for an old thread about it instead of starting a new one. I figured if I could find an old thread then I wouldn't have to re-ask the same questions and you all wouldn't have to re-answer the same questions (and then I would feel like less of a burden...which I already feel like today, so maybe I just need to ask the question). So here goes...

My T asked me something today that I couldn't answer, so my homework is to think about how to answer it. We've been doing a lot of trauma work, and I have a lot of childhood trauma. I have been avoiding anything that connects me to the trauma or anything that makes me feel like that little kid again, mostly because I am avoiding all the pain associated with what happened. I don't know how to deal with all of that. I've talked about a lot of the trauma I can put into a coherent "story", meaning I can tell her what happened. We have worked on connecting the feelings to the experiences. I'm doing better with all of that, but here's where I get stuck...there is a lot that happened in the first couple years of my life, that I can't put into words or explain. I know what I have been told by others. I don't want to give any details because I don't want to trigger anyone, but I know just from what I've been told that things were very bad. So I have other people's comments, which kind of validate my feelings, but then I just have this big mess of feelings I can't explain, and pieces of experiences I can see in my head but I cannot put any words to what I see. It's so weird. So my question is, how do you deal with preverbal trauma? I can't explain it to anyone. I can't talk it through to process it. I can't even verbalize how it feels. I've talked about what I've been told, but it's not the same because yes it makes sense and explains some things, but I have no connection to the experiences they are telling me about. Whenever my T and I start to talk about it, I just want to curl up and cry, but I don't know how to tell her why.

Has anyone found a way to deal with trauma they can't put into a coherent memory?