HUGE trigger warning here...a lot of traumatic memories here. You've been warned.

So apparently talking about trauma stuff with new T yesterday and the day before really triggered something in me...all the memories are coming back now, everything I completely forgot had happened. All the violent stuff and all the scary stuff and all the stuff that wasn't violent or scary but just confusing and unpredictable and didn't make any sense, like one time when I was eight and we were staying overnight at a hotel and I was sharing a bed with my brother and for some reason my mother became convinced that I was taking up more than half the bed (my brother didn't care, but for some reason she thought I was taking up way too much space) and she made me sleep on the floor of the hotel room instead of in the bed.

Or other times when she used to hold me down when I was having a fit, and one time she ripped my shirt literally in half when she was trying to wrestle me into my room, and that shirt was one of my favorites - my grandmother brought it for me from Florida and it was all sparkly and it said, "There's always room for ice cream!" Or how one time when I was about nine or ten, after we'd had a huge fight and she'd restrained me and sat on me for a really long time and my back was hurting a lot and I was just feeling miserable and I came out of my room and went to the washroom and started stuffing cotton balls in my nose, and she came into the washroom and asked me what I was doing, and I said I was trying to kill myself (okay, I was nine or ten), and I remember this so clearly - she sat down on the toilet seat and she laughed and she told me to go ahead.

And stuff that I'd been trying so hard not to think about regarding my father - he was never a violent guy, he never tried to hurt me, but sometimes I would be trying to tell him something about anxiety and he wouldn't be listening so I would stand in front of the door so he wouldn't be able to get up and leave, which he always wanted to do, and he would grab my arm or something to try to maneuver me out of his way, and I would just go ballistic and start pushing him away from me because I couldn't stand being touched like that.

And then he would hold me down just like my mom used to and I would be hitting and kicking and biting and trying to get him off me because it just scared me so much and made me so angry to be in a position of physical helplessness, and those fights weren't even abuse because I started them and I definitely gave as good as I got - I was just a really awful kid, and I can understand why the adults around me always wanted to hurt me, and that's why I always think it was my fault, because I hurt them sometimes too, and if I told this stuff to new T, she would definitely revise her "it's not your fault" mantra...I've never told this stuff to anyone before, and I'm terrified to tell it to her, because she'll realize what a terrible kid I was and that I deserved it.

All of this stuff is just coming back to me and I can't deal with it. If this is what trauma work is like - and this is only the tip of the iceberg! and only the fourth week! - I can't do it. I am feeling so, so out of control.