Quote:
Originally Posted by feralkittymom
I think it was helpful to me to separate sense impressions as a concept from memories. Sense impressions, whether they're visual, auditory, whatever, I think can originate and persist from very young ages. But memories to me imply narrative, and that demands a certain level of cognition and is subject to the over writing influence.
I also have trauma impressions from an experience @ 3 years old that is more concrete, but still not really a memory because there is no narrative attached (never referred to by others, no anecdotal evidence to supply an over write).
|
Yes, that's a big part of it. Thank you for writing this. The narrative is missing because they are more like flashbacks. I think i'll refer to them memory fragments. And after all, my therapist is guiding the creation of the narrative.
This article doesn't have any special significance; it just happened to have come up at the top of a google search. It puts a label on the concept, and I have a need to label everything, all the lower-level things, so that I can think about it in more depth in the larger context of everything.
Quote:
Flashback experiences in one form or another are almost universal among abuse victims (Ellenson, 1986). They involve a wide variety of sensory experiences, including physical sensation, visual images, and auditory phenomena. These experiences often frighten survivors who may fear they are "going crazy." These flashbacks are not hallucinations; rather, they are memory fragments that have emerged in response to some trigger that often is out of the abuse survivor's awareness.
Because of the dissociative process, flashbacks and the retrieval of traumatic memories are often experienced by the survivor as a movie that was stopped in mid-frame and then unexpectedly restarted years later. The client does not just remember the abuse; he or she literally re-experiences the childhood trauma (Spiegel, 1986b).
During the session, as Nancy described her abuse history, she spontaneously regressed. Her facial features and body posture looked like a small, frightened child. She began crying hysterically. When asked what was wrong, she reported having recurrent images of a bathroom.
It becomes the therapist's responsibility to provide containment, structure, and support to facilitate the processing of the fragmented images, affect, and the regressive elements that surface as the survivor reexperiences the abuse during the integration process.
Therapeutic Relationship As The Foundation for Treatment with Adult Survivors of Sexual Abuse
|
I'm still a bit confused, but I think what's contributing to the confusion is the labeling of these memory fragments as 'flashbacks', except for if they pertain to my experiences I had under 2 years of age. It defies logic that they are considered one thing for all experiences under a certain arbitrarily designated age, while being considered quite another thing for the exact same experiences that occurred at a much younger age.
I apologize to anyone who has responded without having the context and detail that is missing from my posts. Like I mentioned before, I don't feel comfortable posting the details. Thanks for all the responses.
