hey perna. yeah... memories are hard. psychologists distinguish between different kinds of memories. one kind of memory is 'explicit' memory that is linguistic, (propositional or narrative) in form. another kind of memory is 'episodic' that is picture-like in form. i guess it is episodic memories that have emotional experiences associated with them (research has shown that episodic memories tend to be formed around fairly intense emotional experiences). they aren't linguistically encoded. as such... communicating them can be hard (what one is doing is kind of superimposing a narrative / interpretation over the top of them).

memories that we have before we are verbal are episodic. later memories can be episodic too, though. i struggle a lot with episodic memories. flashbacks. intrusive images. mostly after i was verbal. a lot of emotional dysregulation though. mostly between 7-... well... the present, i guess. though i do it less now... mostly in the hours between sleep and wake. sometimes i have to come home, though, because it starts involountarily and i have difficulty distracting from it. its like i kind of go into a trance or something... have to come home and try and sleep...

> Maybe people have different "bottoms" depending on their life experiences and when things started/got bent and what went exactly went wrong?

yes, i think thats right. Freud focused on the oedipal phase, i guess. he thought that people who had other fixations simply weren't suitable for analysis (hence he didn't worry so much about what was wrong with them). because he focused (or fixated lol) on the oedipal phase he thought that analysis bottomed out at constitutional drives (e.g., desires that couldn't be analysed away). though... i don't know too much about that... and i could be way off...

since Freud other theorists have become interested in earlier phases of development. in particular (or where I've focused my reading) the oral phase. the oral phase is pretty early. to do with security and the like. i guess fear of annihilation makes sense there. once again i suppose it is taken to be constitutional (biological) in the sense that theorists go on about how the infant isn't able to self-regulate (Lacan said something about infants being 'born too early' (relative to other species) because our heads would be too large to be pushed out if we stayed in the womb longer. the price we pay for such a developed brain is that we need more intensive care once we are born. if we don't get appropriate external regulation by our mothers then the risk of biological and psychological annihilation / death is very real. (the notion is that infants would be in rather an excruciating emotional state if it wasn't for the mothers external regulation of their emotional state).

> I started gaining weight as I started getting better in therapy (was 127 pounds when I started therapy and am now 270)

maybe... (i'm saying this in the gentlest way possible) maybe... that is about substituting certain (relatively maladaptive) defences for certain other (relatively adaptive) defences?

i used to self harm (cut / burn) and use a lot of illicit drugs as defences against my dysregulated mood. relatively maladaptive. i've stopped with that now. i've turned to alchohol and food. relatively adaptive. a great deal more socially acceptable.

progress to be sure...