I don't want to go to the abuse forum because I'm not ready to.
I was crying in counseling last week because of this obstacle. I feel it when I'm triggered...it's an ill-defined shapeshifter. I run from it, I try to go around it. I have a vivid mind's eye, which doesn't always help.

After a couple years of trying to describe my hijacked inner world to myself, to my husband, to my counselors...I guess I now connect the trigger, the bad feelings/thoughts/fears, flashbacks, abuse, and just now the obstacle. The obstacle is the repressed memories. It's what i can't see, what I've never wanted to see. What I don't want to feel. I was frustrated in counseling because I was still triggered. I was half in half out...I could sense the obstacle but it was hidden and threatening me, so I couldn't name it. I know I have memories sitting right there but I hadn't put it together that they are the obstacle that still stands in my way.

As a child i would faint a lot, or zone out, or go to a starry place. Anytime I felt a sharp pain. Saw a sharp pain. I've compensated for these "failures" of fear. I've compensated to the point that I really made things disappear, or so I thought. I shapeshifted myself and my beliefs. I could make anything into anything. "It" led me about. I drew in. As I was going down the slide towards dying, I started drawing it out. It started coming out. In tears, in awful feelings, like hitting my head against a brick wall over and over with no relief. It came out in pretty paintings. A colorful still life with cockroaches; "abandonment" engraved on a gate.

He was the cockroach. Damn! That's about as far as I can go. It's easy to head into despair. Why can't I let him go? All these years. Plus I'm grown. But the repressed memories make me feel like that child. I don't know how to love her yet.