My Support Forums - View Single Post - very good at hiding everything from myself

Alatea · 07:45 PM

Hi everyone,

I recently joined the Forum, and I think I just need to vent, so I hope you are ok with that, and that you might bear with me.

I was diagnosed three years ago (in this order) with Depersonalization and Derealization Disorder, depression, Generalized anxiety disorder, somatization disorder; I caught my breath and calmed my thoughts, and after six months of CBT and Zoloft, I felt so much better.

Then, a bit more than year ago, came Panic attacks, DP/DR again, but not as acute as before, and Dissociative Amnesia. GAD actually never went away, now reinforced with agoraphobia. Oh yeah, and a possible Stockholm syndrome.

Immediately after the onset of this last crises, I was overwhelmed with flashbacks of childhood abuse, that I suffered from around age 3 to roughly 10, and that was covered by dissociative amnesia. I could suddenly remember pretty vividly the event that started it, at age 3, and also could remember not only the subsequent abuse, that happened in different places, but also a number of stages in my life when I nearly remembered the abuse, but then repressed the memories of memories. As someone put it aptly, amnesia can be for amnesia, and it happened to me a lot, more than I can know at this point.

One particular crisis of memories flooding happened around the age of 14, when I had a massive trigger of the abuse, fell ill in fever and excruciating pains that had no physical cause, lied in bed, tossed, turned and cried out loudly, as if something was ripping me apart from within. Then I remembered the details of abuse, wrote down my memories, and disgusted by what came out of me, torn all the pages and threw them in the loo, not to remember it again until I was 40.
At age 14, this crisis caused me to hurt myself, in particular to

Possible trigger:

cut myself with razor blades, and, among other random cuts on my arms and hands, I carved the first letter of the perpetrator’s name on my left upper arm.

What a reminder, huh?
And then I forgot…

Dissociative Amnesia is still hiding so much from me. It goes as far as to not know as whom am I going to wake up in the morning. I have four different "programmes" of behaving and living in the world, and they often change. I do not know whether something like that happened to any of you guys, if you did experience D. amnesia? I have always had these "programmes" and I am very familiar with their preferences and abilities. I used to reflect on this when I was younger, but then I just learned to live with them. Becoming a professional allowed me to keep myself anchored to a stable framework, regardless of which "programme" is in charge. I guess others would perhaps call them parts, but for me they are operative programmes, in an analogy of me as an electronic device with just factory settings, that becomes animated once the "programme" is upoloaded. I would like to hear if you have any comment to this?

Sorry for this long post. Every time I share something like this I crash afterwards, but then I get better, and closer to understanding how my mind works. Thanks for being there!
A.