[NyxBean]

Content Warning: Pretty much all of them but as I say later, I try not to go into too much detail.

I don't know if this is where to put this. It is about childhood.

Through laziness and exhaustion, I'm going to paste what I wrote in a more general advice area. I was writing for a specific forum so I'm not sure if that comes through.

I may have explained C-PTSD incorrectly or maybe it is more that I explained it as myself...

Following is the paste:

[Content warning: pretty much will tick all of the boxes but I will try to avoid going into detail]

I'm not sure how to phrase most of this.

Basically most of my childhood and a lot of my adolescence is a blank. I've become an expert at blocking out even the smallest upset so that even now in adulthood something huge can pop out of left field from a year or so ago. Those I experience in a "standard" post-traumatic stress disorder flashback. Visuals and body sensations mostly with the words remembered but not always heard. Physically I either go into panic or I shutdown and dissociate. Usually the latter.

I remember a lot of physical, emotional, and mental abuse in childhood and those along with sexual abuse in adolescence and then "easing off" as I went through my early twenties. I'm mostly safe now although having said that, this year has been remarkably tough.

*

My point is that I seem to get "emotion/sensation" flashbacks which I can't place to a memory or an occurrence but which stretch back to childhood. C-PTSD can involve a lot of these... weirder flashbacks, the ones which appear to have no context.

Two I know have happened since I was a pre-teen are the bodily sensations and fear I have surrounding an uncle and a cousin.

I'm worried my mind might be making false connections. I do recall feeling like this cousin who was probably close to a decade my elder seeming to... leer at me when I was about ten. His room was filled with porn mag pull-outs and I saw all of them when I was younger than that. Still not sure why I was allowed in his room with all that around.

With the uncle, I can't explain it. He's self-diagnosed bipolar but I know and have known many with bipolar and he's not the only uncle I have. He's the only one I get these feelings from, however.

*

They are like my skin is crawling inside and out. It can be that there's a sensation of being maybe held? Around the upper arms? Sometimes I feel sick and often I start to dissociate when it kicks in. Sometimes it feels like somebody might be on me but not crushing me. I remember being frightened of the attic in my first childhood house that I remember but not why. Only that the uncle slept there when he needed to stay with the family for a while.

Then there's this indescribable "certainty" that somebody babysitting me in that house showed me or wound up letting me accidentally see porn, back when I was about five. I remember blonde women. Except the part of the house the memory tries to place that in doesn't make sense so I can't trust it.

*

I was about to launch into a bunch of other fragments and points which might add up to suspicious circumstances. I realised that was pointlessly upsetting for others and tiring for myself.

*

What I want to ask is if people agree when a doctor says "It's better that you don't remember,"?

For me, I'm not sure. I am constantly guilty about my friends who remember for a fact about sexual child abuse. I feel my emotion-sensation flashbacks and thoughts are... completely selfish and disrespectful, even though I tend not to talk to them about it. Even their being in my head makes me feel horrible and cruel because I can't be sure. Like I'm always competing with others in there.

I hate that. It's hard to ignore as I wind up ruminating a lot and I'm too ill to work. I try hard to focus on other things but some days are worse than others.

I bought a DBT book with about 225 worksheets and asked my carer to print me out a distress tolerance booklet. I see a psychologist, will be receiving help from autistic spectrum related support workers, and have my first drop in visit with the city's resource centre for people with AS and HFA (diagnosed Asperger's recently). So there's all that.

*

Again, I'm not sure whether or not it is better to not know when I keep getting all these flashbacks. Maybe I should simply stick with learning to ride them out. I guess that's what the doctors who have said this mean?

Has anybody been in a similar situation? What did you do? What's your opinion? Have you tried DBT? Are there any resources you'd suggest?

Thanks.

End of paste. Same questions to you folk, I suppose. I feel really queasy and so I might be coming off as curt. I don't mean to be.

[Parva]

I've had a lot of bad emotional flashbacks, very much as you describe, sometimes quite different. For me, it is much more like having the emotional stress of childhood; fear, panic, isolation, but in the context of what's happening around me. Mine have most generally in the context of maternal transference with my T. Emotional flashbacks are particularly troubling because they don't have a specific point of reference, or sometimes it's hazy.

I haven't done DBT. EMDR helped some. Mostly, it's been trial-and-error with my T to figure out how to get myself out of the flashback. Usually, it's as simple as the two of us just talking. Most importantly has been to identify signs or cues that I'm in one of these flashbacks.

This is a good piece that might help understanding: https://www.psychotherapy.net/article/complex-ptsd

[Skeezyks]

I'm an older person. So I have a whole lifetime of flashbacks that keep recurring over-&-over again. Typically, when they come up, they cause a knotting in the "pit of my stomach" as the saying goes. You mentioned that allot of your childhood & adolescence is blank. I also have this problem (if that's a good term for it.) I have no memory of my life prior to about 8 or 10 years old. What I do of it, I know because my parents told me about it as I grew up.

I've had allot of problems in my life, both mental & social beginning early in life. And I imagine that at least some of it was caused by some of that stuff I have no memory of. I used to imagine that, perhaps, I could in some way recover these lost memories & perhaps identify some trauma that caused all of my difficulties. As time has gone on, however, I have come to the conclusion that my past is a snarled ball of wire that will never be untangled. So now I am simply working on accepting all of my flashbacks with compassion rather than to try to expel them. They have only the power over me that I choose to give them.

I wish you well.

[starfruit504]

I would say it's important to think about how remembering would help or hinder your healing process. The question isn't "Do I want to remember?" the question should be "How would remembering serve me?"

It sounds like you still have a lot of guilt and shame about what happened to you and I would agree with a therapist who wanted to work on that, rather than on remembering what occurred. You don't need anyone to validate the way you feel or the emotions that surround your childhood memories. You're the authority on your experience. You can trust and honor your feelings without recalling everything.

I was the victim of sexual abuse starting at age 3 (as far as I can recall) and my therapist told me that it's possible there are more things that occurred that I don't remember and will never remember.

I too have felt like I'm on the outside when I meet other survivors with vivid memories about what happened to them. My memory is more foggy, I didn't understand what was happening and I was incredibly young. But that doesn't mean we aren't all survivors, that we're wrong or somehow less credible.

[Open Eyes]

I think it's important to realize that it's normal not to remember a lot of thing from one's childhood. Also, remember that if there was sexual abuse of somekind, a child doesn't know what that is, so you will not remember it like you would now. What is typically remembered is something that affected one emotionally, something that hurt or frightened a person. To try to recall everything and think something is wrong because you cannot is not something one should stress over or assume something bad happened that you are choosing to block out.

When I developed PTSD, everything that challenged me for a while involved the traumatic situation I experienced. Then when I experienced some challenges with my older sister, or a lawyer that was failing mentally and was failing to help me in my lawsuit I experienced flashbacks from my past that I had no idea my mind held in storage. I would have flashbacks of certain things, parts of things and in every flashback I was afraid or being hurt somehow and experiencing these really confused me.

We may not always remember what was said, although sometimes we do, but we do remember how whatever did take place made us feel, especially if it has "fright/flight/freeze" in it. So, don't just assume the worst or that if you can't remember everything it's bad. We never remember everything that happens to us from day to day in our lives, especially when we are children, unless we experienced emotional challenges, then we may remember those experiences.

Always keep in mind when recalling a childhood, you did not know then what you know now as far as overall knowledge and maturity is concerned. And whatever you do recall, you did survive whatever it was. Often people will remember things that made them happy too. It's just mostly things that involve emotions. And keep in mind, the brain doesn't store everything in areas where there is language so it may take time for someone to be able to put whatever they are remembering into words. Patience is very important.