I was talking about how it feels like there is a load of pain inside of me which feels unreachable, and I don't know what it is or how to feel it. T suggested one of the reasons it feels so hard to define could be that it relates to preverbal experiences.
Since he said that, I have been feeling very anxious and can't stop thinking about it because it has struck a chord with me. I have had a few dreams since the last session, including one where I was travelling in an aeroplane looking at the curve of the earth when I suddenly realised how tiny I am and became overwhelmed with fear. I had another dream where I bit into an apple and found it rotten at the core and crawling with insects. Another one where I had to go down a long tunnel, but somebody had put a big locked iron door there so I couldn't get any further. All these dreams seem pretty significant to me and related to T's suggestion about preverbal experiences.
I tried to clear my mind of cognitive thought and create a collage to see if it helped me to express anything significant but I don't know if the results mean anything or if they're random (or contrived). I don't trust myself or my memories, and because I deal in truth and cognition, I find this abstract concept difficult to deal with.
I haven't had the opportunity to talk about this with T in any detail yet, but I am wondering if anyone here has had similar feelings, and how are those feelings dealt with and explored in therapy?

[Skeezyks]

Hello Echos Myron: Oh yes... the Skeezyks is very familiar with this feeling. For me it's like there is a black hole somewhere deep within the center of my consciousness... a dark menacing presence. This is my second time here on PC. And when I was here previously I wrote a fair amount about this. It gets fairly complicated. I'm not currently posting any of my own Threads here. And everything I wrote previously is now gone. But I do know exactly what you mean. I have worried, from time-to-time, that if that malevolent force ever escaped there would be no telling what it might do. Fortunately that has not & hopefully will not happen.

Thanks for sharing your experience Skeezyks. Did you find a useful way to uncover this in therapy? Or did you find it better to leave it untouched?
I feel like I need to address it and understand it in some way but I don't know how to go about that.

[amandalouise]

Originally Posted by Echos Myron

I was talking about how it feels like there is a load of pain inside of me which feels unreachable, and I don't know what it is or how to feel it. T suggested one of the reasons it feels so hard to define could be that it relates to preverbal experiences.
Since he said that, I have been feeling very anxious and can't stop thinking about it because it has struck a chord with me. I have had a few dreams since the last session, including one where I was travelling in an aeroplane looking at the curve of the earth when I suddenly realised how tiny I am and became overwhelmed with fear. I had another dream where I bit into an apple and found it rotten at the core and crawling with insects. Another one where I had to go down a long tunnel, but somebody had put a big locked iron door there so I couldn't get any further. All these dreams seem pretty significant to me and related to T's suggestion about preverbal experiences.
I tried to clear my mind of cognitive thought and create a collage to see if it helped me to express anything significant but I don't know if the results mean anything or if they're random (or contrived). I don't trust myself or my memories, and because I deal in truth and cognition, I find this abstract concept difficult to deal with.
I haven't had the opportunity to talk about this with T in any detail yet, but I am wondering if anyone here has had similar feelings, and how are those feelings dealt with and explored in therapy?

how its dealt with in therapy in short depends upon that treatment providers usage of the word pre verbal. for example in my location with my treatment provider pre verbal has two different definitions.

the first one means before a child reaches an age where they can speak words.

the second definition in my location means the same thing as non verbal \traditional speach communication....ie body language.... how a person sits, facial expressions, eye contact, sighs, moans, grunts, breathing...

example one time i had a problem with feeling like a feeling was unreachable\ cant put words to how I was feeling.

my treatment provider said ok so maybe this is a pre verbal. look at how you are sitting. are you sitting straight and tall or are you sitting hunched over, with drawn, are you fidgeting, are you smiling, frowning. this gave me the understanding of how I was feeling in the situation we were discussing. it had nothing to do with being a newborn incapable of communicating I was hungry or in pain, wet and such. it had nothing to do with being an infant of one or two months old when babies learn their first speech of babbles and imitating noises to let someone know they are in pain, being hurt, hungry cold wet... and it had nothing to do with being a toddler of 1 to 3 where children learn to put their sounds, babbles and small words together to form sentences. and the situation with me and my therapist had nothing to do with being 4 on up to adulthood. I Just didnt have the correct words in that moment to describe what I was feeling so we went with it was preverbal communication situation.

my suggestion is talk with your treatment provider. they will explain to you what they meant by the term pre verbal and help you to find ways to work around your pre verbal issue regardless of what the definition is according to your own treatment provider.

I experience preverbal trauma as dissociative and somatic reexperiencing. We discuss the feelings that emerge in the reexperiencing.

Interestingly, I've never linked dreams with the preverbal stuff. They seem much more visceral than symbolic to me (which dreams mostly seem like).

[BayBrony]

This is a big part of my trauma. I practice visualization where I interact with the very small version of me. I experience the trauma from a third person perspective and have built it into a narrative that is now part of my personal.history. giving words to the experiences as my adult self has done a great deal to help me understand my experience and heal from it.
In the beginning it was very confusing and I feared I was making things up. But I have experienced profound healing in my life since I started doing this so.I have come to.believe it is real.

[rainbow8]

My T suspects that I may have had some preverbal trauma. Some of my reactions to T have been weird, like when she suggested, for valid reasons at the time, terminating therapy and not emailing. It made no sense to me that I screamed all the way home in my car after that session. I never scream like that. It scared me!! My feelings about abandonment don't fit with the reality and I don't have words for them. Preverbal experiences are a possible answer.

Echos, I hope you and your T can figure it out together!

[feralkittymom]

My T's take on this for me was that the objective detailed recollection--which would probably never happen-- wasn't necessary to heal from the emotional consequences. That the emotions would have morphed as I grew, that it's the nature of emotional development to incorporate prior emotional experience. So healing the emotions from the experiences I did remember was just as complete as if I'd remembered every day of my life. The "partial" narrative is no less true emotionally than a "complete" narrative. It helped me feel settled and whole, despite huge gaps in memory.

[Out There]

Earlier in my therapy I had feelings that something was behind glass and I could see it but not get to it. The dreams do seem significant. I started to have lucid and precognitive dreams around two years ago that begun accessing the trauma. I work on " body memory " with TRE , with pre verbal trauma we may never remember but still can be worked on.

Thanks so much everyone for sharing your experiences. This is a very new concept for me, because I have always rooted myself in logic and reason (as protection from overwhelming emotion I suppose) so I am having to retrain myself to accept this as something ethereal and not necessarily something I will ever 'know'about in concrete terms, yet something I can heal from anyway. It's scary but fascinating and I really appreciate the insights and experiences you have shared here.