[Confused213]

Sorry I'm posting so much lately for the most petty reasons.
I just have a LOT of questions.

So, for the past 3 months, I have felt delusional and insane.
This is because I honestly don't know if anything happened to me as a kid.
I've had vague flashes of suggestive things and nightmares that I used to have when I was really young.

So, as I've been trying to sort out all of this, I've been asking myself, did something happen to me? Is it all in my imagination? , with no luck of an answer.

All I've been left with is anxiety and fearfulness of making a mistake or believing the wrong reality.

So now my question is, is it so bad just to drop it? Forget that there was ever any confusion at all? Stop digging? Be okay with not knowing and don't even think about there being something to know?

I ask because "coping" has left me even more emotionally handicapped and I see no answer to my questions of abuse at the end of this dark and narrow tunnel.
For every reason that leads me to believe that something happened, there's another that says I'm not a valid judge of what did or didn't happen. (And vice versa)

What do you all think I should do?

Thanks again

[kaliope]

i know what physical and emotional abuse happened to me as a child and there are possibilities, lots of signs of other stuff having happened. i dug for years trying to uncover the mysteries. my ptsd was off the charts. i could barely function while trying to discover what happened to me. so i stopped. i just accepted that something happened. i didnt need to know what. my mind would let me know when it was safe, when i was ready to handle it. but i had sent myself to the hospital trying to discover. what good did that do for me? for my life. so i stopped looking and decided to just accept i didnt need to know anything more than i had been abused and i needed to get on with healing my life. so that became my mission. i didnt need to know the gory details. i just had to work on functioning again, managing my emotions. i am better now. i still dont know what happened to me but i dont care any more. i function great in the world and dont let much hold me back anymore and that is what i care about. i have left the past behind me. there is nothing i desire from it.

[shezbut]

For me, I needed to face my memories ~ rather than continuing to repress them. Something seemingly innocent and loving would always trigger this intense feeling of shame and self-hate. I had to face it. Because my running from it sure wasn't helping me!

Going in for private T and group DBT is what I needed to help me work through my emotions and memories. I'm still working on it...

[growlithing]

None of these questions are petty. I can remember being where you are. It's really REALLY unpleasant and my heart goes out to you.

I think forgetting about a memory has good and horrible outcomes at the same time. The horrible ones are obviously what you are experiencing right now, but forgetting did help me get through my childhood.

To be honest, it took me a little over a year to come to terms with and define what my memories are to an 80% level. I got through it by obsessively googling signs of abuse, definitions of abuse, signs of lost memories, odds of a false memory of abuse (they are VERY unlikely) etc. I then just constantly needed to hear my T tell me that what my abusers did was wrong and I needed to tell some of my closest friends about it just to get more opinions. I still sometimes fall back into briefly doubting my memories and my understanding of the word "abuse" but it is so much better and easier now. I hope you can figure this out within good time.

[tealBumblebee]

Hey there. =] My first therapy session, I brought up how I have minimal memories of anything prior to 6th grade. (Literally ~10 memories, all partial and minimal such as sitting on the steps watching christmas presents get wrapped, or writing a note saying i wish I was dead and putting it under my mothers pillow).

She explained that forgetting things/blocking things out of memory is a coping mechanism. I don't personally think it is a negative one, but it does make it hard to identify who you are if you have no memory of where you come from/what you've been through.

However, I don't think its good to just "drop" it either. T often says that those feelings are pushed aside, and just layered until their no longer seen on the surface. And it builds a wall of sorts that has to be broken before it can be healed. =] Just my opinion.

[velcro003]

Originally Posted by tealBumblebee

Hey there. =] My first therapy session, I brought up how I have minimal memories of anything prior to 6th grade. (Literally ~10 memories, all partial and minimal such as sitting on the steps watching christmas presents get wrapped, or writing a note saying i wish I was dead and putting it under my mothers pillow).

She explained that forgetting things/blocking things out of memory is a coping mechanism. I don't personally think it is a negative one, but it does make it hard to identify who you are if you have no memory of where you come from/what you've been through.

However, I don't think its good to just "drop" it either. T often says that those feelings are pushed aside, and just layered until their no longer seen on ithe surface. And it builds a wall of sorts that has to be broken before it can be healed. =] Just my opinion.

Did you work through those un-remembered years? I have this same issus and it drives me craaazzyy! I have a handful of memories from abt age 4 (when my bro was born), through 5th grade. When i moved and stayed in the same school in the middle of 5th grade, its like my memory just turned on. I still have a notoriously bad memory, and so does my mom- so maybe all of that is genetic, and there needs to be no reason for me to worry?

[tinyrabbit]

No need to apologise. I'm in pretty much the same boat (I remember a few things but there's more, and I don't know how much more there is or what it is) and it is maddening.

I think there are different kinds of coping. There's the kind where you pretend nothing happened, squash it back down and try to carry on regardless, which doesn't work because it keeps coming out in different ways.

Or you can acknowledge that you're in pain, and you don't know why right now, but you need to heal. That alone has made a big difference to me: allowing myself to see that, whatever the reasons, I have been hurt (all the signs are there) and it is okay to acknowledge that.

I think you are a valid judge of how you feel. If you feel hurt, if you feel wounded, nobody can tell you otherwise. I totally understand what it's like - I have the same issues with feeling delusional, insane, etc.

Being in therapy has helped because I've started to see all the objective signs that things were not okay in the past. I've started to discover how many of my thought patterns are not normal. For example, I thought everyone felt guilty and apologised when they were upset and needed to talk to a friend, but my T says not.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that, if someone has a head injury, you don't need to know how they got it to see that they are hurt. Same applies here. If you feel you have been hurt, you are absolutely a valid judge of that.