Posted by happyflower on September 15, 2006, at 18:16:01
In reply to Trauma and forgetting? **trigger**, posted by llrrrpp on September 15, 2006, at 16:37:05
Wow llrrrpp you are going through some heavy stuff. From what I have learned in school is that normally you remember tramatic events VERY WELL, so well that you can't forget them if you wanted to.
But in some extreme cases you can disassociate trauma. There is a big controvery in Pysch right now about surpressed memories and they think many people have been over dianognosed with that, in fact they could be just in denial or avoidence. (this is not exactly my view, but what I am being taught in school by 2 different Prof. so far)
I asked my T about this, because after EMDR, I did remember some horrific things that I didn't remember before. Even this what happened to me after EMDR is very rare. My T said it has only happened to 1 other person, and he has done it on over 300 people in the last 10 years.
Then there was my recent burn accident where I remembered some child abuse also.
My T now believes that I did dissociate when I was younger and he believes this due to the severeness of the abuse(mental and physcial) and the habitual amount that it has happened to me. Does he think there might be more memories that I have forgotten, well he says maybe there is , maybe there isn't. We are going to go deeper in this in the future, so it is very scary from me. But I think I feel I can trust him more than ever, and I feel more comfortable with him that I did when we started with this stuff.
I don't know what kind of trauma you do remember, (for me I remembered my brother being abused, and the emotional abuse, but I didn' t remember being pysically abused) So it is possiable that you have surpressed something I think since you do have memories of some trama happening. I know I lost my best friend when her parents wouldn't allow her to come to my house again. ( I didn't know there was anything wrong)
But I too my whole life have felt I had to keep going, I had to put this stuff out of my head, if not I wouldn't have been able to succeed in what I have in my life. My brother wasn't able to do this and he is really bad shape. We are talking homeless, being a drug dealer and according to my T some major personality disorders. My T doesn't believe I have any disorder. So the fact that we might have dissociated when we were younger was a good thing because I was too young to deal with the severeness of it, If I didn't disassoicate I might have ended up like my brother. But one thing my prof. said today is that your reactions to trauma isn't what is abnormal, it is the trauma that is. That made me feel good.
poster:happyflower
thread:686272
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060911/msgs/686307.html