Long Time Podcast Listener - First Time Post - Incest

[Renee]

Hi. I have been going through EMDR for Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome following the loss of my daughter in a car accident - believe it or not 30 years ago. Now during this process I have done well, but now we get to the root of who I am and I FEAR and in in TERROR that my father violated me and my sister as children. You would think that facing the loss of my daughter in a car accident would be my worst fear. It was hard to work through that with EMDR, but now I am terrified as we get to this other issue and I might have to just pass on it? I don't think that I can do it. I have no memory of anything. I have wierd events that happened, and things that would make sense that this is what happened, but I really don't know and maybe I don't want to know? My father was alcoholic and full of rage. He would beat us with the belt for no reason and often when we needed comforting, instead he would hit and be so angry. I never thought that he had done any touching until now. I don't understand how or if my mind blocked this out. I am confused. As an adult I learned that he was accused 3 times of touching children or molesting them. He is dead now. He is gone. But as an adult and learning about these molestations that I have no doubt that happened, other things are brought to mind. For instance. Waking up in the middle of the night "hurting down there" and telling my mom and she would give me a warm bath with baking soda, then I would feel better and go back to sleep. When I brought this up to my therapist she said "why would you be asleep" and I thought OHH, yeah why WOULD i be asleep and then suddenly pain? I had terribly painful periods through my life until a hysterectomy at an early age - I have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue and severe back problem. I am in pain all of the time. Well, I never looked any of this up before but when I do I see that all of the physical symptoms that I have are often the same as incest survivors. I honestly don't know, because I cannot remember ANY of it. I guess I need to find out how brains work because I cannot understand how a child can completely block out something like that as if it never happened. At this point I am not going to pursue this subject with my therapist. I am going to tell her I cannot do it. I am petrified. WHY? Thanks for listening Maybe this should not be under "Introduce Yourself Here" But hey this is my first post and I figured out how to get here. Thanks

[tentickles]

Renee,

It's very courageous to have shared this here, and I applaud your bravery as you unpack some very difficult feelings. It's PERFECT for the introduction section, in my opinion! This is a place where we don't have to suppress the feelings and thoughts that we are used to suppressing. The anonymity makes it safe, so we can sometimes get real insight by hearing ourselves describe our challenges in this context. I hope that you find this to be true for you. It's also important to connect and feel like someone is "hearing", so I wanted to let you know that you are coming through loud and clear.

I believe that a good therapist will understand how you might not be ready, right now, to go any further down the road of examining whether you were abused as a child. I also believe that a good therapist will try to help you to get ready, and will be there to help you when you are ready. There's no one-size-fits-all rules, as far as I know, that you have to face everything right away. You've been successfully not facing it for decades already, so a few more days or weeks or months to gather your strength and feel prepared is perfectly reasonable in my opinion. Please take the time you need, and please don't decide you will NEVER go there... just know that it's okay not to go there today, and it's also okay to go there when the time comes that you are willing to do so. Does that make sense? I hope so.

From my own experience, it seems that when something I've suppressed and denied for so long that I effectively "disappeared" it starts demanding my attention again... well... it's horribly uncomfortable and I want to flee, but it's also probably finally filtering to the surface because on some level I *am* ready to re-examine it. Or at least I'm ready to be ready. The very fact that it's showing up might be a signal that very soon I am going to be able to take this on and figure out how to keep it from poisoning me subconsciously. Maybe this is true for you too.

I think I understand how brains can block something out so it seems to never have happened. I do it myself, to varying degrees, all the time. Nobody can remember EVERYTHING, there just isn't enough space for all that information, and most of it isn't important to our survival anyhow. If enough trauma happens, the brain tries to protect us by deleting the memories, and if the trauma is bad enough, the deletion has to be extra strong to overcome it. I certainly dissociate when I am fearful enough. Some people dissociate so much that they develop alternate personalities to cope with different aspects of their lives. It makes perfect sense to me actually.

Some of my life history contains stuff that I know must sound to other people like I was traumatized and abused. Some of it I absolutely agree was abusive (my ex-husband choking me, kicking me in the ribs and head, etc.), and some of it I absolutely don't agree was abusive (the man I lost my virginity to, when I was sixteen, was forty at the time). In the final analysis, my perception of reality is my truth, even if it's not shared by others, and I have to feel authentic about my own life, not live up to somebody else's idea of how I should label or define myself.

It's SO GOOD that EMDR has been helpful to you in re-processing the loss of your child. I am SO GLAD there is relief, and that you are finding it. That gives me hope that I will eventually be able to find a mental health practitioner who provides EMDR to help me, too. I want to respond to what is happening now, rather than what has happened before. I feel like I'm full of old mechanisms that used to provide comfort, but now just get in the way, and I don't have any other tools to use when I'm hurt or scared so I keep using the same crappy old broken stuff that doesn't work. It sounds like you and a lot of other people find EMDR very effective, so that's something I look forward to incorporating.

I hope you'll stay in touch here and let us know how things unfold.