Every once in a while I experience something that is very unpleasant and confusing, and I am wondering if others out there experience something similar…
It only happens when I am experiencing an extreme amount of stress and I think that I need to be under stress for a period of time before it will happen. I am then deeply triggered by something and connect strongly with memories from my childhood. At that point, the me who has been developing an understanding of how to care for myself gets lost and is no where to be found. I become more and more distressed and drawn ever more deeply into feeling/memory states. I kind of know that I should be able to care for myself and that there are things that I have learned that will help me to ground and start to extricate myself from those states, but I cannot even begin to puzzle out what those skills might be. I tend to draw inward and isolate myself from sources of help.
It happened this evening as strongly as I can remember it ever happening before. This time, rather than being in a single memory state, I experienced myself as bouncing between different ages. Even though I reached out to Mama Bear, it was almost impossible for me to communicate, which made it difficult for her to help me. I felt trapped within a cage of confusion and pain, and I couldn’t manage to reach through the bars in order to get the help that I needed in order to get out. She asked me what I needed and the response that I got was that I needed to disappear. It didn’t even occur to me to tell her that was my response, instead I acted out trying to disappear and told her that I needed to get off the phone.
Unfortunately, what I needed to disappear from wasn’t Mama Bear, but it was something that I carried inside, so instead I was left alone with it. And I felt tossed between so many different fragments of what seemed to be memories. And it was highly distressing for me to experience myself being tormented by the memories fragments. Sometimes there were images, sometimes there were sensations, and sometimes my body just acted out something and all I was aware of was a sense of desperation and wanting to escape. When I experience myself at different ages, my sense of my body changes and in particular I perceive my hands changing size to what would have been appropriate for that age. I was appalled when I realized just how small my hands were sometimes today and I felt like I just wanted to scream and crawl into a corner to hide. And through all of this, I was unable to do any of the things that would normally help me draw back from being so thoroughly triggered, not because I couldn’t figure out how to make the coping skills work, but because I had forgotten that any of those skills existed.
It is frightening to me when it seems like I lose my connection to the most functional part of me, and I tend to panic, however that panic only serves to reinforce the distressed state that I am already in. And did I ever panic tonight! Eventually, I responded to a message that Mama Bear had sent and told her how badly I was being triggered and how all of the memory fragments were just too much to deal with.
And somehow that action seemed to help me to break out of feeling frozen in a helpless place. I started to move and fairly soon I was able to drag myself out of bed and I started to reengage with my normal life. And I slowly started to connect with the part of me that is most functional and capable.
One of the things that disturbs me the most about all of this is that I am used to thinking of the memory states as parts, but I had been thinking of my main self as being that more functional self. Now I don’t think that it is. I think that I have built this more functional self over time and it is generally engaged, but some times it is simply gone. So who am I? I don’t know the answer to that question, and I am trying to not be frightened by the lack of understanding. After all, I can feel that I am really here and that I am connected to all of me, more or less. But I am experiencing a bit of a crisis of identity at the moment.
Cat,
It’s not that you’re functional, integrated self, whom you know yourself to be, isn’t real or doesn’t exist, you’re just a normal human being overwhelmed with a traumatic memory. Several things are happening that are physiology based. Trauma memories are stored differently than “normal” biographical memories; they believe they’re even stored in another part of the brain. Because, by it’s definition, trauma is overwhelming, the memory is not processed, understood and integrated into your sense of self. So when you remember, this is a split off part of you that existed BEFORE the whole person you are now and the emotion is at an intensity level that feels to your body as if you are now EXPERIENCING the memory rather than remembering. So you are remembering, way too vividly, feeling terrified, isolated and powerless to do anything but endure. So why aren’t you applying your new, hard fought for skills? That level of terror in your nervous system kicks your amygdala into high gear, and it floods your frontal cortex with hormones to take it “offline” so when it screams RUN, you don’t argue. The connections running from your amygdala to your frontal lobe are like six lane highways, while the connections back are very small dirt roads; the limbic system tends to dominate. Your ability to think is literally being physically compromised.
So when you’re ability to think is being severely affected, you do in effect, “lose” yourself. Add to this that when stressed, we fall back on our oldest most ingrained coping strategies (older, stronger, more well worn neural pathways).
So yes, it feels, very strongly, that your self disappears (I have felt this and know how horrible it can feel) but its a feeling, a temporary condition, not a reflection of reality. Much the same way that a person suffering from the delirium of a high fever is once again their lucid self when the fever is gone, you return to yourself when not flooded with these memories.
“When you’re going through hell, keep going” to quote Winston Churchill. As you process and integrate these memories, they are changed from traumatic memories to biographical ones. Still not wonderful to have mind you, but robbed of the immediacy which kicks off your limbic system so that you won’t lose your sense of self or skills so strongly. It’s such a slow process, where you gain more control in such small increments, that progress can be imperceptible (which can be extremely frustrating) but someday you’ll look back and be amazed at how far you’ve come and how much energy has been freed up for other endeavors. You are doing fantastic work, and have a really wonderful therapist, it’s just that healing from long term childhood trauma is a hellish process. You have to trust to the process, even when it doesn’t feel like you’re going anywhere or even that you’re losing ground. Just take what came up back to Mama Bear and keep talking about it. You’re doing much better than you can see, or feel, right now.
I hope your Christmas is filled with peace, and joy, and the love of the family you have managed to build for yourself now. Love, AG
Thank you, AG! I have already learned much of what you wrote, but it was much appreciated to have a reminder of everything that you said. Reading it all put together in a different way from how I usually here it or have read it was very helpful to me, and even though I am doing better today, I’m still not at the point where I was going to remember those complexities on my own.
It is astonishing what bizarre experiences our brain gives to us, isn’t it? That question of what is real and what only feels real is one that I struggle with a lot. I am so aware that we have to rely on how we perceive things and yet those perceptions can be terribly distorted by both internal and external factors. And when you factor memory in to the equation, it becomes even more difficult to determine what is “real.”
Yesterday was a pretty miserable day for me and I let myself get freaked out. I remember from when I was talking with Mama Bear last night, she asked me, “What do you have going on in your life right now?” I snorted and she responded, “Exactly!” There are a lot of stressful changes going on right now, and major life changes have an element of threat to them, even if they are welcomed. I need to remember that in the initial stages, the brain reacts to any sort of a threat in the same way. And, as you said, those neural pathways are well worn going from feeling threatened to having a trauma response.
I am working on following Mama Bear’s advice and taking regular breaks in my day to ground, be mindful, and generally orient myself to the here and now. Hopefully doing that can keep me on a more even keel.
Wishing you a warm and loving Christmas with the people you care the most about!
I’m sorry things are so hard for you today. Thinking of you xo
It is incredibly hard to keep a functional me going. That is what made us lose our job. I absolutely love what AG has written and couldn’t put it better myself. Try not to be so hard on yourself; even people who haven’t been through such extreme trauma falls apart at times xx