Somerset Survivors

Its rather strange really. When I disclosed the abuse I suffered to the police, and social services before them, I was scared that talking about it would trigger me and I would breakdown. If not right there and then then certainly later. But it didn’t happen.

I was able to talk about it, to given them the details I could remember and answer their question without any problem. Almost as if I was telling them about something that happened to somebody else.

And it is that feeling of detachment that explains it I think. The abuse its self has been so well compartmentalised from me that all I can do is to relate to it in a disassociated way. I think that this was possible because the abuse was time limited in that it only happened either once or a couple of times, to be fair Im not sure which!

But the rejection and emotional dissociation that I experienced from my parent leading up to the abuse and the emotional manipulation and threats after were much more long term, indeed they formed the majority of my formative years so maybe that explains why as soon as I try to talk about them, even to a therapist, I totally break down. And its interesting that what I feel as an emotional storm with very little structure or discernible cause he has described as

‘Classic trauma response. Displaying extreme fear, withdrawn into yourself and a self-protective posture’

I didn’t expect this reaction, and most certainly not to be so violent and frightening. It was not just frightening to the little boy, and I was feeling his fear, I was back there. But it was frightening, terrifying, to me as an adult.

The experiences terrify me and its more than simply my terror or the inner little boy’s terror is almost like one terror is multiplied by the other. The little me’s terror and overlying that the terror I feel now as an adult.

After so many years of denying, to myself, what had happened to me, the abuse both sexual and emotional I was, am, totally unprepared for these feelings. I have no coping strategies and no way of dealing with it apart from pushing it all back down again into my subconscious.

But now they have been set free I can feel them, I can feel them even now. I can feel them every waking moment.

I know that this pushing them down, denying them expression can’t go on, it isn’t even a medium term solution but to tell the truth I have no idea what so ever how to manage them and even the therapist has said that this is way outside his experience and expertise!

One of the impacts of child hood abuse is that the child will often need to disassociate from the experiences he, or she, has faced.

This can result in being unable to remember specific instances of the abuse or, as In my case, a more general inability to remember much of the childhood at all. These memories are locked away an frozen in time. They are never processed, never integrated and put into a proper context.

But it is not just memories that get frozen. In a way, it is the child, memories, experiences his whole being that is frozen in time. For the IT literate among you it is like taking a snapshot of a running system, or perhaps taking a 3D hologram snapshot of the child. One that not only captures the whole image of the child but also captures his thoughts, feelings and fears and freezes it in place.

Over time around that frozen core the adult forms. New experiences and memories overlay the inner child and these memories, skills and experiences often suffice to allow the adult to operate in what appears to be a ‘normal’ way.

The adult part of the person can accept adult experiences and problems and react in an ‘adult’ way. The day to day life of the adult survivor doesn’t seem to need to access the inner child, the adult crust built up over the years processes the experiences its self.

Read more »