My mom and I got into a huge fight. I told her I needed some space, I needed to eat, I’d talk later. She kept pushing.

God, I haven’t felt that angry since I was 12. (The insiders think that line makes for a good joke. I guess it is pretty funny but throwing me off what I want to say.) 12 really hated/hates my mom. Just like back then. Back then there would be pictures and “cartoons” of my mom being hurt. Pictures of me then running away. I might have one still. In it she’s yelling at me, I punch her in the face, and run away from home. That drawing is actually pretty comical.

Something, in hindsight, I think was different this time. Well, maybe two things. One, I was very aware of my body and it’s reaction to anger. Two, I could not for the life of me calm down. It’s taken a couple days. I don’t feel the intense rage but I’m still not really speaking to my mom.

I keep looking for Dth (the big DA/nasty introject) but I keep getting this picture of him hurt or “crippled”or something. A lot of the time when I get pictures instead of the actual person it’s a metaphor of some sort.

I know my DA’s were there working. The other two for sure anyway. I don’t usually get rage attacks like that, where I want to hurt someone. In this case I felt really out of control. Lately over all I think I’ve been more angry and snappish with my mom. I’m not entirely sure why, maybe it came on after she reveled some new info about her brother. (ugh). It was pretty confusing.

Later I thought I heard Dth but it was different than his normal hate speech so I wasn’t sure it really was him or who it was. (I feel someone pressing me on that last bit) Something about hating hurt and her hurting me/us/them?

Don’t remember exactly. I just remember that I was writing a stream of consciousness sort of thing. I was writing about how I had later told my mom how I had felt, you know about hurting her, that I had been that angry and she basically said “Whatever, I would have called the police, had a restraining order, and had you removed!” I kept replaying that over and over (still am). That’s when the voice came in about hating her and her hurting us.

I know we’ve been trying to help Dth see the outside world, maybe it’s working (all of a sudden feeling really upset, like crying but can’t figure out what it’s about. Gone mostly now, slipped away.) We put up t.v. screens in his cell and connected them to the body’s eyes and ears. We decided to let him come and go as he pleased after a while, it took time and I’m still not sure we are entirely trusting of him. Maybe, something did change though…

Maybe, he’s on our side now. Maybe.

I’m presently procrastinating studying a chapter on Psychoanalysis lol.  So I guess that’s what it takes to get me to update my blog! haha!  So let me do a quick and dirty run down of my life.

• Went back to school. Studying Psychology. I mean come on I like finding out there are people who are truly nuts (you know all those regular folks) haha just kidding.
• Working part time. I was working two jobs but dropped one because it was driving me insane.
• Ran into some more medical issues. So now I’m officially in the asthma camp.  (had a few bad Fibro flares as well)
• Been working on my diet and now I am back at my regular weight and it’s holding steady even through illnesses (yay!)
• Getting out and about with friends a little more.
• Working hard in therapy.  We’re supposed to start work with some of that icky family crap soon but…I’m kind of dragging my feet. Otherwise doing really well, lots of boundary and grounding type of work.  A few weeks ago I managed to just walk away from my mom as soon as I thought the conversation was going to turn to a particular family member (ugh, see I’m so anxious about it that I can’t even say who even though I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it before in this blog). So I was pretty surprised at myself that I could do it.
• My favorite uncle passed away last month. It’s been really rough for me.  Just kind of opened a whole can of feelings I hadn’t really been aware of or thought could be there.
• Had a rough time through my March anniversary date for the first time in a long time.  Went through a lot of nightmares around that time.
• Things with our DA seem to be going much better. Still scary but, think we are making progress with him…maybe? Our other introject or whatever…not so sure. She popped up a few sessions ago scared me to death, hadn’t heard that voice in so long (I was only semi-aware of her I think when she popped up a few years ago when I was coming into the realization/acceptance that these voices were something more than whatever it was I was passing them off as all my life).
• Lately, been battling some thoughts of SI on and off.  Seems like it hits once or twice a month. Usually it’s very short like a minute or two. I can’t remember the last time any actual harm was done though!
• Finished the EMDR on my drowning incident. It’s now just something that happened. It’s still weird to say that just because I do remember how before that memory was really disturbing to me.  Now…it’s just “Yup, that happened to me when I was little and I was really scared back then but I’m ok now.” I’m not disturbed when I see people drowning/near drowning in films, or watching people swim underwater,read or watch news reports about drowning accidents, etc.

I think that’s about it.  I’m hoping I can figure out some way to get better at putting my thoughts down so hopefully I could update and post some real stuff again.

Went off to my appointment today and while I was looking both ways before crossing the street I thought I saw my grandma (a.k.a grammy – mom’s mom). Which is kinda dumb she’s been dead 17 years this September. I haven’t had an anniversary reaction like this surrounding her in a long time.  All day long I keep thinking I see her but it’s just some other persons grandma.

So that on top of kind of a rough session…I think I just need to go to work and try to get some studying in. Lay off dredging up the news of whats new etc.

Anyway, I’m exhausted and headed to bed. Long day tomorrow!

The Others as Worry Dolls

Update: There are our worry dolls so far. I kind of like them without the faces but dunno. Usually when doing anything with people we don’t do a face.  On these sometimes it smudges (even though it’s permanent ink, it’s hard to do that small. I might redo the Little One doll wasn’t really sure how to do the dress at first. The one on the right is the stand in for S.

Wow! I haven’t written since June?

Well, we are still working on that drowning memory.  It changes each time I go in to work with it.  I don’t want to say it gets better or that it gets easier, I’m not sure it really does if you know what I mean. I think it will always be horrible and scary but just…a regular horrible and scary.  Dunno if that makes any sense…  I guess it’s kind of the difference between burning yourself taking cookies out of the oven and just remembering that one time you burnt yourself taking cookies out of the oven.  My brain is slowly learning that I’m not drowning, it’s just a memory.  I’m actually alive and I’m safe, I made it to the surface again. I’m learning I can leave that memory when ever I want, it’s not as much of a struggle to leave and find reality.  I can choose to picture myself drowning and remember that I was scared but at the same time know my feet are on solid ground in the present.  The terror that was once there lasts only a second if it shows up at all.  Pretty dang cool!

Recently I switched from using the tappers (buzzers) to the light bar (following a light with my eyes) and um…wow! I switched because I realized I was kind of dissociating and avoiding things when it got rough.  There seemed to be more interference and walls too.  It seems better with the light bar.  The last couple sessions though have left me with some rough nights.  On one of these nights I ended up finally meeting another of our fragments.  It’s pretty funny, I’ve had an inkling he was real (that sounds funny I know) but now I know for sure.  For a long time I thought maybe it was just 12 or someone horsing around but it didn’t seem right…  Anyway, I’ll call him the Joker here.  He’s the little announcer guy I hear a lot in various situations.  Sometimes he just makes things entertaining by providing my life, television, and movie watching with a bizarre yet often hilarious running commentary.  Other times he provides insight into my inner life in cryptic sing songy rhymes.  I found out that he was one of the Little One’s pocket people and that’s probably why it took forever to learn of him.  It just happened one night when Little One got scared and out popped Joker to try to interpret and alleviate the situation with a little humor.  To clarify a little, Little One has fragments apparently that she carries around with her.  Some are regular sized people like Slly, I call her an umbrella person since sometimes I see Little One’s dress like a giant umbrella that hides people under it.  Some like Joker are tiny, I guess, and live in the pocket of her dress (I sound like a nut job now! lmao!). It was on of my co-conscious moments so I manage to think of trying to take down notes of what he was saying (I’ve also asked the Others in times past to try to record things for me if I’m not able to. Meh, sometimes it works sometimes it’s just better to do a job yourself if you can lol!). I was reading Tempy’s “Crackers & Juiceboxes” blog and she had some pics of her journal writing posted so I thought maybe in my next post I’d share that one and a few others.

The rest of my nights after therapy have been filled with bizarre and often unsettling dreams. Oh, Therapy! What fun! *sarcasm* Last week was super frustrating because there were two that I can’t quite remember but felt really important.  The one I vaguely remember ended with me being pissed at my dad because it turned out that he knew everything that happened to me and never said anything, never tried to protect me.  Probably close to the truth, I don’t know what he knows though in real life.  Unlike my mom…maybe in the dream it was safer to get upset at my dad than my mom?  Dunno.  Then there was this other one that seemed super important, like it solved every one of my life mysteries!  I remember I woke up completely terrified though.  I remember being completely exhausted, trying to concentrate on how good the cool breeze coming through the window felt so that I wouldn’t fall back into that horrible dream world.  At the same time I kept telling myself to remember this, write it down when I get up.  The next thing I know my drunk neighbor is shouting at his brother “Have a good day! I love You!” at six am and while I was pissed about that I cracked up at the same time.  The dream was totally forgotten at that point.

No therapy this week.  Yay! But boo. haha!

I’m going to try to get a shot of the worry doll people we’ve been slowly working on.  I can’t remember, someone did a blog on those …super cute…and I wanted to link to it but I’ve lost it.  Anyway we got some of these from patterns at work and some searching the internet.  I want to put it up on this post so if it’s not there in a bit, keep checking back! All but one of them is one of The Others and the one that is not…is kind of a temporary stand in.  Hah, that was kind of complicated!

What I really came here to do was to share my first EMDR processing session a little bit.  I don’t want to go into it too much because it’s just too fresh for me and it’s not really finished.  However, if anyone reading this has any questions I really don’t mind so feel free to ask.

We started with something that was “smaller” but ugh after doing it, it doesn’t seem so “small” if you know what I mean.  I guess what I mean is it’s still “small” but reliving it (in a safe way) made it …not so “small”.  I realize a little more that it was a big deal, all the minimizing of it had a big impact on me.  Ok, so what we started with was my memory of my camp swim instructor throwing me off the end of the dock into the deep part of the lake for BEGINNER swim class.  Basically, I nearly drowned and my best guess is that when I resigned myself to death, I floated to the surface instead. I was around 7 years old, first time at sleep away camp.  Never told a soul until a few years ago.

So basically we set up a little plan of action for safety and self-care first before the actual session. Then the actual session came and I almost didn’t want to go (all parts were in agreement that we were going to go through with this all, though) so I made myself/selves a promise that after the session there would be a trip to the bakery just up the road. We settled on using the tappers and the headphones.  Went through a brief recap of the event, brief statements about how it made me feel and how I saw myself because of the event (i.e. I felt I should have died, I felt no one cared, I felt terrified), where in my body I feel anything and what it feels like (mostly my upper body, feels tense, my chest hurts and I have a hard time breathing). My T would have me focus on these things and then stop and have me report what I experienced.

It was pretty damn intense.  I thought I could put on my tough face and not cry (this memory actually turned out to be a big source for that “don’t be a baby” thing) but, I totally broke down.  I won’t lie and say it wasn’t scary…it was but at the same time I felt safe…my parts I don’t think did really but that ended up with some light shed on it. It was because this memory had a lot of the secret keeping elements to it without being the heavy-duty trauma.  The memory also seemed to hold a lot of metaphor for the rest of my journey in all this.  The thought that doing this EMDR is scary and so much is sunk under the surface that we need to let go and let ourselves sink to the bottom so we can reach the top again. I think one of the majorly scary parts was hearing from my “system’s operation” part/s that there’s more than likely going to be what my T calls Blockers popping up.  They showed me a maze with walls popping up right in front of me, making me walk into them.  One of these parts is of course Dth. I was too scared to bring that up then but I’m going to try to mention it next time, I know it is important to get him on our side.  Ultimately, I think he’s the one who can get past the other blockers.  It’s just scary to think there are all these minor/fragment parts I don’t know about. They make me think of little ghoulies and goblins.

We were just wrapping things up when I got one last ‘fright’.  All of a sudden I had a flash of a girl underwater, struggling, thrashing about and then letting out a loud scream that was soon suffocated by the sound proofness of the water.  Almost loud as day I heard a voice say something like this is when Scr was born/first came about.  I guess it scares me some because I’m still just not used to and/or ok with this all being real.  That this is who I am, who we are.  That these things happened and there were ‘consequences’ (not a good word really but…blah) for them.  For just a moment we got Scr to stop and listen to everyone, I tried to give her a candle for her dark ‘cave’, then we put a sound proof booth around the cave and place a microphone with a two-way switch in.  We check in with her, we let her know we aren’t leaving her or ignoring her but, it’s just a little too loud for us…it’s a little too painful to hear sometimes, to sad to see her like that.  We’ll keep working on this and maybe someday we can help her better.

It feels so far away, that session.  I remember bits and pieces, right now I feel like I’m avoiding remembering it.  Afterward we all went to are various safe places, it took some time (with the help of a walk) but in the end I was able to go about my day without much trouble or distress.  I’m not looking forward to my next session lol! I should find some sort of reward for myself again.  I know good stuff is coming out of this, I know to a degree I felt a little ‘lighter’ or something but, ugh! *sigh* I think it’s worth it…just gotta figure out how to keep going at it.

I was sitting there watching this and trying to think of one single meaningful relationship where I really felt that the other person was right there with me.  A relationship where I felt like I was heard and understood, cared about, empathized with, etc.  I suppose I somewhat had that with my Grandmother but I don’t think I had a relationship that really fit the description until High School.  I think I’ve mentioned this relationship before a bit and how much it has impacted the rest of my life.

It’s strange though because I’ve been back in touch with that person and I don’t really feel that way about the relationship anymore.  I’m not entirely sure how I feel but, it’s definitely not the same.  I’ve been really thrown as to what to do about it, if anything at all.  Right now I guess I don’t have much time to worry about it.  I have to many other things going on in my life and I guess thanks to that experience back in High School I know this is not the end of the world if I need to let go.  I think I will always in some way love this person no matter what (and maybe that’s a good thing, maybe a bad thing) but I know this person is not the LAST thing.  I know I am surrounded by people who truly love and care for me & vis versa.

Oh my gosh I’m posting! Yeah, I’m finally getting around to posting again for tonight anyway.  So if anyone is still checking in on this “Hi again!” Things have been so crazy, and super busy for me.  I hardly get a minute and when I do, I try to just take sometime out and not use my brain too much lol!

Anyway, I have a lot on my mind tonight.  It’s been a heck of a day and I just wanted to talk about a couple things while I have a second.  So this might be a triple post night. I’m hoping I’ll get to it all. If not let me lay it out my plans for these three posts and you can feel free (if anyone’s reading this still) to bug me about getting around to posting, if I don’t finish tonight.

So I went to this conference today on trauma and it got me thinking about a few things, then there was this incident between me and someone so that triggered off some shit…

I’m really not sure how this thought about eidetic memory (photographic memory) came up, if it was the conference or something else.  If it was the conference, it wasn’t directly talked about but just something that’s popped up in my head from mulling things over.

Second post was going to be about “Silent Ragers”. Can’t remember if I have posted anything so, this is where I might run out of steam (meaning I might get caught up searching through old tags of mine to see what I’ve talked about if anything already).

Third post is a video that was shown, there was a line in it that really struck me.  I think I’m kind of looking for feedback and discussion on all three of these, so seriously if I get distracted on posting feel free to bug me about finishing my posts if I don’t finish.

Ok, so eidetic memory.  I read a little bit about the subject just now and learned that true total, detailed, accurate, recall is rare if it exists at all. So “photographic memory” isn’t probably the best term but that’s what everyone knows it as. Plus, between this and other articles the real definitions seem to get sketchy for me. I’m curious about the statement in the article that it happens in kids but is rare in adults…so it gets outgrown mostly?  For me this description of seeing things in after image or as a picture is pretty much how things work for me.  I’m known at work for knowing where everything is, that’s because I have a mental image of everything. Sometimes I can’t help it, it just seems to happen (although it may be subconsciously on purpose if that makes sense? Hopefully in a bit when I throw in the trauma reference it might make sense…I hope) and other times I try to do it on purpose.

I have this notebook that I stumbled upon a little while ago that was from one of my trips abroad (probably what brought up this post for the most part, but my memory isn’t that good ha!).  In this notebook are several stories I wrote out, not my own stories but stories from children’s books.  I am almost certain I did not have those books with me to copy from, nor did I find them where I was staying.  So I’ve been wondering “how” they got in that notebook (it was one I bought while over seas, not one I filled and took with me).  I haven’t compared yet but they sound fairly close to the original stories.  I may have read the stories a short while (weeks, months) before my trip and writing out the stories but it was some period of time.  I know for  a long while I could “go in my head” and “read” one of my favorite series of stories, it was a self soothing thing (I did it quite a lot on that trip as well, I did have those books with me though and may have  been consciously or unconsciously trying to recall). I’ve done this on tests where I just “open the text and read the page”. I don’t think it’s word for word accurate but it’s good enough.

I am wondering is a lot of why I can do this comes from that idea of survival.  It was an important skill to have for me growing up.  For one thing my mom has got some OCD tendencies so there were times (still are I should say) where we could catch a scolding for things not going back in exactly the right way.  Another reason this was an important skill had to do with the secrecy that ran around our house, sometimes the only way to get info about what was happening in the family was to sneak around and, or snoop around.  So you had to make sure if you disturb anything, that it went back the right way or else you’re in deep caca! Which leads to the third reason, if you’re doing it to everyone else…it’s probably reasonable to assume you have no privacy either.  That means memorizing how you lay out all you’re stuff and noticing any changes.  Ahh, yes the home filled with a mine field of egg shells.

I found myself looking for online tests of eidetic memory or photographic memory but didn’t expect to find much reliable.  It was mostly just fun tests that who knows how accurate anything is anyway.  While I was playing around with the tests I noticed (and this is where my conference helped out) how I was feeling, which was a little anxious. I wondered if all this had any link to my test anxiety.  I was recalling how in elementary school my testing for my learning disability was much like some of these tests.  I think they are fun tests but somewhere in the back of my head I’m terrified about failing.  It reminds me of those feelings of “what if I fail to recall where everything goes in this house/room/whatever”. Sort of interesting.  At the same time though I remember playing many hours of the game “Memory” with my dad.  Probably one thing that did get some bonding time between us, one thing I knew he was really proud of me (yes, to brag but still).  He just loved to “test” me and I loved to see how fast I could go.

This is one of those tests (this one I wasn’t anxious about really at all, I won’t post the one that made me really anxious).  I’m kind of curious how other people do at it.  Visual-photographic memory test.  I don’t know if you can link to the result at all or not, I think I clicked out of my link (suppose I could just fill out the form again. I still recall all the answers hehe!). I mean, you know, self reporting and all…pfft.  I’m curious about my non-trauma friends too.  Just for the hell of it.

Do any other survivors have experiences with memory abilities? Anyone shed any more info on the subject for me? Anyone ever been tested or any info on that? Anyone heard of a link between trauma and memory abilities (I haven’t looked around yet)?

Ok, I’m running out of steam and I need to take a shower. *Cross fingers* that I get to those other two posts at some point tomorrow or the weekend.  Bug me, about it if you wish.

I have this huge to do list and only a few things are getting done.  Um…forgot where I was going with that.  I’m so easy to distracted these days.

I have a cold … again.  So, I don’t feel much like writing right now.  I’m just kind of sitting here horsing around with various things and every few minutes zoning out.

It’s kind of been a rough week and I’m just kind of trying to keep everyone settled.  It’s going surprisingly well, there are still short moments when I wonder if I might lose “my grip” but…hasn’t happened.

Ugh I’m getting sleepy!