12/28/2023 0 Comments Telling my story of abuse![]() You may not realize it, but you already have a story about what happened to you. Then I need to return to my usual life and my ongoing healing work." I need to take care of myself until I have regained my ability to function. I can usually recover from this fairly quickly, but not immediately. Until I finish this work, I will have periods of time where I become gravely frightened all over again and am unable to live my life in the way I'd like to. I have not yet recovered from this, but I'm working on it. "Some years ago, a bad thing happened to me, and I was terribly frightened and hurt by it. You should start with a very simple one - something like this: This basically involves your constructing a story. You must learn what actually happened to you. Two things have to happen, if you are to bring about this engagement and then successfully resolve your highly distressing secondary shame reaction. A key part of this is becoming a better storyteller, as you will see. To make this happen you will need to correct how you think about yourself, and from that will come corrections in how you feel. I want to propose that working on resolving this secondary reaction to the primary problem of triggered functional breakdowns in the midst of life is an essential part of your healing. This is especially a problem with DID (think of it as a kind of super-PTSD), where shame issues and dynamics tend to be a Really Big Deal. Now, we know this is entirely irrational, but the feelings are very real, and they are hard to avoid. People tend to feel defective, and at fault. There are many things that are truly awful about such situations, but one of the worst is the feelings of shame that seem always to follow such episodes. He became almost unable to function, and felt absolutely terrible because there were people present who surely had no idea what was happening. Another person I like and respect recently encountered a massive trigger, entirely unexpectedly, while out for a social evening with family. One person I knew and worked with almost went to prison, because of violent defensive behaviors that were triggered by a sense of extreme threat, when she felt abandoned by an intimate. Triggered breakdowns in social situations can have serious consequences. So, you will bewilder and maybe even frighten people a certain amount of the time. ![]() The real problem here is that you can't avoid all triggers. We both know you want this not to happen, but, as is surely obvious to us, you have little or no choice in the matter, other than to avoid triggers to the extent that you know them and can anticipate them. If you are living with unresolved trauma memory, whether or not it's posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or dissociative identity disorder (DID), you will almost surely bewilder people some of the time. ![]()
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