Posted by Daisym on August 20, 2006, at 0:54:40
In reply to Re: Confused and update on hypnotist, posted by Estella on August 19, 2006, at 22:13:27
I probably shouldn't speak for Antigua but I think her main point keeps getting lost in the discussion.
She isn't saying she doesn't remember being sexually abused. She is clear that she was and it was her dad who abused her. She is also clear that she loved her father and that there are conflicting feelings within her. What she has said over and over is that she has a "tip of her tongue" feeling that is driving her crazy and she would like to access whatever it is that pricks at her just below the surface. It might be an event with her dad she forgot...it might be something else. But she wants to get a clearer picture of her past.
I don't know why but there is a need to process traumatic events IN DETAIL, over and over again, by most human beings. Good trauma and bad trauma. I think anyone who has ever been in a room full of women with children has noticed that eventually, somehow, women begin to tell each other their birth stories -- in detail. This is a huge traumatic event, loaded with emotion, which blurs the details somehow. But there is this innate need to recapture those details, to understand intellectually what our body remembers.
I've been studying neurobiology this year and there are PET scans that show that traumatic memory is NOT stored the way other memories are stored. And what we know is changing at a fast and furious rate. So what we think today will be different tomorrow.
All that said, I completely understand the need to understand your own history and figure out how to have a coherent narrative of what happened to you. The "truth" here isn't for a court case or a confrontation (since he's dead). It is for her inner peace.
poster:Daisym
thread:677710
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060808/msgs/678352.html