Posted by Dinah on April 28, 2003, at 9:53:06
In reply to Re: Well... (unpleasantly graphic and overdisclosing), posted by Cecilia on April 28, 2003, at 1:59:07
In my case I have a cluster of symptoms that, according to published psychological wisdom, come with sexual or physical abuse. In fact, in all the books I've read (and ok, I've read more than a few - my husband jokes that I'm working on my doctoral thesis) some of my symptoms can *only* be accounted for by ongoing sexual and/or physical abuse. So when I go to a mental health practitioner and tell them what's going on with me, they naturally think abuse.
I guess it's possible. My memories of my life after age 4 1/2 when we moved back to my father are far clearer than the memories of the period we lived on the farm, even though it was just a week or so earlier. The number of memories I have of the farm period is roughly equivilant to the number of memories I had from before we moved to the farm, and I was much younger then. I know from my mom that she worked long hours a long way away and that I was left with my very busy grandma and my grandpa.
But.... Isn't it also possible that people who *act* as if they were abused, have all the disorders that people who were abused have, and yet weren't abused are a challenge to their therapists? A threat, almost, to the way they conceive of certain disorders? Well everyone knows that XXX is caused by YYY. But what if someone has XXX but not YYY? Maybe it's easier for them to believe that YYY must have happened than to rethink their entire diagnostic picture. Not that my therapist has pushed me to recover lost memories or anything. But his attitude is rather disbelieving that nothing worse than what I've told him happened.
I dunno. If we were back a few years, and were schizophrenic or autistic, and told our therapists that our moms were loving and not at all "refrigerator moms" would they have been equally as skeptical?
It's very frustrating. All the research I did on sexual aversion seems to start with finding the reason, for example. But even if there was a reason, I think it's been lost now. So that pretty much leaves desensitization.
poster:Dinah
thread:221574
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20030426/msgs/222878.html