According to my therapist, people do sometimes heal from past trauma without remembering every detail. I find that really hard to believe.
To me it’s like my past is a puzzle. I have maybe half of it done, and most of the pieces are all together on the left side and along the bottom, but there is this big empty space left and a couple puzzle pieces, or thoughts, are stuck up there in that empty space and I can’t figure out how to connect them.
Some random thoughts like rocking back and forth in my room as a kid holding my favorite stuff animal, a white polar bear. I can’t place where it and a couple other random memories all fit into this traumatic past and it’s frustrating. I’ve learned, and am still learning, that memories don’t come back with any regularity or on some timetable. It could be weeks or months or years between memories. Or I might get several in a short period of time. There is no rhyme or reason, no set of events that I can pinpoint to make them happen. It’s totally out of my control and that drives me up a wall.
As an analyzer, that’s about the worst thing you can experience. You can’t make any sense of it. When is a new trigger going to be discovered? How would it fit in, and why is it a trigger? Is the random memory of a piece of this whole puzzle connected to a trigger all the time or not? If not, why isn’t it?
In case you haven’t noticed, I am an over thinker and analyzer, in a BIG way. I will take any situation and run it through my head a million times till I can make sense of it, rationalize it, or look at it from every possible angle. So like I said when you have that kind of mind coupled with Dissociation and Anxiety, just about any situation can be a challenge to work through if I’m not careful.
I don’t know if or when I’ll get a full puzzle put together in my head, but I sure hope so because random memories just stuck in that blank space of the puzzle board are my worst nightmare.
