Trauma

(Namespace: functioning)

My system, Abyss, was created through childhood trauma that I don't remember. Some adulthood trauma has also been mixed in there, since I retained the dissociative mechanisms as a maladaptive coping skill later into life.

I know the trauma happened partly because of a small and loose handful of facts, but mostly because of an abundance of nightmares and aftermath symptoms.

I believe I suffered the following traumatic experiences in childhood, but I do not remember them, at least not in my waking life: It's my shaky understanding, largely reconstituted from sparse and abstract fragments of memories, that my father…

• violently sexually assaulted me at home at least once;
• repeatedly molested me in a gentler manner both at home and at outings;
• at least once smuggled me out of the house in a suitcase to share with his friends;
• and may have also molested me during supervised visitation.

I know I suffered the following traumatic experiences in childhood, as I do remember them:

• I was bullied extensively throughout all of elementary and middle school, but don't remember most of it;
• my mother yelled at me a lot and made me feel worthless and suicidal—although in spite of that, I know she loved me very deeply, and was the person I could come closest in the world to being able to trust, and was not at fault but simply doing her best to cope with an unfair situation.

It was also traumatic for me when my mother passed away unexpectedly in my early adulthood. That's different of course. Everyone has to face that at some point in their life. I should have been able to handle it better than I did. But I can't un-have the reaction I had.

My mother and father had always had a very difficult relationship. He was struggling with addiction. He would verbally and I believe also physically abuse her. She would argue back just as viciously, but I don't think she ever hit him back. He also cheated on her with several other women, including at least one he conceived another child with.

When I was four years old, I woke up one morning, fog-brained and emotionally numb, yet crying my eyes out for some reason I didn't understand, and found I had no memory of anything that had ever happened in my life prior to that point. I went and played with some toys but couldn't stop crying. My mother sat me down on a stool and interrogated me as to why I was so upset, and I found myself telling a story I didn't recognize. “He peed on my tummy.” I was able to elaborate to some extent and tell my mother I was referring to my father. The entire time I was speaking, I didn't know where the words were coming from. I wasn't intentionally fabricating them, but I didn't remember what I was talking about, either. They were just spilling out of my mouth, and I had no ability to control their content.

My mother has told me that at that time, she examined me intimately for evidence of anything he had done. She did find evidence, but it was inconclusive: namely, noticeable gaping. She has also told me that the night before, she fell asleep at the dining table, and woke up with an awful headache, and suspected my father had spiked her drink. She has also told me that he used to regularly have untrustworthy friends over who were known domestic abusers and/or cheaters, and she felt a need to try to protect me from contact with them, and he would try to negotiate with her to get me out of the house to go see them or get me alone in a room with them. None of this is absolute proof, but taken together, it strikes me as great cause for suspicion.

CPS dismissed our criminal case due to insufficient evidence to prosecute, but we brought civil charges, and the evidence, whatever it may have been, was strong enough for preponderance. Accordingly, we were able to win a restraining order and a child support agreement.

I have treatment-resistant depression, EDNOS, recurring nightmares, and, most tellingly, anxiety attacks and intense crying spells that happen when I think about or engage with the sorts of things that theoretically would probably remind me of my trauma if I remembered it. (Obviously there is of course also the amnesia itself.)

The most prominent recurring symbol in my nightmares is a shadowy figure representing my father.

Nightmares I've had about him, not exhaustive:

• I tried to leave the house, and he stood across the way and stared at me, freezing me in place and making me unable to leave. Every time I blinked, he would suddenly be closer.
• He proposed to me. On what was to be the day of our wedding, he took me to a featureless white room. The door disappeared. Everything froze, and suddenly I was on the floor with his hands around my throat. The room shook and started turning red, and though he was not moving his lips, I could hear him speaking directly into my mind. I couldn't make out what he was saying because the voice was pitched-down and distorted.
• His face stared up at me from inside a toilet bowl.

Waking nightmare-like occurrences:

• There have been several times I was falling asleep and thought I saw his face in the texture of the dried paint on the walls or ceiling.
• There have been several times I've woken up in the middle of the night with sleep paralysis and seen him standing over my bed and watching me.
• I used to have a phobia of being alone in a room. My eyes would fix on the door. If it was open, I would be paralyzed with fear about who would be the next person to walk in or walk by. If it was closed, I would be paralyzed with fear about who would be the next person to open it. I think, on some level, I was always expecting it to be him, come back to abuse me again.

Mannequins have frequently appeared in a few recurring nightmares:

• I used to dream about a whole city where everyone was a mannequin. You would only know when they would turn around to look at you. I went to that city with my mother. I don't quite remember the rest of the dream well enough to describe it, but from the feelings I remember, it seems clear to me this dream symbolized the disorganized attachment I experienced with my mother.
• I used to dream that I was being taken somewhere in the car and would be trying to hold a conversation with the driver, but the driver would not respond, and then I would discover they were actually a mannequin. Then the car would crash or fall off a cliff because no one was actually driving.

I used to dream often about an abandoned elementary school where a pulsating black mass would chase me through the halls and playgrounds. I believe these dreams symbolized the bullying I endured.

I had a dream that I was digging through a suitcase on the bed with my mother and looking for a pill bottle. We found the pill bottle, expecting it to incriminate my father. Instead, the name we found on it was that of the person who ran the daycare(?)

The dream then rewound to what I was to understand was an earlier point in time. A strange man had the same suitcase laid out on the same bed. He opened it, and I was curled up inside, naked, bruised, and awake but unresponsive. He lifted me out of the suitcase and lay me sprawled out on his bed.

I was allowed semantic understanding, but not actually shown, that the way I had been put into that suitcase in the first place was this: Another man, maybe the same one, maybe not, maybe my father, maybe not, had beaten me to convince me to take a pill misleadingly offered to me as pain medication. “Take your medicine, little Jaime. It will make all that pain go away.” The actual purpose was to drug me into a pseudocatatonic state to make me pliable and quiet so I could be loaded into the suitcase and smuggled out of the house without raising suspicion.

I had a dream that I was in a hotel-like bedroom with an integrated bathroom. I was a child, in this dream, as with the others. I lay naked on the bed. The bathroom door was open to encourage me to watch as an unfamiliar man showered inside, preparing himself to join me. I looked away from him and down over my bare thighs. In the left, I felt excitement to be loved and wanted again. In the right, I felt terror, knowing from experience the violation it would cost.

In this dream, I saw Singer in an unlit room in a cabin. She was sitting against the wall, with her stuffed rabbit by her side. I crouched down across from her and listened to what she had to say.

All of it was real. You think you have it bad now just with what you've had to remember so far? You couldn't even imagine what I remember. We don't have the luxury of doubting it.

In this dream, my father—as himself, not as the shadowy figure that normally represents him—hosted me at his house to have sex with me in the living room on an air mattress. I didn't want to, but I went along with it anyway because I felt powerless to refuse, and politely made sure it didn't show through at all that I didn't like it. As he was having his way with me yet again, he praised me for my obedience, telling me he was so glad I had finally realized none of it had ever happened—including what we were doing at that very moment(!?)—and he was an innocent man and I had been brainwashed against him.

The brainwashing accusation is one he frequently made in real life, but it's completely impossible it could have happened the way he claimed.

My father would frequently appeal to the notion of “false memory syndrome,” claiming my memories of what he did had been implanted by therapists. This is absolutely impossible for several reasons:

• The concept of false memory syndrome is scientifically discredited. Granted, so is the concept of recovered memory therapy, but…
• At the time he would claim that, I didn't have any consciously-accessible memories of what he did. I could not have been brainwashed to believe an implanted memory was actually recovered, if as far as I was concerned, there simply wasn't a memory there at all, false or otherwise.
• Despite that, on that morning back when I was four years old, I somehow found myself in extreme distress, and was able to tell my mother what he did while actively forgetting it—before I had ever been in therapy. There was no opportunity for a therapist to implant a memory.
• And I know I was telling her something I believed to be true while actively forgetting it at the same time, and not just making something up, because I do consciously remember, and have always consciously remembered, exactly how it felt to try to tell her. It felt like forgetting as opposed to lying. I may have gone on to lie to myself that I had lied, but that doesn't mean I actually did lie to begin with.
• My mother herself also could not have implanted or coached my telling her the memory, because, while it is true that she was interrogating me coercively as to why I was in such distress, I consciously remember that I was the first party to the conversation to bring up the fact that my distress was because something had been done to me. I was also the first party to bring up the connection to my father, as well as the specific details of the abuse. I remember with absolute clarity and certainty, and have always remembered with absolute clarity and certainty, that I was the one to bring all that up, and it did not start with being told about it by someone else. There was no opportunity for anyone to implant the memory before I spilled about it with my own mouth. The reason I'm so certain of this is because I distinctly remember being utterly shocked to hear the words involuntarily coming out of my own mouth. Why would I have been shocked to hear them if I'd already heard them before?

So, in summary… Let me try to un-jumble my thoughts here a bit…

• I know for an absolute fact that I reported the abuse unprompted. That memory, at least, has been more-or-less perfectly preserved since the day it happened and has never been in question.
• Therefore, there was no opportunity for anyone to brainwash me. Not any therapist, and not even my mother.
• I also know I wasn't making it up (even though I would go on to tell myself I was) because I remember exactly how it felt to say it, and it felt like struggling to remember something, not like making something up.
• Since I forgot it while in the process of reporting it, and was never able to consciously remember it again, that's another reason I know the memory could not have been implanted by recovered memory therapy: because the memory wasn't recovered.

If the idea couldn't have been put in my head and I couldn't have been making it up, what else could it have been but the truth?

Let's suppose for the sake of argument it was just a nightmare I misinterpreted as reality because of my young age, since that's the only remaining alternative explanation. Then what about my aftermath symptoms? Why would a simple nightmare continue to cause me distress for 28 years? Even if we further suppose this is because I convinced myself it was fact, that continues to be impossible, because I couldn't have convinced myself it was fact, because at the time, denial had convinced me it wasn't fact. How could I have been traumatized by believing a supposedly false story that I pointedly didn't believe?

So let's look at the big picture of how the whole process would have to work, if this were indeed all a big lie, and let's count up the blatant impossibilities.

• I have a nightmare about things a child my age at the time would be incapable of dreaming about. (1)
• I mistake the nightmare for reality and report it to my mother as fact, but I forget what it was while I'm in the process of telling her.
• Since I can't remember it, I come to believe I must have made it all up after all.
• I develop disordered eating behaviors and body image, daily-life memory problems and DPDR, flat affect, alexithymia, verbal and motor tics, and treatment-resistant severe depression, not because it really happened and I'm processing it on the back burner without conscious awareness, but because it didn't really happen and I just have repressed guilt about lying to myself that it did, while I'm also much more intentionally telling myself it didn't—which is apparently the truth in this scenario, so if I'm telling myself the truth, why would the problem persist? (2)
• I go to therapy for these aftermath symptoms, get misdiagnosed with autism and subjected to mitigative therapy for autism, where supposedly the therapists then brainwash me and implant false memories, which…
  • … I already acted on before there was any opportunity to implant them in the first place; (3)
  • … are unrelated to what I'm there to see them about, since I'm there about autism instead; (4)
  • … I also continue not to remember, even after they're implanted, which is not how false memory syndrome is supposed to work even if it were a real thing. (You're supposed to actually “remember” the false memory, not, like, simply continue not remembering it like nothing changed.) (5)

There are five ways my father's version of events blatantly contradicts objective, known, factual reality, even disregarding my suspicions and presupposing them false. It may seem like jumping to conclusions to decide instead that it all really happened—but considering the alternative, isn't that decision actually much less convoluted, much more straightforward and self-consistent?