This post deals with issues involving sexual abuse and children, so please do not continue reading if that will trigger you.
To start with, I'm unemployed and home alone (well, aside from my two monster dogs) most of the day. I'm dealing with an unplanned pregnancy and a house that was remodeled by an idiot and it has so many errors and flaws that the whole thing should just be torn down. So, I am currently under a great deal of stress emotionally and financially. When this happens, when I'm overwhelmed, I tend to have more flashbacks and nightmares, and for the last few days I have also been having vivid daydreams that I can't turn off. Up until this afternoon, all of these have been of incidents that I have always remembered. Well, I took a nap this afternoon and had a dream that I was writing myself a note to remind myself to tell my new counselor about 'the man in my room'. When I woke up, I had a vision/flashback/whatever from when I was a little girl in my bed and there was a shadow figure, a man, standing in my doorway. I felt terrified. That's all I've got and I can't seem to understand if this is something I need to pay attention to or if it's just the stress and lack of sleep playing tricks on me. Part of me thinks that if it's a blocked memory, I should leave it blocked, because I obviously blocked it for a reason. And yet it is haunting me, but it was just a dream. I've been trying to come up with other memories all day to help me figure it out. As far as I can recall, the only man who could have ever come into my room at night was my father and I KNOW with every fiber of my being that he would never have done anything sexually abusive, although he has been verbally and physically abusive to my entire family. This was never unprovoked, though, so having an image of HIM in my doorway at night while I'm in bed doesn't make sense. I learned within the past year that my brother was sexually abused by his friend's father when we were around the age of when my vision/flashback/whatever took place. I have held onto a memory of being in my brother's bedroom closet with his friend and he was touching me and having me touch him. My sister came in and told us we were all in trouble but I was so little and I don't remember anything else beyond that, or if there was anything else, or even if that was all just a dream I had.
What I am trying to figure out is if my subconscious is creating false memories to try and explain my current fears and other issues or if there is more to all this than I want to come to realize.
Have any of you had painful past experiences revealed to you that had been blocked? If so, has it helped your recovery or do you wish that they had stayed covered up?