mini-crisis feel like I'm a liar *trigger*

Hi all. So this last week I was in my therapists office and some intrusive feelings about SA came up. I had a particular person in mind when this was happening but I have no clear memories. Most of my feelings come in like a little girls voice or just feeling little and scared. I don't want to be specific about who this person is but it's a pretty constant feeling and suspicion. This person acts very strangely around me now as an adult and there are a lot of other things but this isn't what's triggering me. It's very painful to even entertain the thought that this person hurt me. I've struggled all my life to get answers as to whats going on with me. The thing is, once I left my therapists office and told him about my suspicions I felt like the little girl in me was happy and I didn't feel so depersonalized for awhile, like this part was happy she was feeling validated. That soon went away when I was washing dishes later that night and I said "oh shishcabob" sp? lol my grandpa used to make shishcabobs on the barbeque when I was kid and we used to visit him all the time. When I said that I remembered going to my grandpas and starting thinking "what if he was the one that abused me?" I have also had thoughts about two other people and I'm feeling really triggered right now. I must be lying. All these people couldn't have abused me. The thing is....when I felt like a little girl in my therapists office it was a different voice than the ones that tell me other people abused me. I feel so confused right now and need some advice. I don't see T until Monday

Sometimes when I read your posts I wonder if I wrote them So much of this rings true for me. If I accept or believe what the 'little' parts are showing me, they feel happy and relieved. But there is a very strong part which tells me/them it's all lies, it's all made up. I can't say anything about it without that caveat that I'm probably a liar. Having battled with this for a while now, my best advice is: try to do whatever makes you feel better. For me, trying to accept that what the little ones say is less painful (to them and hence to me) than denying it. We might never know what the truth is, but I hope that it will at least start to become clearer with time. Whatever the truth may be, there are good reasons for you feeling this way. You are not a liar.

Sadly, it's very common with SA that there's more than one perpetrator in a family. Abusers can create other abusers. In mine, abusers were multigenerational and on both sides. I have many alters who came to deal with specific things my mother or my father did. I have one alter each for two other relatives on different sides of the family. I am disgusted to belong to my family, even though I know some, like me, are innocent.

I don't recall all the details but I have enough and if I sit and allow the memory and communication with that part to open up, things start coming. So even if I haven't yet opened the door fully, every time I do or the door is triggered open further, there's more information (memory) there. I try to remain careful about not filling in what's missing with more than I'm sure I know because I can get to a place where I am sort of making it up, filling in gaps in the memory that I don't yet have.

Far more convincing than the incomplete memories or even the existence of individual alters whose phobias alone tell their story are the flashbacks or emotional overwhelms I've experienced that are associated with a narrative memory of the SA, with minimal words of what happened. What the body goes through in the present, the crying and/or hyperventilating, the overwhelming desire to escape or hide or just freeze, the flooding terror, the sounds that come out of the body, the feelings in body parts -- these are all unmistakeable proof that something happened. So are the incidental triggered moments that don't become flashbacks or overwhelms. I'm uncertain if I believe my mind all the time but I do believe my body. I know I'm not making my body do these things.

If you've had flashbacks, panicky overwhelms, bouts of young crying or sadness, etc. I would believe these mean something if I were you. If you have images or people who seem associated with these, take what's there. Avoid filling in the gaps but also don't disbelieve what you can see or sense so far. These events are your body speaking to you and, in my experience, the body doesn't lie.

brandsonmom777 wrote: It's very painful to even entertain the thought that this person hurt me. I've struggled all my life to get answers as to whats going on with me.

I thought it worth pointing out in a separate post how the pain behind these two sentences is in direct opposition. There is pain if you know and pain if you do not know.

What would happen if you started holding on to the first pain a little longer? Entertain the thought longer than you usually do. If nothing happened from this person, I'm pretty sure you're not going to be inventing it and any pain from the imagining will go away. If something did happen, the pain from your first sentence would increase for a time and would then grow less, while pain from the second would begin to shrink. In any case, maintaining the status quo doesn't seem to be working for you, there's just a lot of dulled pain. I project from my own experience, of course.

Thank u owl eyes and Johnny jack, both of ur posts were comforting. I don't know
Why I'm having such a difficult time thinking right now, it feels like my
Mind is having a hard time making thoughts I am frustrated when I think I've
Found something out about myself or something is beginning to make
Sense but my defenses always step in to make me doubt my own experience.
I'm left feeling crazy, alone and like I'm the worlds biggest liar and if anyone knew the real
Me inside with all my twisted accusations they would hate me. So I keep this part of me
A secret like no one could ever know the real me. It feels so lonely.
I feel like I'm lying to my therapist and have told him so and he tells me I've
Never given him any indication I was lying about anything but that these
Things r my minds way of protecting me and making me question myself.
Thank u guys for ur support, it's invaluable what a support this place is
Especially with a little mini crisis I don't want to bug my T with on
The weekend so thank all of u

brandonsmom777 wrote:...but my defenses always step in to make me doubt my own experience.
I'm left feeling crazy, alone and like I'm the worlds biggest liar

Jeez I was there too many times to count, really. Once I gained a sense of what was going on (the multiplicity), once I could see there was a phenomenon of "memory wipe" or "spin thinking into a whirlwind until John is hopelessly confused," I had to ask specifically for those inside (whoever they were) to stop doing that, to let me focus and know. The block was probably the Sphinx on automatic pilot. After he understood I didn't like that at all and that it was counterproductive, he listened to me and stopped doing that. Jonathan may have been involved to support this at some point in the past, I just don't know, but more recently Jonathan strongly supported the Sphinx giving up control. That dizziness, confusion, denial, craziness -- it had aspects of each and sometimes felt more one than the other -- stopped happening fairly quickly once we called for it to stop.

However, I should point out that for that to happen, I had to be willing to learn at least some of what was being held from me and I had to state that aloud and write it, I couldn't just think it to myself. Once I began to get hints about, then finally received Jack's memory, which was about as awful as anything I could have imagined, all who needed to be were convinced I was ready and willing to know. Before that, it was more or less a given that my mind would be wiped once I started getting too close to anything. The phenomenon drove me completely batty for decades and, sadly, I know I could have handled all this years ago. But it wasn't how we were wired and Sphinx wasn't assessing anything other than whether the body was surviving. Sphinx arose just a few months after the birth so his focus was life and death. Anything and everything else was secondary. Jonathan and I actually had to yell at him, call him names (okay, that didn't work at all) and say things like "a full life requires risk" (though not said as well as that) and "a life without meaning is not worth living." Being a hyper-objective part of the mind, it took him a while to understand at all and after a while he just decided that he needed to trust "those who lived in the world." He had to admit that he could never really understand the "true life."

You may have a part like this, a gatekeeper, internal self helper, objective observer, system manager, whatever, who is preventing you from focusing on this. Or it could be a protector, persecutor or introject, any one of which could be a little, who might be hard to convince. Because you have DID, my suspicion is that it's an alter or alters who are responsible. If it is an alter, this part probably feels their job is to keep doing what they're doing. In that case, it's up to you to convince them otherwise, or at least to let up. When you're lucid, I would write this stuff down and give it to your T, who may be able to help you. I know there was a time I couldn't have trusted my own mind to allow the movement I needed in a therapy session. So a letter or email to a T may be able to circumvent any wipe-out that happens at therapy. I would definitely trust your T as an ally. Unless your T has proven to be incompetent, in which case you should move on, to not trust the T seems very counter-productive. Of course, there are barriers to trust but sometimes you just must take that leap. A full life requires risk. We wish you all the best.