Afraid to know!! (Very long post, sorry for that!)

Hello everybody,

I am Martina and i have DDNOS. I have 8 parts besides myself, with ages ranging from 2 years to adulthood. Each part is more or less related to a certain phase in my life and traumas there in. I don't have that much memory loss in general, I do have alot of gaps in my childhood though! I essentially remember very little up to age 8. I generally experience switching as being locked up inside my head, viewing myself from a distance talking and doing things in a manner that is just not me. It is like my body is possessed and i can't find the strength to take back my control over it. I do usually remember most of the stuff i "see myself doing", although they sometimes come to my memory with a bit of a time lag (sometimes seconds or minutes, and other times days or weeks).

Yesterday i had an appointment with my therapist. I was very anxious all day for no clear reason. Thoughts, flashbacks and voices were rushing through my head so fast that i could hardly follow them. I had to wait for 10 extra minutes as he was a bit late. At some point i went blank. For some reason (unknown to me at least) i vaguely saw myself getting up and sitting between the chairs in the waiting room. When my therapist came to get me, i was already mostly gone. A little girl was there, she was very frightened. She talked to him between tears about her being stupid and therefore deserving to be a toy for men, who are all dirty, angry and dumb.

My therapist telling "me" later in the session about this conversation with the little girl, asked me if i was ever sexually abused as a child. I firmly said no and i do believe it, because i find it hard to believe i could miss on a whole incidence without even remembering flashes of it, given that i don't have that much memory loss. He also said that his doubt has been growing for a while about that matter because of some other signs and patterns i described earlier to him (have a question to you guys about that but will do that in a separate post).

The thing is, when my therapist says something about such possibility, a voice in my head started screaming "he is a liar and you are a liar as well". I am afraid of knowing or even thinking of this as a possibility as it would change who i thought i was. I am also concerned about the false memory syndrome. But i am also unable to understand the terror i feel as soon as my therapist's question pops into my head. If i am so sure of my memory, why am i so scared?! Does that make sense to any of you? Did you experience this fear of knowing? All through my therapy (2 years now) i felt happy to uncover a new aspect of what made me a group of 8 people in one body, no matter how exhausting it was. Why am i suddenly afraid?!


If you reach this point in reading, please accept my apologies for the very long post. And thanks for reading

Martina

Hi Martina. Many of us who are diagnosed with DDNOS-1 and DID can relate to your story.

I am not able to believe certain things that I hear coming out of my mouth. I just don't know. I know that many things happened that I do not remember. I also know that confabulation is possible. On the surface confabulation looks like lying, but it is actually the mind trying to "fill in the holes" where there is amnesia.

I feel fortunate that I do not have an introject Voice of Denial who screams that I am a liar, or similar toxic mind #####&, but I know many of us do have such a voice. Did you tell your therapist what the voice was saying?

For what it's worth, the DID forum is far more active; you might join us there. I check in here only rarely.

Hi Una, thanks alot for your reply. I am glad to hear i am not the only one who has these conflicting feelings of wanting to know and yet being terrified of finding out.

I wonder if there is a way to avoid (or at least minimize) confabulation! I don't want to be unconsciously creating an extra source of pain for myself . I did tell my therapist about the aggressive voice, he noted it down but didn't really comment. I think it is yet to be discovered what this angry dude is about! .

On a different matter, i think the reason i am not feeling 100% confident that nothing happened is because i have very clear flashbacks about me being quite sexual (in a masochistic way) around the age of 8-9. Moreover, one of my parts (8 years old) carries serious feelings of shame about these particular flashbacks. Can physical and emotional abuse cause a child to have masochistic sexual feelings?

I will definitely check out the DID forum. I may even post the above question in it as a new post. Thanks for the tip and the reply Una!

Martina-8 wrote:Can physical and emotional abuse cause a child to have masochistic sexual feelings?

Yes. And toxic shame can do that too. From what your child part said I would not jump to sexual abuse; those words sound like the kind of shaming words that unhealthy adults say to children and children internalize, and repeat about themselves.

Some of the yucky stuff I have had to deal with, the toxic messages in my head, I know came directly from the mouths of my mother and grandmother. I think life was pretty yucky for them when they were children.

That is actually making me feel better! For the time being, i will just drop this sexual abuse thing completely as long as i don't remember something clear and concrete without thinking too much.

What do you mean by toxic shame? I find it surprising that physical and emotional abuse could be capable of triggering feelings of a sexual nature? Do you know more about this? Or do you know of any references that focus on physical and emotional abuse and sexuality? Because everything that i found was on sexual abuse.

Shaming words that are sexual in nature can create sexual feelings, and feelings of shame about the sexual feelings, in a child. But there is another important phenomenon that comes in to play. It is called projective identification and it is a normal, healthy aspect of human nature, the product of mirror neurons in the brain, not pathological. What sometimes is pathological is the content of the projective identification. By means of projective identification a parent who was sexually abused as a child can, unconsciously and without sexually abusing, transmit to their own child some of the affects and behaviors of a sexual abuse survivor. It is a kind of vicarious trauma. A psychotherapy patient can even transmit this toxic stuff to the therapist without remembering or describing the original abuse. This is one reason why so many therapists have an "uncanny" way of knowing far in advance what is going to come up in therapy.

Thank you so much Una. This is so helpful. Actually now that said that, i do remember that my grandma for example used to be terrified of men. She used to warn me over and over about men and what they can do to a little girl! This is a memory my mother confirmed, so it is most likely not false .