fabricated body memories (trigger)

So all my life I've been having the same dream of falling out a window

I'm 5 and it's like someone tilted the house so I stumbled and fell out the window.

The other night this turned from a dream to a memory.. Only it was my brother who just died who pushed me out the window.

That was a pretty intolerable thing to remember which made me switch to child me and I was deeply upset.

Only it doesn't end there... Before this was a period where I couldn't talk. I turned from one child me to the other one who can't talk

Then I had a body memory. It was like I was being grabbed and I couldn't escape. And then I was raped.

I tried to escape but couldn't and flailed everywhere. I tried to talk but only babble comes out... I can't bear to talk.

I felt so disgusted that I had to tell myself I was lying since I couldn't escape out my body. I couldn't touch myself. I couldn't let my SO touch me. I was disgusted to share the same genitalia as the person who did this and haven't been able to feel it since

This has happened twice now

That body memory has come from nowhere though... It explains alot about me but I'm troubled by how it's come out and wonder - is it possible I'm either making this up or that the body memory doesn't have the literal meaning implied here?

I don't know anything about body memories, but I don't know if you can create a memory that intense, suddenly. I thought it would have to be built up over time to be fabricated. Anyway, it sounds like it was horrible and I hope that you don't have to go through it again

This is a very late reply, but it's quite common for trauma memories to return this way. During the original event, different aspects of the trauma -- overwhelming emotions, visual and other sensory memory, your thoughts, physical pain, body position -- are not stored and held together as a unified memory the way non-traumatic (usual, average) memories are, but are recorded in fragments. It's these different aspects or fragments of trauma that return. So you might have a flashback of everything happening just exactly as it did, but more likely you may have a flashback of one or more parts of the memory. It's this incompleteness that makes it easy to think we just made it up.

Also leading one to doubt is the fact that more details of what actually happened can return later and this new information may contrast with something truly constructed (and inaccurate) which the mind inserted or filled in after the event in order to make sense of the incompleteness of former memories/flashbacks or to steer oneself away from the negative aspects of the event.

I have had many instances of that, where I turned a many times repeated dream or partial memory that popped into my mind into something neutral or even positive, whereas the original full event was truly traumatic and overwhelming. If recall of the events and how they affected me hadn't made so many other things in my life make sense, I think I might have doubted them more. Plus I had alters who could confirm the new information and even add details.

By the way, spontaneously or more likely during therapy, these fragments of memory can be reunited and re-stored as normal memory, never losing their meaning but losing the traumatic overwhelm aspect of the event. They can be recalled as a whole rather than intruding as a flashback.

Reading about the etiology of trauma memory and reading a large number of biographies of people with DID helped to establish for me what was normal in recording memories of traumatic events and in how someone with DID often recalls them in stages.