cant stop the thoughts...

iv been talking recently about the abuse my parents put me through when i was younger, in therapy. I think its only now im starting to really believe that maybe my childhood wasnt normal. but now i cant stop thinking about it all, and i ccant sleep and i dissociate and i cant concentrate on anything. i dont know what to do, i just cant function at all at the moment. any ideas?

hi nellie,
what you speak of is very common to most everyone who would post on the sexual abuse/ptsd portion of this site. i think we all struggle with this. most struggle with how to deal with it and not loosing all of our bearings and also not taking up residence in the memories as well.
i found a good list of grounding techniques that i think should be helpful. i wish there was a magic bullet. obviously talking and posting about it should help but in the end we have to learn to be with the memories and feelings without going insane, without medicating, and eventually without allowing them to send us to emotional purgatory.

http://www.help4trauma.org/grounding.html

thanks cinderella, my therapist gave me some grounding exercises which were helping abit but now i dont know. i keep feeling all panicky and really scared and i dont know why

I saw your reply to my message and now I am reading your post. I think we are in similar boats. I always considered my upbringing as something to be grateful for. Now, that I am teasing through my past, wow...a whole new picture. I dissociate as well...like I said, did it for decades. I just thought it was normal. It is so hard differentiating normal verses abnormal. One thing that helped was that when I confronted my parents, they denied it. So, I told them that if I went back to our old home where I was raised, we would see evidence permenantly embedded in the structure of our house of the abuse. So, I did go back and took pictures. I then got x-rays of my broken finger and showed them. Being wrong and being stupid was so engrained in my head, that I needed to prove it to myself before I could prove it to them. These were my steps. They may not be appropriate for you, of course. So many lost happy moments. That's what I can't wrap my head around. We can never go back in time to recapture them. We can only try to understand them at this point.

i dont think i was ever grateful for my upbringing, but i always feel like im exaggerating. i coonfronted them about the phsyical abuse afew times, my mum gave up trying to deny it, then shed just say i was exaggerating, or i should be thankful i didnt have a mum like 'so and so'. and i remember the physical stuff, but its the other stuff i dont remember exactly, and my mum read my diary where id talked about it, and she didnt even deny it or ask me what had happened, she just said was i going to report my dad to the police
but yea i dont know what normal is and i think thats hard, all i know is i would never treat anyone the way they treated me.
I hope going back there wasnt too hard and that it helped you figure stuff out. they denied breaking your finger etc? or they denied abusing you? i think sometimes they dont want to accept what they did when they know it was wrong? maybe.

It definitely helped going back. I knew the denial was coming, so I had a large body of evidence. Like i said, ive been programmed to be dumb, guilty, selfish and a bad boy. So, i was ready to shove that back at them...im not that dumb kid you used to slap around anymore. Plus, it's kind of hard to explain why I have a broken pinky in a classic defense wound on a bone that was sheared at a growth plate (growth plate fractures happen in young children). My dad is still in denial, but my mom isn't. 1 sibling doesn't deny it, but doesn't seem to grasp the implications. He seems more interested in the fact that he can't gripe as much about his childhood. My other sibling doesn't know. I want to tell him face to face.

What may help with that is that right when the memories get brought up is to distract yourself from the thoughts, before the thoughts get stuck in your mind. Talking about it and writing about it may help, Idk for sure though if that helps cause it stops someone from thinking about it. If you talk to the right people about it though, it may help a lot.

thanks, at the mo i dont really know whether to avoid talking about it because talking about it brings it to the front of my mind, or if talking about it will help in the long run or not?

nellie100 wrote:thanks, at the mo i dont really know whether to avoid talking about it because talking about it brings it to the front of my mind, or if talking about it will help in the long run or not?

Writing or talking about feelings can sometimes help though. You may want to at least try it. But it's up to you talking about can help me, but it's different with everyone.