How to deal with abuse memories that occasionally come up for no reason.

Distraction helps me a lot. Most of the time I am okay, but falling asleep is the worst. I’m alert yet become progressively more defenseless as I fall asleep. So when I go to lie down, I take my Kindle Fire, plug in my earbuds, and watch/listen to stuff until I fall asleep (mostly youtube relaxation videos). So now, if I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep (nightmare, drank too much diet coke, etc), I just put on another video and usually fall back asleep within 1-10 minutes. I guess you could do the same thing with sleep mode on a tv, too. But I prefer the mobile device, because a touchscreen is easier to operate when you’re half-asleep than a computer mouse or tv remote.

Anyway, distraction is key. Anything it takes to get you to sleep without thinking? Do it. Well, except alcohol. hehe

You also might look into a prescribed sedative. I take a small dose of Atavan on the nights I can’t sleep, and it works pretty well.

I have no useful advice, but I feel for you.

I hope time eventually heals you.

Remember thats the past, its dead and gone.

We’re all with you, sending good thought your way .

There’s a lot of good advice in this thread. I guess I’m sort of torn between allowing myself to feel grief about it all and just pushing it down. Though this time I was completely unable to control my emotions and I normally have a death-grip on my emotions.

Gah! It all just kind of sucks.

I HATE that I have to deal with this, I just bloody hate it. How many times do I have to think about it, talk about, deal with it? I just want to be done with it all.

It’s so hard to not feel like I’m just broken, you know? That I will never be whole or normal. I know I won’t be, but I hope I can one day not be overwhelmed by my past.

Maybe it’s time to spend some time talking to a therapist again.

Thank you, to everyone who replied. Especially for the support, it’s so helpful to have people who understand what I’m going through.

That’s the thing - it’s not dead and gone. It can’t happen again that’s true, but as a kid it was all about how can I be a better kid, not upset daddy, do the things he wants, please him, be good.

These involuntarily reviews as an adult are full of recoiling terror - that bastard was a cunt! You’re really absorbing the true horror, the terror of it for the first time. At the time it was why am I such a naughty girl - now it’s WTF? You’re feeling the more normal reactions that you didn’t necessarily get at the time.

That’s a really interesting thought. You’re right though. At the time, watching him throw all my stuff around, screaming at the top of his lungs, flinging garbage all around, my only thought was “please don’t hit me, please don’t hit me”. And now my thoughts would be “I’ll be right back with a baseball bat”. But at the same time, the profound sadness of that little girl just feels like a sledgehammer to the gut.

I remember sleeping in the woods, just on the ground, so that he couldn’t find me. There were bears and cougars in those woods and I chose risking those rather than risking my own father.

I just don’t know if I have it in me to truly deal with it all. It’s just too much.

FloatyGimpy, just about everybody feels damaged for some reason or another, I’ve learned. But we all deserve to live a good life and we all have something to give to Life. Trust that small voice inside you, even when it’s weak, that says But I’m not that bad. Because you’re not and it wasn’t right and it wasn’t you. Try to acknowledge his failings without owning his shame.

Your dad wasn’t trying to teach you any lesson, imo, but was just acting like a childish douche having a tantrum. And you didn’t do anything to deserve it–he was just behaving like an out-of-control toddler, who clearly lacked the maturity to appropriately raise a child.

But hearing stories like yours and the OP’s, makes me really appreciate my parents. But the silver lining in enduring such abuse is that you know exactly how NOT to parent, and if you have children of your own, the cycle will be broken and you can be a better parent because of it.

FloatyGimpy, you can do this, and although it will be hard, the rewards are worth it. Find a good therapist or group and work through this. Groups are great for dealing with past abuse. The feeling that others have been through similar situations and understand is incredibly healing. I will never forget the first time I met someone whose mother had threatened suicide to her as a child. I thought I was the only one, and meeting this older woman who had been there was a revelation to me. Suddenly, I wasn’t so alone. It was the beginning of healing for me.

And try to keep in mind a few things. You are not alone. Every one has some burden to bear. Suffering is a universal human experience. If we can get past the details of each person’s specific situation, it all breaks down to the same emotions - this is grief, this is anger, this is guilt, this is sorrow. Everybody knows these things. You are not nearly as alone as you think. Trauma survivors have a tendency to think nobody can relate to or understand them. When I started reaching out to people I learned that you don’t have to go through the same experience in order to experience the same emotion. And, you don’t even have to talk about what happened to you. Sometimes it’s enough just to talk.

After another night’s sleep, I have a bit of a different perspective.

I’ve had years of therapy, been on many different meds. I even went to a two-month inpatient program with other people going through the same things.

I’ve talked and talked and talked about all of this, in depth. Maybe this is just something that’s going to occasionally come up and overwhelm me for a couple of days, then I’ll get on with things and get back to my regular life? I’ve always been hoping that it will all just go away, once and for all and maybe that’s just not a reality.

Not to sound dramatic but I think that my abuse was somewhat on the severe side and maybe because of that, it’s something that will raise its ugly head occasionally and I’ll have to deal with it. I think that this was just a bad episode.

Dealing with it gets easier the more you do it. It won’t happen overnight, of course. It’s like watching a scary movie. The first time you see it, it might send you on the roof; by the tenth time you see it, you know where all the scary bits are and when the cat jumps out, and when shows up, and so on. By the twentieth time, you’re barely even paying attention. Being fed up with it now is a good first step to being bored by it all, and then over it all.

You can deal with it. You were strong and smart, and you survived. It won’t be pleasant or fast, but you can do it.

If you’re not currently seeing your therapist, you might try to arrange some sessions to discuss this new stuff you’ve dredged up. It’s something new to work on.

Have you considered turning your pain into action? I have heard of others in your situation who have found solace by volunteering to help kids in the same boat they were once in. Given your history, you have the ability to understand all the complex feelings that children of abuse are suffering–esp when that abuse is at the hands of the very people who should be nurturing and protecting them.

I am sure that strategy would not be effective for everyone, but food for thought.

One thing that helped me learn to accept my mental health conditions was Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. I had to face the unpleasant truth that there is no “cure” for what ails me. Blame my parents, blame my character, blame bad genes, it doesn’t really matter what caused it because I’m the only one equipped to take responsibility for it. It’s not going away. I have a chronic illness and probably will for the rest of my life. So my challenge is to live a meaningful, value-driven life regardless of what insanity of the week comes a callin’.

I think you’re moving into a new and good phase of your treatment. You’re beginning to realize that this will probably always be a part of you, but that it will not make your decisions for you. It can make you feel afraid, guilty, and aggrieved, but it can’t take your life away. The sooner you accept that those feelings are a healthy, natural response to your traumatic experiences, the easier it will be to put them in their place and get to the business of living.

Have you tried EMDR, Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing ? It is a proven effective therapy forPTSD. It should yield fast results.

Sorry to hear you’re going through this, Floaty Gimpy. I have issues myself, am with you in what you’re already doing by creating diversions by using positive thoughts, but would also like suggest to try not to recall those bad memories. Easier said than done, and I don’t mean to sound like I think this is an easy to do, know first hand that it’s not, can seem impossible at times. The reliving of those memories refreshes them in your mind, reinforces them giving them strength anew to reappear.

When thoughts of painful past experiences pop into my mind, I try to drive them off, say to myself “don’t think about that”, repeat this a couple times while trying very hard to force the bad memory away. I then try to think positive memories, like you’re already doing. Best wishes to you, you deserve good things to happen to you, am hoping your bad memories fade away soon.

It sucks. The thing people can’t understand is the impact of living with the crazy. When that video of the Texas judge was going around, while it seemed that he was extremely overboard, I didn’t hear the crazy in his voice. I could be wrong, but it sounded to me like I heard a bully but not someone who had lost his marbles.

The OP’s father sounds like the crazy. Like my father. When you get someone dumping meat scraps onto a pile in a girl’s room, you have no idea where it’s going, because the person has lost all reason. It reminds me of the shit my father would do. One of the worse beatings I ever came after I gave my father the wrong sized spoon for breakfast. When I was six. Who the fuck almost kills a kid over that? That’s crazy.

Or being beaten because my father had thought* he had told me something and beat me because I didn’t do what he had said. Yes, living with someone who forces his wife to get down and lick his shoes clean. Yep. Them are the crazies.

So ironic that the father and mother go off to Bible study. Sick.

For me, there’s two problems. One is the fear. That people develop anxiety issues is pretty much documented.

The other is what happens when you grow up with no love. Or insufficient love. Where was your mother that day? Watching and then off to Bible studies with Daddy. My mother, too, was a battered wife and unable to protect us, and we missed out on growing up feeling like we were worthwhile human beings, valuable enough to be cared for.

For me, become a parent myself, and watching my children be, well, children, makes me understand how crazy it was. Yes, I’ve got a young child, at 4 and a toddler, 2, so they test our patience, but nether my wife nor I have felt the need to hit either hard enough to leave a palm-shaped bruise on their cheeks, like my father would do. That’s crazy and out of control.

I can see what normal kids are like, and how different it was in our crazy home. And the effects were wide-spread. My kids aren’t watching me like hawks, looking for the tiniest changes in mood. They don’t have to worry if they are being led down the garden path into an ambush.

My memories of the abuse are fading. One thing which worked for me was to hear stores of other people and to taunt my dead father with those. “You think you were crazy? Shit, you never once dumped scraps of meat in my bedroom. Amateur.” Thank you. That’s a new one to throw in that man’s face.

I’d replace “should” with “may” because it’s not 100% but people say in many cases it does help.

*For years, I had assumed that he had told one of my siblings and only thought he had made a mistake, but my mother confirmed he would often just think conversations had happened which had not. Growing up with someone who is unable to distinguish reality from fantasy is not the funnest thing, and generally not recommended.

Cashew, I respect your experiences and this in no way means to invalidate them. But I have to respond to this, because I think it’s very dangerous advice. I have researched this subject and I have personal experience with treatments based on trauma theory.

As I mentioned upthread, a key driving force behind PTSD is the avoidance of painful memories, thoughts and experiences. It is a scientifically established fact (borne out by over 100 years of research) that repeated exposure to a given stimulus (in this case, a memory) will decrease the anxiety associated with that stimulus. In other words, your memories can’t kill you, they can’t hurt you, they aren’t dangerous, they aren’t to be avoided. They are painful - sometimes it may seem unbearably so - but the more you relive or recall those experiences, the less frightening they will be.

I experienced this myself through prolonged exposure therapy, which had dramatic (and I mean DRAMATIC) and immediate effects on my symptoms. I need to emphasize that this should ONLY be done with the guidance of a trained professional, because if you do it wrong, it can totally backfire and make everything worse. In the therapy, you recall those memories and relive them over and over and over until you are sick to goddamn death of them and they don’t frighten you any more. By ‘‘over and over’’ I mean for 2 hours a day for three months straight. I had to speak my memories aloud, in vivid detail. It hurts like hell at first. I screamed, I bawled, I hyperventilated… but I survived. And I stopped panicking as I went through it again. And eventually I got bored and moved on to a different memory. And now those experiences don’t have nearly the same power over me that they once did. I can now relate most of my life story, traumatic experiences included, without feeling particularly upset about it. I can be reminded of my abuse without it ruining my entire day.

People tend to react with horror to the concept of prolonged exposure because one figures it must be a bad thing to deliberately upset yourself. ''Why," people have asked me, “Would you want to relive all that over and over again?”

“Don’t you get it? I’ve already been reliving it over and over again - every day for the last 10 years. It’s really not going to kill me to do it for three more months.”

I really can’t emphasize this enough - **AVOIDANCE WILL MAKE PTSD WORSE.
**

You will probably get more informed advice from your therapist, but what helps me with bad memories is to think of them as just scary movies I have seen which were frightening, but are now over and which I don’t have to watch again if I don’t want to.

Or I will amuse myself by imagining a memory is a badly written story and I will make up a better ending.

Absolutely. My only qualifier to this is: there’s a time and place for everything. Talk/work things out in therapy, absolutely. Take 30 minutes every day to practice your CBT techniques, definitely. When you’re trying to fall asleep or get through your workday or drive home without crashing the car, though, avoidance is appropriate.