Do you remember the wounds?

It makes physical sense that a scar won’t look the same as the wound, nor the skin before. The tissue, damaged then inflamed seeks to heal and creates a substitute tissue to stand in the originals place. Thick and non-functioning, it fills a void. Do you remember the wounds before them? Remember the wounds your scars replaced, what they stand for? Do you remember the pain of them, how they came about? Do you even remember the story they tell?

Many scars tell a good story, but many more tell a horrible one. 

And what of the emotional scars, the ‘psychological’ ones? Do we remember what stood before them? Do we remember ourselves before that trauma? Our emotions, our thoughts, thick and hardened through the hands of abuse not dissimilar to the scars on our skin. The bodies inate, desperate mechanisms to heal and heal quickly. To survive. 

Can we change them? Can we soften the scar tissue in anyway? Can it be treated? Can we remember what was there before, can we remember the wounds? Would it help to?

What is it like to be covered in scars you don’t remember receiving, wounds that have healed behind your back without your knowing? Perhaps that is unanswerable. 

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Talking out

It is not often I see the pros of ‘talking out’, of telling or sharing my story. I am all to easily silenced by myself or others, but a recent blog post has made me think a little more. 

When you have a thought or memory endlessly cycling in yor head it can be near impossible to get it out. If you picture it physically, you can almost see it there inside your skull bouncing of the walls trying desperately to get out, but with your mouth tight shut it has no where to go, no escape. By opening your mouth you allow it out. You create a tangent for your memory to spin off and finally end its repititive circling. Or you can cry it out, I suppose. If you know how. 

That is all. 

The ‘mute’ button

I feel like someone’s pressed it again. I feel totally silenced. Was it me? I am exhausted of this fight. 

Mutism has always been a safety blanket for me. They say ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all’, but I think sometimes it’s if you don’t have anything right to say. Silence is safety, talking is risk. If you don’t know the right way to talk yourself out of a situation, maybe you shouldn’t even try. I simply do not have the willpower or strength to keep trying to talk out. I don’t have the energy to analyse what is safe and what’s not. 

So I fall silent, again. To fight back, with words or strength is essentially a sin. ‘Children are to be seen, and not heard’, that’s what they always said. 

Is it better to fight and to lose, or not to fight at all?

In my experience, it has always been the latter. 

I am fighting to speak, but nobody hears me. To lift my internal mute is a dangerous agony. Even when I manage, it’s like my volumes turned right down; you probably couldn’t listen, even if you tried. More often I cannot lift the mute, I cannot deselect my selective mutism, learnt as a child, so I hide in the middle of it, screaming where no one can hear. 

Is it even worth it? Do I want to share my story? Does anybody want to hear? It’s much easier and innate to keep quiet. 

“Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.” – JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. 

Trying to keep strong and positive (believe it or not). Trying to keep talking. 

Maybe I am just broken

Maybe it is time that I just accept that I am broken, that I can’t be fixed. I have tried for so long to put myself back together maybe it is time I just accepted ‘me’ the way I am and carried on with my broken and painful parts. 

I have carried this pain for so long, blistered and sliced my fingers trying desperately to put the fractured parts of my soul back together maybe I should just give up. My coping mechanisms have gotten me this far, maybe I should carry on with them. Who says I need to be fixed?

I suppose I do, really. Dancing over the shatterings of glass left after a childhood of abuse has proved only painful, but that is the only footing I have. I cannot just walk away, unfortunately. 

I suppose my hands can be fixed, but if I don’t use them to realign the pieces of my soul I will always be broken. 

Food for thought. 

What does abuse do to you?

This is a very difficult post for me, even anonymously, to share publicly. The word ‘abuse’ is a big and scary one and I wouldn’t classify anything I’ve been through as that, though I know others would disagree. 

In light of my recent post ‘recovery’, I’d like to be able to follow it up with a second post that looks more honestly at the shadows behind that word. In many ways, I think DBT (dialectical behavioural therapy) has actually been unhelpful to me. I feel almost as though the past year has taught me how not to cry, how not to react to terror and torment and so reinforced many of the lessons I learned as a child. My therapist, possibly not to her fault, actively discouraged me talking of anything vaguely traumatic and helped gloss over everything that is my life. This has helped me in some ways, it’s arguable reduced some of the ‘BPD’ symptoms (though, I am not sure if I have just made allowances for this elsewhere). The thing it really hasn’t helped me with, and if anything has pushed me further into the hands of denial with, is my PTSD. 

Post traumatic stress disorder. What a phrase. 

I’ve suffered this arguably since I was a child, though obviously I wouldn’t have seen it that way then and I still don’t really now. I have nightmares every night, sure. I have night terrors still, like a child and wake myself up screaming and fighting. And then there’s the day times. Every half step, something seems to trigger my memory and I find myself wincing or bracing to fight my way out. It’s exhausting. It sounds like something out of a movie, but it’s not. It’s really not. This is my life. 

I feel like I am trapped in my childhood, and that wasn’t a good place to be. 

So these are some of the symptoms DBT has not helped me deal with. These are the manifestations of a constant overflow of traumatic memories, one after the other flooding my brain and frying it’s circuits. 
What is it like to have PTSD? It’s exhausting. 

And what of the original trauma? 

Now that I have finished DBT, I am allegedly ‘robust’ enough to start dealing with it. I am not gloating in anyway, but I have ‘survived’ a childhood of abuse, neglect, homelessness but now after a year of DBT you think I might be robust enough – thanks. 

Anyway, so this means onward referal, which I am entirely grateful for. The downside being I must now try and share my story again. 

If admitting to having PTSD is hard, admitting to having been thtough any trauma is impossible. I just can’t do it. So I start scraping around the top of the barrel for some lesser, more acceptable memories. I need to portray to this team I am struggling, but my inner autos kick in and I simultaneously need to portray that I have never been abused in any way shape or form. 

So what does trauma do to you? This. 

It terrifies you to talk and terrorises you to not. 

Even the memories I class as lesser, the one offs, even they terrify me. And it’s only just dawned on me how freaking scary this all is. 

This is all I can share for now. Thanks anyone who reads.