u/Less_Prompt_3486

I included the following in a reply in a prior post. For me, it's worth its own post. This is my own experience and understanding.

Because traumatic memories lack connection to other memories or thoughts, when traumatic memories resurface they are reexperienced without any context, including without any sense of location within time. This lack of connection to any particular time makes them feel, while they are being reexperienced, as though they are occurring in the present. For example, a reexperienced auditory traumatic memory is “heard” as though it were a sound taking place here and now. This present-time nature of reexperienced traumatic memory contributes to the common perception expressed by those who go through the reexperiencing process that they feel “crazy.”

My own experience of posttraumatic stress, however, has made me feel “crazy” in ways that are even more unsettling. There is, of course, the feeling of fear itself when that type of emotional traumatic memory emerges. Fear makes sense when it is felt in response to an identifiable, immediate, and present danger. And in that situation fear can fuel an appropriate responsive burst of action. But to reexperience a traumatic memory of fear is to be filled with fear divorced from its original context. There is nothing to be done with the experience—the fear is just there inside of you eating away like acid. Even if you can identify the fear for what it is (and that’s not always likely), to experience that disconnected, floating fear is to feel “crazy.” And to experience such fear without even knowing its source is “crazy” squared.

But “crazy” happens even before the traumatic memories finally emerge. Although traumatic memory is not subject to voluntary recall, as long as it remains buried, it tends to exert some force on feeling and behavior. Buried traumatic memory is a hidden source of information, urges, and distress from below the surface of consciousness and accordingly affects experience, conduct, and decisions. Buried traumatic memory generates posttraumatic stress.

Traumatic memories form when the mind is compelled to disconnect some of its own circuits. Before those circuits are reconnected and the traumatic memories are resolved, the mind has some ability to sense the disconnections of its own circuitry. These disconnections may be felt as uncertainty, unease, and impending doom. More to the point, to perceive such disconnections is to feel “crazy.”

The closer that traumatic memories are to emerging, the more strongly they are felt in this way. Traumatic memories are like the gas dissolved in a carbonated drink. While contained, traumatic memories may remain buried, invisible, and hard to detect. As the process of release begins, the traumatic memories begin, like bubbles, to coalesce and rise to the surface. Before finally emerging, they frequently rest for a time just below the surface, distorting the shape of that surface, distorting emotional experience and perceptions. The formation and flow of these “bubbles” and the surface distortions they create are perceived as emotional distress that can’t be explained by present circumstances. To feel this distress is to feel “crazy.”

A partial awareness of emerging traumatic memories may cause a person to feel “crazy” in yet another way. Prior to fully emerging, a traumatic memory may be perceived or understood by only a portion of the conscious mind. Particularly when the knowing part of the mind lacks language to attach words to what it knows, the mind harbors a threatening duality. Such differences between separate states within the mind may be sensed as a physical split between parts of the brain. Or these differing conditions may even be perceived as two distinct selves that are in conflict with each other. To feel this split within the mind is to feel “crazy.”

Each of these ways of feeling “crazy” is a kind of psychic pain. While such distress is certainly different from physical pain, psychic pain can be as hard to bear as the physical. And each kind of injury leads to its own predictable processes of healing.

The mind appears to have a continuing tendency or need to resolve traumatic memory, as though a traumatic memory were a foreign object lodged within the body. In my own experience, during the years that I carried unresolved traumatic memories, I felt that I was searching for something that I could neither identify nor describe. I sometimes called my search a “spiritual” one, and that is certainly true to the extent that I was seeking a wholeness that I had lost early in life. Even though a traumatic memory is inaccessible to conscious awareness through ordinary recall, my personal experience suggests that subconscious aspects of the mind in some ways know of both the existence of the traumatic memory and its content.

71M. When I was less than a year old, my mother physically attacked me. My injuries weren’t acknowledged or cared for, and I survived to grow up in a midwestern small-town, middle-class family.

I was told that I was “born with my left foot turned in.” At two or three, I was fitted with special shoes that I wore in bed with the eventual result that I walked with my foot pointed straight forward. But that foot always felt a bit odd.

In my 20s, I worked for Dallas’s largest architectural firm, where I was a “golden boy.” At 29, I left the firm and city to take care of myself, although I didn’t know why exactly or how. It would be the first of a half dozen times I would quit a job because of PTSD.

When 34, my emotional self disintegrated. At worst, I curled up on my sofa in crushing emotional pain and in fear of the entire world beyond my skin. I was diagnosed with major depression (not exactly accurately as it turns out) and took imipramine for a year or two with unknown effect.

Over the next couple of years, I did psychotherapy, journaled, did body work (Feldenkrais, Rolfing, and massage), researched family history, listened to my body, and ran and ran and ran. I felt indescribably horrible every waking minute.

I had promptly let my parents, two sisters, and many friends around the country know about my circumstances. None of them came to visit me. Ever. I worked a regular full-time job because I needed to support myself. But every weekend I would crash and sleep and barely be able to go out in any kind of normal way.

Within 18 months, I came to the understanding that my mother had done something severely destructive to me at at a young age, although I didn’t know what. Twenty-two months after my emotional collapse, I made an eight-hour round-trip drive to visit my parents, with both the intention and the result of confronting and accusing my mother. After an extended conversation with both my parents sitting in their kitchen, in the several minutes leading up to my actual accusation, while my father was talking I glanced at my mother, and she was looking at me with the coldest hate-filled anger that anyone ever directed at me before or since.

She denied everything. My father and, subsequently, both of my sisters took my mother’s side. I have never regretted confronting her, and I never saw, wrote, or talked to her again in the subsequent ten years before she died. There is nothing in my life I am more proud of than that.

In the years after that confrontation, I continued to heal, going through cycles of bad and not-as-bad phases. I wrote a 60,000 word “book” to document my experience and to record my understanding of what had happened for my future self to reference.

Not suspecting how much I had yet to uncover, I decided I needed to start over because I felt I had become a different person. At 39, I moved across the country to go to law school. After graduation, I returned to the midwest and had the good fortune to be able to practice commercial litigation for a number of years and later work as an in-house attorney for a nonprofit organization. At 41, I also added regular weight training to my running and was buoyed by the physical strength and endurance that resulted.

When I was 46, I got the news that my mother had died. I instantly felt relief . . . just unadulterated relief. By then my father had been incapacitated by strokes. He died a couple of years later. I had only seen him twice since the confrontation with my mother: Once he drove four hours each way to tell my psychotherapist that my mother wouldn’t have done anything like I was suggesting. I saw him briefly on that trip; he expressed no concern for me. I saw him again a year before he died only because his carer had contacted me to say that he wouldn’t “let go” without having seen me. By then, he could not talk and could move only an arm. My father had liked to tell me that I had always been “too sensitive.” He utterly failed in his duty to protect and care for me. Upon learning he had died, I cried bitterly.

My mother had orchestrated my complete disinheritance, which both of my sisters participated in actively. We remain out of touch. A few years ago, one who I haven’t seen since 1988 emailed me out of the blue with an “apology.” She wanted me to know that her response several decades ago should have been that she “hoped I would get the help I needed.” I didn’t respond.

My mother’s death enabled me to resume my healing by uncovering things impossible to contemplate while she was still alive. Only then did I finally encounter literature on anxiety and more specifically PTSD, which by that time I easily self-diagnosed. I re-entered psychotherapy with an MSW who was knowledgeable on trauma.

At age 35 during my initial recovery, my left foot had reverted to a turned-in position during an intense crying session while I was in the shower. The corrective shoes hadn’t worked at all; at age three, I had simply taught myself to hold my foot in a “normal” way. For decades, I had been unconsciously using my ankle muscles to hold my foot straight.

Then, at age 48, my left foot gradually and finally turned back out straight as muscles in my lower back gradually released. As a baby, I had contorted my body in response to my mother’s attack, after which those back muscles had remained chronically and continuously contracted. The contraction was tied up with the unprocessed emotional and sensory record of the attack; the muscles couldn’t release without me experiencing and processing all the pieces of the original event. It would take another 20 years for my back muscles to fully release. This chronic holding of muscles is something I have never seen described in the “literature” but is inseparable from my own experience and understanding of PTSD.

Yes, I now know pretty much exactly what my mother did to me and when it happened and where it happened. No, I’m not going to describe it here. Yes, the body really does keep the score. No, I don’t care why she did it to me. She had no right.

At 50, I wrote a 20,000 word addition to my “book” to include what had happened in the prior dozen years. I integrated the entire story into my understanding of PTSD. I spent untold hours (hundreds) editing the entire work, which I found to be enormously therapeutic. I ultimately “published” it online using Wordpress simply as an affirmation and declaration for myself since it gets zero views.

Occasionally, I will still wake up in the middle of the night and for about 30 minutes experience a very specific physical pain from the attack. The first time I experienced that particular thing 25 years ago, it was so intense that it caused me to pass out. Really. Now when that nighttime pain reappears it is still intolerable, even though I know intellectually that it is no more than an unprocessed replaying of something from the past.

I consider myself to be at least 90% recovered. However small the remaining percentage is, it can still at times be a real bear. But the good stuff in life is worth going through the bad stuff.

This post was prompted by recently looking through my 1989-1991 recovery notebook for the first time in decades. Specifically, my mother’s nine letters: six between disintegration and accusation; two in the several months after; and one about a year before she died. I only scanned them, but that was enough to send me into a horrible downward spiral. “You were not abused.” Her lack of felt concern for me is breathtaking.

I wish all of you the strength, courage, and perseverance to keep going and heal.