Does anyone else talk very fast whenever you are triggered? I used to talk fast all of the time (before therapy), so I guess I was always triggered and/or always feeling an enormous amount of intensity. I would guess that it takes an enormous amount of intensity to stay split into multiple parts.
My therapist told me that, even if we had met under different circumstances, such as a party, he would know that I had a story to tell based upon my rate of speech. He said that people who talk very fast frequently do so because they want to get the words out before they are silenced. They are people who have a story to tell but have not yet been heard. I was fascinated when he told me that my rate of speech would probably slow down after therapy.
My therapist was correct. When I am not triggered, my speech is much slower than it used to be. However, whenever I am triggered, I start talking very fast again. I have an offline friend who has picked up on this. She will immediately start asking what’s going on with me when I am talking fast. The funny thing is that, about half the time, I am not even aware that I am triggered. However, after my friend inquires, I will notice that I have been feeling the urge to overeat or other symptoms that I am triggered. I sort of have to “step back” and recognize the intensity in myself.
I now recognize this dynamic in others. When I am in a “good place” and talking at a normal pace, I will notice other people whose words are spilling out on top of each other. This is a red flag that they need someone to listen.
I used to talk very fast all the time. Now, when I get triggered, talking so fast wears out my tongue. I will notice that I cannot get certain words out clearly because they are tumbling over one another so fast. No matter how hard I try to slow down, I cannot do it because the intensity inside of myself is driving the speed.
Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
I talk very fast and a lot.
I ski fast, I walk fast, I read fast and I write fast. If I can not go fast than I do two things at once like reading and eating.
For me it was to keep the adrenaline going. That is when I was the happiest or perhaps the least unhappy.
I can even garden fast. I can go to the hospital fast. Three days if no one messes me up.
I go to fast and do to much.
I can not draw fast yet if I am not careful I will learn. I swim as a way to slow down.
This is all changing. It is hard work for me to not go fast. I found it easier not to think in terms of going slow rather better to frame it not going fast.
Gotta go I have lots of blogs to read and and then have three jobs that have to get done. Smile
Michael
Yes. I do this ALL the time. I do not like it, and do not like when others do it, because oddly it adds to the anxiety… I am also ADHD, so I have interrupting (impulse control issues) and problems with forgetting what I need to say if I wait too long. Either I forget what I’m going to say, or I have to tune out the person talking. Either way, it sucks and i so wish I could just have a normal conversation!
Thanks for the post. I guess I should get back into therapy. After I get a job.
my husband cannot understand me at times because i speak so quickly. i get pressure of speech and flight of ideas and it all just tumbles every which way. this is the first sign of a switch to gracie aged 6. i can do nothing to alter the speech pattern. and then i either lose time or watch gracie from the sidelines as she prattles on or whatever. various people have said i am bordering on mania when gracie is around but she just needs to go as fast as she can – speech movement etc – in case the devil catches up with her. my other alters have their own speech patterns. one hardly speeks at all and when she does it is in a clearly very depressed manner. one is bossy and one thinks she is all grown up. me – i am just confused a lot of the time and trip over my words because of it.
Let me start by saying that I doubt that you won’t allow this on your site. However, I would appreciate it if you would at least respond to me through an e-mail.
I admit that I haven’t read everything here, but the parts that I read indicate that you think you have multiple personalities, that you were systematically gang-raped by a cult, raped by a dog, raped by your mother, involved in some kind of ceremonies involving blood and feces, and date-raped. Am I leaving anything out?
I am writing you because I genuinely think that you need help. There is a phenomenon known as False Memories, and you exhibit all of the symptoms: You “recovered” these memories late in life (and new ones are still appearing, correct?). These memories are extraordinary and literally nothing even close to them has ever happened, at least from a legal standpoint, before in the history of recorded law. However, things like this are depicted in the media constantly.
I am not trying to say that you are lying or being deceitful. As far as you know, this is all true. I am sure that this all seems real to you, but please, I beg you to at least look into this possibility.
Betrayal Trauma Theory Predicts Amnesia Greatest When :
1. Abuse is by parent or important care-giver (betrayal)
2. Abuse is accompanied by explicit threats demanding silence
3. Abuse context is different from non-abuse context
4. Isolation during abuse
5. Young age at time of abuse
6. Alternative reality defining statements by the offender
7. Lack of discussion of the abuse
Source :
Betrayal Trauma – The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse;
by J. J. Freyd, 1996, Harvard University Press.
http://dynamic.uoregon.edu/~jjf/articles/dimensions.pdf
http://dynamic.uoregon.edu/~jjf/defineBT.html
lagore – read these web-sites. there are good recovered memory resources and there are legal cases with links to the actual case documentation :
http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/tm/tm.html
http://jimhopper.com/
i hope that you take the time to look through these sites.
the first one has a lot of legal stuff.
there are links to scientific literature.
i don’t think many people would want to pretend bad things happen to them. actually, i don’t quite know how anyone could fake the after effects of severe child abuse such that they presented consistantly over many years and with the subtle signs only really recognised by fellow CSA survivors.
i have never been inside a POW camp or a refuge camp or any such place, nor have i personally seen any. but i have had patients who have spent years in such places, whose children were born of rape and then themselves bore children of rape.
i have not seen or been but i do not doubt there stories.
evil is real. and even though we might like to think otherwise, evil is very likely more prevalent than good.
lagore,
you might be interested in this link :
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Taubman_Center/Recovmem/other_pub.html
it is a link to 24 case studies of children who survived the concentration camps of the Holocaust yet had little or no memory of ever having been there.
Hi, Lagore,
I was in therapy with a very good therapist for a few years, and he will be the first person to assure anyone that I am sane. Also, my sister has the same memories (and has always had many of them) of the same abuses, and we have never seen the same therapist.
It is not true that there is no history of severe abuses of children. Check out the Bible. It records evil being perpetrated by societies that was so horrible that God ordered the Israelites to obliterate those societies from the face of the earth. What do you think “sacrificing children” was all about?
If I was not sane, my words would not resonate so deeply with those who have been harmed, and they certainly would not be healing to anyone. As the comments on my blog show, my words do bring healing to others. I have been there and have healed (and continue to heal), and I am sharing my healing journey with other child abuse survivors.
You are welcome to believe or not believe that this level of evil continues to exist in society. My sister and I, as well as many of my readers, do not have the luxury of not believing because we were deeply harmed by that evil. Have you ever considered that the reason this stuff is sometimes addressed in the media is because of its truth?
Have you also considered that survivors of ritual abuse are too ashamed to press charges? Your questions to me in your comment would be nothing compared to a defense attorney in court. I was hurt enough by my abusers and feel no need to be “abused” again by the court system by pressing charges this long after it happened. I would be the one on trial and not my abusers. Who is going to believe the memories of a little kid?
And yet the Internet is filled with images of child pornography — Babies being raped by men and women, children being raped by dogs, etc. Are we to assume that those pictures and videos are all doctored? I agree that these are ugly truths, and I wish that they did not exist — but they do.
I appreciate your concern, but you don’t know me face-to-face. If you did, you would not have these concerns. :0)
Take care,
- Faith
Let me begin by apologizing if the following message seems too harsh or rude, that is not what I intend.
It is certainly possible that you and your sister suffered some abuse as children, as that may explain where some of these seeds were planted in your mind, and may explain some of the current mental health issues you face. But you must understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I do not think you realize just how stunning and earth-shattering these things would be if they were true. There simply has never been any recorded incidents similar to what you are describing (at least as far as I my knowledge).
I do not dispute that child sexual abuse occurs, and is in fact quite common, but I have never heard of a single verifiable incident of “cult” related systematic abuse. The closest thing would seem to be the paranoia surrounding abuses in day care facilities, when dozens of innocent people were falsely thrown in prison based on the outrageous claims with no evidence, simply out of people’s fears (Luckily, they have mostly been freed).
I do not know your sister, or your relationship with her, so I cannot comment on that. But I can say that there have been may cases where a person’s memory is altered (without them realizing it) by the firm suggestion of another person that the event took place. I do not know if this is the case here though.
If I may briefly touch on the subject of religion religion: I hate to question your beliefs, but I’ll admit that I’m curious about how you reconcile the idea that god is all-powerful, all-merciful, and loving, with the fact that he allows things such as this to occur to innocent innocent children?
And to wrap things up: if these things you have said are indeed true, then I do not want to judge you too harshly. But I will say that it is sad that the victims of something like this would sit idly by simply because they were afraid of going to court, or just assumed that you’d lose. I give children more leeway, but you are a grown adult now, and who knows how many more children have been brutalized because no one stepped up?
Again, I apologize if any of this sounds rude, but I am merely curious about your view of these things.
Hi, Lagore.
I do believe that you are not intending to be difficult or rude, which is why I am taking the time to answer your questions. If I thought you were a troublemaker, I would not allow your comments to be published. :0)
“But you must understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ”
This would be true in a court of law. (By the way, I earned my law degree from a very prestigious law school.) I am not trying to put anyone in prison. I have never “named names” on my blog and have not even shared my own real name. The purpose of this blog is to help other people heal. Therefore, I am under no obligation to present “extraordinary evidence.” I am not trying to prove any particular person’s guilt on this blog.
“And I do not think you realize just how stunning and earth-shattering these things would be if they were true.”
Yes, I appreciate how “stunning and earth-shattering” these things are because they happened TO ME when I was just a helpless little girl. Nobody on the planet understands the gravity of all that I have been through more than I do.
My experiences are not the only “stunning and earth-shattering” examples of evil on record. What about the Holocaust, when Jews were hunted down like rats, locked into concentration camps, beaten, starved, tortured, raped, and goodness knows what else?
“There simply has never been any recorded incidents similar to what you are describing (at least as far as I my knowledge).”
I see plenty of such incidents recorded in the comments that other people have written on my blog as well on sites such as http://www.isurvive.org and http://www.asasurvivors.com. What possible reason do we have to make this stuff up?
People did not believe that “hysteria” in the 1800′s was caused by trauma until all these men came home from WWI with “hysteria” symptoms. People still have trouble accepting that DID is a real disorder, even though it is included as a real disorder in the DSM and there are even residential treatment centers dedicated to healing people with DID. Do you really believe that none of those people was severely abused and that all of those mental health professionals have been duped?
The Bible records all sorts of horrors being perpetrated on children. See the following verses:
Leviticus 18:21
2 Kings 17:31
Isaiah 57:5
Ezekiel 23:37
Ezekiel 23:39
Deuteronomy 12:31
2 Kings 17:17
“I do not dispute that child sexual abuse occurs, and is in fact quite common, but I have never heard of a single verifiable incident of “cult” related systematic abuse.”
Again, you keep going back to the court of law. I am not in a court of law, and I am not putting my cult abusers on trial.
There are numerous people who have talked about ritual abuse from all over the world for decades, but society does not want to believe it. The same thing happened in Germany in the early 1940′s when people kept disappearing. There were rumors of prison camps, but nobody wanted to believe it. Even today, with lots of photographs of the Holocaust, some people still prefer to believe that it did not happen rather than face that this level of evil exists on the planet.
The fact that we ritual abuse survivors have chosen to step away and heal rather than pursue a class action in court does not negate what happened to us.
“I do not know your sister, or your relationship with her, so I cannot comment on that. But I can say that there have been may cases where a person’s memory is altered (without them realizing it) by the firm suggestion of another person that the event took place. I do not know if this is the case here though.”
My sister and I have separate memories of the same events, and we have separate memories of similar events (such as me being forced to kill a kitten and her being forced to kill a bird). We have never seen the same therapist. We do not live in the same state and haven’t since I started having flashbacks. I think that a conspiracy theory of how someone managed to tinker with both of our heads separately and aligning them so well is even more farfetched than you seem to believe the truth is.
“If I may briefly touch on the subject of religion religion: I hate to question your beliefs, but I’ll admit that I’m curious about how you reconcile the idea that god is all-powerful, all-merciful, and loving, with the fact that he allows things such as this to occur to innocent innocent children?”
That is a completely different discussion. I will blog on that question. :0)
“And to wrap things up: if these things you have said are indeed true, then I do not want to judge you too harshly. But I will say that it is sad that the victims of something like this would sit idly by simply because they were afraid of going to court, or just assumed that you’d lose. I give children more leeway, but you are a grown adult now, and who knows how many more children have been brutalized because no one stepped up?”
I will save my comments for a separate blog entry on this topic. Short answer — I am not sitting idly by. I am writing a blog, in which I have invested countless hours for no pay, to offer hope and healing to fellow child abuse survivors. I can invest my energy in helping people heal and educating the world about these things really happening, or I can invest my time in rounding up people who are now in their 60′s and 70′s, trying to convince a D.A. to listen to me about something that happened in the 1970′s, and then put myself through what will clearly be a losing battle because the trial (if it ever got that far) would be a trial of my credibility, not of my abusers’ actions. The trial would be public, which would invite the world into my history. My child might be mocked, or even put in danger. I have chosen to invest my energy into helping others heal, not into retribution.
I do believe that you are not intending to be rude. I am happy to answer your questions. Bottom line — One of three things must be true:
1. I am lying (which you do not seem to believe).
2. I am delusional.
3. I am telling the truth.
If I am delusional, then why are my words so healing to others. How is it that someone who is delusional/mentally ill is showing improvement in her life, rather than deterioration, without ongoing therapy and medications for mental illness? How is it that multiple people have told me that my blog has inspired them not to commit suicide and to keep trying to heal? How is it that many readers bring things I say into their own therapy sessions and receive confirmation from their therapists?
Take care,
- Faith
[...] Tags: abuser and prison, child abuse, confrontations, prosecuting abuser On my blog entry entitled Talking Very Fast When Triggered, a reader posted the following comment: And to wrap things up: if these things you have said are [...]
for lagore,
i am pleased for you that you have such a safe and sheltered view of the world. unfortunately, others of us do not. from where do you think the child pornography on the internet originates ? what about children traded as sex slaves ? what about organised paedophilia ? those are things not uncommonly mentioned in the media, do you believe that they exist ? evil is for real – just because you cannot personally see it or have not been involved in it does not mean it is fantasy.
my father and his friend raped me throughout my childhood and i said nothing in order to protect my little sister from the same fate. i was a child – i believed their threats. does my not having told mean that what happened did not happen ? a wise person would not pass judgement on things about which she has no knowledge. maybe you should consider that.
Although, to the best of my memory I was never sexually abused, I would certainly not describe myself as having a sheltered view. I understand as well as anyone the horrific things humans are capable of, but logic still plays into the equation for me. Now, to cover your statements:
The majority of information out there claims that child pornography is mainly created by individual child molesters to trade amongst themselves and that it is rarely, if ever, done as a criminal venture for the purposes of making a profit, simply because it is so risky and there is such low payoff compared to say, narcotics trafficking. I further think that child pornography is FAR more scarce than many people believe it to be. Have you ever stumbled upon it in your years of being on the internet? I certainly haven’t. And I have never known a single person who has, either. Although I’m sure thee is some small-scale or anonymous trading going on, I hihly doubt that there are any massive networks of child pornography hidden across the internet, as many would have you believe.
I further believe that most experts will tell you that the child sex trade is mainly active among less-developed regions such as central Africa, southeast Asia, eastern Europe, and parts of Latin America. True that there is a thrive sex tourism industry in countries such as Cambodia and Thailand (if 20/20 is to be believed), but the western world functionally has no operating child sex trade, excepting the
I am very sorry that you were abused as a child, and again, I am not disputing that abuse happens and is very widespread. But I am very skeptical when people describe any sort of organized child molestation group.
I think that there has been virtually no organized paedophilia at all, if you were to look at the history of it, other than some family members or possibly two associates acting together. I have never once heard of large organizations of many members sexually abusing children.
This is because the massive taboo that surrounds paedophilia is enough to keep most of these molesters from telling anyone about it. Not family, not friends, not a psychiatrist, and certainly not strangers in hopes of organizing a club of fellow molesters. And perhaps most importantly, paedophilia is incredibly rare. I’m sure that it doesn’t feel that way to the visitors to this site, who have experiencedchild sexual abuse first hand. And although figures about this disorder are scarce, to say the least, it is certiainly less than one percent. So logically, it would be incredibly difficult for several paedophiles to find each other, confirm that that all are indeed child molesters, and boldly organize a group.
Again, I am terribly sorry about what happened to you, Gracie. I do not doubt you, but when someone makes incredibly extraordinary claims that are unlike anything that have ever been proven before in the history of human civilization (again, the bible DOES NOT COUNT, Faith), then I personally require more than anecdotal evidence, or else I assume that the events did not occur.
Hi, Lagore.
Did you see the episode that Oprah aired last year about Internet child pornography? According the officer she interviewed, significantly more resources were needed to follow up on all of the leads because 98% of the leads were not even being pursued due to limited resources. I wrote about this here:
http://faithallen.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/combating-child-exploitation-act-of-2008/
This one has a link to all on that topic:
http://faithallen.wordpress.com/2008/09/27/protect-our-children-act-passed/
Considering that child pornography is illegal, I am not surprised that you have no stumbled upon it. You might want to check out more from the episode of Oprah. The officer invented a program that can trace the child pornography to the source. He made it sound like it was a HUGE undertaking.
I seriously doubt that abusers are only 1% of the population. That might be the statistic for those who are prosecuted. None of mine ever were (to my knowledge). Most abused children don’t tell, much less prosecute.
The stats I do know is that 1 in 3-4 women are sexually abused by age 18 and 1 in 5-7 men are also sexually abused by age 18. (The statistics vary by study.) I think 1% of the population would have to be quite active to harm up to 33% of the female population.
Take care,
- Faith
I tend to shy away from Oprah since she has been known to endorse some very odd, unscientific concepts, but if this officer she interviewed seems legitimate, I would certainly take that into consideration. After all, that particular opinion of mine was just an assumption, I know very little about the subject of child pornography other than the few times it’s come up in the news.
I am well aware of the high percentage of sexual abuse victims, and admittedly I think that figure factors in sexual abuse of teenagers and young adults under the age of eighteen, such as date rape. But still, I absolutely think that there are a large number of prepubescent children (the definition of paedophilia) who are abused by some incredibly prolific abusers. I doubt very much that any of them stop at just one or two. Unfortunately I cannot remember the exact figure, and I would hate to make one up, but I do remember being shocked when I heard the average number of children an abuser abuses before they are caught (IF they are caught).
Bear in mind that 1% would still be one of every hundred people. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I think that humans as a whole are saintly, as a matter of fact I tend to hate most people. But even I think that a higher number, like 10% would be a pretty bleak outlook.
i think that it is very sad that you “tend to hate most people “.
why is that ?
i cannot imagine hating most people, actually i cannot think of anyone that i hate.
Oh, it’s a long story, and I’m sure that you’d just think I’m far too judgmental of people.
But sufficed to say that from what I see in my day-to-day life it really seems like the people around me lack any sort of proper moral compass in the things that are important to me.
I hear you, Lagore. When I come across people who are honest and compassionate, I view them as rare gems. :0)
- Faith
[...] my intensity shows itself through talking very fast. Other times, it shows itself through working tirelessly to complete a project as I take on the [...]