Believing Your Own “Unbelievable” Memories

On my blog entry entitled How to Work through Memories of Child Abuse, a reader posted the following comment:

my major problem is owning he memory. How can you own it when the memories are so unreal? Alot of my memories are about rituals and torture, and sexual games, trying to tell yourself this was your life you just don’t remember it is so unreal. How do you believe the memories and work through them when they are so evil and weird that your mind couldn’t even think such things let alone believe them? ~ Kelly

On yesterday’s blog entry, I focused on the bigger picture of believing your own memories. Today, I am going to focus on believing the “unbelievable” memories – those that are too horrible, sadistic, etc. to be believed.

I have had to work through “unbelievable” memories more times than I can count. If you have read my story, then you understand why. I had to work through the reality of what I endured, and my reality happened to be “unbelievable” in many respects. I did not choose to be abused, nor did I choose the types of abuses that I suffered. The “unbelievable” element of the abuse I suffered is not under my control, but I always have a choice to believe myself.

One of the comments to my blog entry yesterday summed this up nicely:

It sounds as though the path to healing is the road of acceptance. I had not realized it before, but what you said about getting better when you accepted your memories and getting worse when you denied them, is exactly what has been happening to me. hmmmmmm…. sounds easier then it is. ~ Barbi

Healing from child abuse really is that simple – unfortunately, simple is not the same thing as easy.

The key is to stop fighting yourself. When you experience a flashback (recover a memory), you are releasing some of the trauma that, up until this point, you have been using an enormous amount of energy to repress. This is a natural part of the healing process that will go much more smoothly if you will simply accept the memory at face value. Yes, it will be shocking and upsetting, and the release of the memory will come with the release of emotions related to that incident. If you will choose to embrace the memory as “mine” and express the accompanying emotions, then you will not spend too much time dealing with that particular trauma. Accept and release it, and the flashback loses its power.

If you spend a lot of time questioning whether this could have really happened and/or fighting the memory and emotions, the process is going to move a lot slower. The natural process of healing to is release it all, but you are acting as a roadblock by fighting it. The more you fight the natural flow of healing, the more pain you will experience for a longer period of time. It sucks, but the only way over the pain is straight through it.

Once you choose to believe yourself, no matter what comes up, the process gets significantly easier – still painful, but easier. As you learn to work with yourself, you will develop strategies to get through the most “unbelievable” memories.

For example, I recovered a memory of being forced to perform sexual acts on my younger sister. At first, I fought it because it was “unbelievable.” I had never heard of this form of abuse, and it made no “sense.” I thought child abuse was about the abuser getting sexual pleasure out of the experience, and S (my most sadistic abuser) was present and forcing this contact but seemingly got nothing out of it (was not a participant). I finally recognized that I needed to believe myself, even if I was “wrong.”

Then, I moved into fighting it because I could not handle it. If I was my sister’s abuser, then I really was “one of them” and just wanted to die. My own healing process dispelled this fear by releasing a montage of mini-flashes of my sister being forced to perform sexual acts on me. I “knew” at a heart level that neither of us were the abusers – both were being forced by S (and others). This freed me to accept the memory and deal with. Processing the guilt, shame, horror, anger, etc. was excruciating, but I was able to release this, which brought an enormous amount of healing.

Photo credit: Hekatekris