On my blog entry entitled Controlling the Darker Parts of Ourselves after Child Abuse, a reader posted the following comment:
What if [your emotions] don’t come ONE at a time?!? What if its a flood? I might be able to deal with all of the emotions if I could control them, and release them one at a time! But that isn’t how it happpens for me! I don’t get a choice with how fast they happen, or which ones to ‘let out.’ It just happens on its own. ~Theresa
I strongly recommend that Theresa and anyone else dealing with this issue read Chrystine Oksana’s Safe Passage to Healing. She has a great chapter entitled Associating Emotions that deals with just about any question you might have about dealing with emotions.
Here is some advice that she has to offer on the subject:
Associating dissociated emotions may be confusing for a while. Survivors have coped with skewed emotions for so long that distorted emotions feel normal. Many have to learn basics such as how natural emotions feel and what they are… Survivors usually avoid associating emotions until they feel overwhelmed. It comes a question of which is worse—living with unbearable tension or coping with unbearable feelings. A better approach is to schedule emotional release on a regular basis. Even five minutes a day can help…If five minutes feels like too much, start with thirty seconds, increase it to a minute, and so on. With each release, you will feel stronger, more alive, more energized, and more genuine. ~ Safe Passage to Healing, pp. 228-229
Until you allow yourself to begin to feel your emotions, you are going to stay in this hellish place. The healing process has its own rhythm, and it knows what it is doing. If you will release yourself into the guidance of your healing process and release emotions as you feel the need, you will experience an incredible about of healing. The more you fight it, the more painful and stressful the process will become.
I strongly recommend working together with your therapist as you begin allowing yourself to experience your emotions. If you are afraid to “let go” in private, then perhaps doing so under the supervision of your therapist will help you feel safer to do it.
When I first released my anger, I feared that it would rage on and on. In reality, it was an intense 20 minutes, but then it was over for that session. I did not hurt myself or anyone else, and the feeling was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.
If you keep doing what you have always done (repressing the emotions), you are going to keep getting the same results. It takes courage to risk feeling your emotions, but it really is a key part of healing. You will be amazed at how much better you feel afterward.
Photo credit: Amazon.com
Blooming Lotus 
i understand this post. i dont ‘like’ any of the ‘memories’ or flashbacks or dreams. but i wanted to fill in my blanks for so long. i have times like the last 3 days when anxiety and ‘depression'(which i agree w the one person who answered…it is really just exhaustion..we survivors had a lifetime during and after the abuse of exhaustion. i am sooooo tired). anyways.. so the last 3 days ive been ill with such anxiety. nit started at work. i felt like my father was around every corner. i couldnt think. my hands had pains in them ice cold and bone beep in my joint aching. body memory???? scared me. and i was charting and felt like someone had their hands on my back bare skin. noone was there. body memory??? i dont know. but i went home as soon as possible and actually was physically so ill. i slept and didnt dream. but i cant call it rest. im still exhausted. i could easily become agoraphobic and never leave my safe haven ive created. its as close to safe as i can get. my dog near me. my girls sleeping safe. 5 a.m. and the alarm set on my house. but am i safe?? no. because until i remember and walk thru the memories i wont heal. so i can choose to be that woman who freaked out at work inside (others didnt know) and come home and sleep, hide, even slit my wrists. but i dont want to. some days im not brave enough. or strong enough. and im gonna run. but trust me. id rather have all my memories even the evil ones so i can be rid of the intense heart stopping fear and anxiety of all that my mind/brain somewhere remembers and body doesnt forget. its a choice. no one asks for this pain. noone wants it. we dont deserve it. just the horrific incomprehensible stuff i recall is enough to make me want to block the memories or kill myself..thus kill the memories. / but. i look at my dog. the one that was a puppy noone else wanted..and they all wanted to ‘put down’ and i wouldnt. in a way.. he saved me. he gave me that extra push i needed to change my circumstances and leave a bad marriage where my ex husband reminded me of my father and i would actually get the 2 people mixed up in my head. it was screwed up. so i look at my slleping crippled up needy wonderful dog. and i wouldnt leave him for the world. my first memory of my father was him killing kicking to death our family dog. and you know what. until i remembered that..i never pieced together why dogs..this dog..other dogs..all dogs..matter sooooo much to me. maybe im just rambling here and im sorry if i am. i hope someone will find something out of reading this. so. yes. i want my memories. all of them. /scarey undertaking coming up for me. i have a huge box of slides. i bought a slide projector….we will see what ..if anything comes from my seeing our vacations and christmas’s. im scared to death. / but. i dont want to be that woman who had to get home as fast as possible ,sick, vomit, and anxiety and fear. i want peace. i may never find it. but i do know that i will never even come close to PEACE if i dont process and remember. and they are my memories. one thing i dont want HIM to have taken along with so so much. i may be tired. or exhausted. or depressed. but i want to heal. and live. not merely survive. even tho 3 days ago i would have given anything to be run over by a bus just to escape. im still here. and glad beyond words he is dead in physical body. but he does still live in the corners of my mind and around some corners in my thoughts and i want him gone. not me. malanie
maybe im just rambling here and im sorry if i am.
Malanie, I found Faith’s blog recently and you speak the truth miss, hope you carry on as much as you ever want, never be sorry for this…
And Faith this post speaks to me right now. For the first time last week during flashbacks of oral rape when I was a toddler I yelled ‘F*** off’ to my dad, ‘get off her’ and I told myself, ‘my poor little one’, over and over again. This lasted maybe 15 mins max but was so cathartic and since then I have been able to be angry and cut off from a ‘friend’ in my life who was actually emotionally abusive. Powerful…
I still struggle so much with my memories, but its times like this i know it is better to remember than to block out…
Much more to say but will leave it for now as don’t want to hog your comment space, i am such a newcomer too, but please know I am SO grateful for your sharing and sharing of others here…
Hi, A x.
Thank you for sharing your experience because it makes dealing with memories much more accessible to my readers. If it is just me saying to do it, then people can think that there is something “special” about me. However, when others share their similar experiences, readers are more likely to see that this really does work!
Please don’t limit yourself in commenting because you are a newcomer. You are a welcome addition, and your voice is just as important as anyone else’s voice here. :0)
– Faith
A x i agree w faith. please please talk. dont limit what u say. ive gained so much by what others say. ok? its cathartic to talk on here too. im not brave enuf yet to cut some people i shld out of my life but it helps to hear u say u did. malanie
Faith,
“the feeling was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.”
That is one possibility. There are others that I experienced. For a while I blamed myself maybe I was not doing it right.
I had to find a way that worked for me and my experiences not what would work for someone else or different experiences.
That expressing the emotions is the way from me to heal I have in common with you. The results in the immediate were well from being amazing.
I expect it has to do with the physical baseline which has to do with what has been experienced and what one is experiencing in the now.
When I express deep emotions for seconds it takes days to recover.. If things do not go well the memories go back to where they came from and it might be years before I can get back to them and it is harder each time.
As a practical matter I have to spend much effort to know where and who I am. It is still hard for me to find my way home from therapy. Not a hard as it was.
I write so that if someone else does not experience the same thing and reads this perhaps they can not blame themselves. This is well beyond we are all different. I needed to accept that what I needed to do and how I did it was fundamentally different and often the opposite. Again I expect it is a physical thing.
Hi, MFF.
I appreciate you sharing your experience. You are correct that different people will have different reactions, and I don’t want someone to think that having a different experience from me means that they “did it wrong.”
– Faith
I know you did not mean that people were doing it wrong.
It took a lot of work to dare to trust that what I experience is often different than most people that are healing from trauma and that I needed to do things differently. I just thought that I would put it out there that it is possible to heal in fundamentally different ways from trauma that is fundamentally different. Not worse just different.
Journey on,
Michael
The permission to feel…
This is a big issue for me as well. My therapist makes a point of reminding me that emotions are like waves, they come and go. I said asked her about the wave crushing you. She said that no one has ever died from an emotion. She wasn’t talking about suicide, she just meant that feeling an emotion doesn’t kill you. She acknowledged that it may FEEL like it’s going to kill you but that emotions have peaks and drops. If I wait through and just stay present with it, it will fall off and I will still be alive.
I am presently reading this book, going through it with the help of the T. It does contain a lot of good information.
Emotions – ugh. I’m fortunate to be involved with a DID group 1x/month, and this month the topic was emotions. How to name/recognize them; suggestions on how to express them; the Ts provided some insight of how someone experiences emotions much differently if they have a trauma background versus someone who doesn’t have a trauma background; and how it is a lot of work to ‘reconcile’ emotions.
For instance: Shame and guilt are emotions that I recognize and feel very easily – those emotions were reinforced time and time again while being abused, so much so that I feel them constantly, it is “normal.”
But to feel happiness is overwhelming and very uncomfortable. It frightens me to feel happiness, in many ways. One of the Ts commented that the body can easily misinterpret happiness, too. That one of the physical reactions for happiness (or excitement/joy) could be the heart rate increases, or body gets warmer – and these physical reactions to an emotion are similar physical reactions to fear; so, the mind can become easily confused and overwhelmed because happiness/fear “feel” the same physically.
I’ve got a lot of work to do on being able to recognize and feel comfortable ‘sitting’ with my emotions, but I think it can be done!
wtr
wantstorun,
thank you so much for your comment, especially the part you shared from one of the therapist saying that the body can misinterpret happiness.
I never realized this before and I can totally see that this is somehting that has been happening to me my whole life.
I appreciate the insight….now to apply it, aaarrggghhh.
barbi
I am still at a loss though as to how to feel safely. In the past when I have “let go” I have had complete time loss only to find that I had tried to kill myself. While inpatient where I should have been safe to feel, I also disassociated and lost control only to be threatened with a transfer to a general unit not specialized in trauma recovery and told to “behave”. I have found no safe way or safe place to feel so I just don’t. I would love to , but I just feel like I have no options.
Hi DIDdenial,
In the past the same went for me: several long inpatient treatments, while having no clue why happened to me what did and the absolute need to ‘behave and be good’ there out of fear for the consequences, which lead to more dissociation and feeling out of control. I had a very very selfdestructive alter part. But I didn’t know who she was back then.
I beleve I read in a previous comment you still struggle with being multiple (hence your screenname). I could relate to that too. However: I found out that the key (for me) to get out of the situation I was in was internal communication. Even though I kept (and still keep) having periods of fierce denial (though hardly now because of being multiple), in between I tried to get to know that selfdestructive part. Now, every dissociative system is different and personal, so I don’t know how you experience it. But for me the big BIG change came, when I had a look inside in the internal landscape there and could visually see that angry part that drove me into destruction and found out that she wasn’t an adult, but a child (I thought she was 12, now I know she is only 9!). Then when my therapist and I kept talking to her and win her trust (a very long and wobbly road with lots of huge bumps), we came to realize how scared and hurt she was. She did what she did because she saw no other solution and thought she had to deal with it all on own. Now she is my friend and biggest comfort inside.
The point being: if you lose time, it means some alter part is out front. If you don’t have contact with this part, try an open attitude and try to invite the part out, get to know it. Listen to what story it brings. It has important things to tell you. If you stay scared of it (like I was with my destructive alter part), it stays in control and keeps spiralling downwards. While it just wants to be heard and to be helped in one way or another, but doesn’t find the way on it’s own. If you get to know it, you will be able to change how it feels and gradually, with time and building trust, you will lose less time because of this part. I am fully co-conscious of her now all the time. All parts of me have their own healing process to go through, their own story, their own grieving to do. But they don’t have to do it on their own anymore. All of them are in contact at least with my therapist now.
And to underline my point of the importance of internal communication: since we got to know each other better inside, her self-destructive behaviour has ceased completely and I haven’t been in hospital since. There are still other very troubled parts in me and a few I myself don’t know yet, but the communication inside now and back then is a world of difference.
This is just my take on these things. You don’t have to agree. But I hope it gives you some sort of hope and perspective for how it can evolve. Good luck to you!