Trauma Memories
I have a host of memories that I’ll call trauma memories. I was molested as a little girl of about 4 and it was so horrifying, that I suppressed it for a very long time. I had so many symptoms of this abuse, but having not been taught about it I just moved through life not understanding it for a long time. After I had children and was in the middle of a career transition, I began meditating and studying psychology for a master’s degree. This process was part of me remembering my trauma. It was as if a part of myself had decided, “We will open this Pandora’s box when you are ready and can cope with it.”
I began to learn a range of therapeutic skills and I started remembering pieces of what happened to me. First smaller parts and then larger. Some of it came back to me in meditation, some doing introspective work in school, and some while I was in somatic therapy and other healing settings. At first I just wanted to deny them. They were terrifying to remember, shocking to revisit and absolutely overwhelming. One of the hardest parts about them was the questioning that naturally arose. How do memories from so long ago resurface? How clear are they? What if my view as a child has distorted them?
As I worked with my trauma, I experienced what is written about in the landmark book, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk, MD. They body will tell you the truth about your trauma experience whether you can remember it or not. That gave me some relief from the constant desire of the mind to want to make sense out of all the fragments of memory.
But even beyond this undeniable source of truth (our bodies), we have the validity of our experience. We are individually so unique and our sensitivities vary wildly. Two people can experience the same thing and come away with totally different feelings and responses to it. So one way to hold ourselves is to just accept that if we are hurting that is enough. We do not need to compare, analyze and categories them. When some wound speaks, our job is to listen and apply love.
