TW : PTSD, Body Memories and Me

Going through therapy, as a survivor, you learn that all those weird aches and pains you have are connected to the abuse you went through.

I have spent years suffering from neck pain, I have spent years having this investigated from a+e admissions to specialists to scans to physiotherapy with nothing being found to be wrong.

Absolutely nothing, no infections, no abnormalities, no degeneration, nothing.

But, the medics still investigated it, still treated me with care and respect. All because these neck problems stop my breathing.

Yes, you read that right, these neck problems stop my breathing. My breathe is cut off, I cannot breathe.

It isn't asthma, it isn't abnormal swallowing or apnoea or any other physical, treatable condition.

It is a body memory.

My abuser attempted to strangle me, as a kid, when he abused me. He placed his huge adult hand around my tiny child neck and pressed his thumb hard against my windpipe.

Re read that.

I survived that, for some reason. He was disturbed doing it and dropped me to the floor.

That experience I blocked out for a long time. I simply could not remember it. Even when, as an adult, I had moments of being unable to breathe followed by gasping chocking fits. Even when I stopped breathing in my sleep, awakened by the chocking fits.

It wasn't until I had a mental breakdown and started remembering the abuse and learnt about body memories, that I was able to connect all my neck problems to the abuse I endured.

I have had to relive the abuse during therapy. It isn't pleasant to do this. To work through flashbacks.

Body memories are physical flashbacks rather than mind flashbacks and therapy needs to help you understand, cope with and work through both types of flashbacks.

I have spent the last five years doing that and now, when my breath stops I can calmly deal with it.

I look after myself, give myself a wee hug, tell myself I'm safe now, that it is no longer real, no longer happening.

Of course it still causes problems, I still have problems with eating and drinking. Dribbling tea everywhere is hazard but I can laugh it off now. I can wake, chocking from sleep but calm myself and try to sleep again.

I survived

Unsureity and made up words

I haven't posted anything for a while.

However, I have a back log of drafts in various states of completeness awaiting either the delete or publish button.

I haven't posted because I've had a mental fall-back. A fall-back to the darker days of my breakdown when I was trying to deal with being a survivor by researching everything I could about child abuse.

It was a never ending rabbit warren of victims, over and over, failed and punished by those around them.

It lead me to some stark places of paranoia and despair in the darker recesses if my mind and I don't know how I managed to crawl out of it, but I did and I don't want to go back to that place.

If I do, I know I won't make it back and will spend the little life I have left, dribbling into a metaphorical straight jacket.

The thing which comforts me and brings me back to a level I can cope with, is that, through the entire history of human writing, these things have been written about.

It's all there in plain view once you are willing to see it.

The great literatists of eons past have repeated over and over the murky cycle of abuse which permeates throughout the centuries.

They knew, they wrote.

They told it in fantasy and legends and myths.

They explained everything and that's why they're the greats.

And still today, the great writers come, concocting fantasy realms integrated with the present to give you the escape, comfort and comeradiree to know you aren't alone, you aren't the only one and sometimes, the only way to cope, the only way to exist, is through make believe.

It's less painful than the truth.