REMEMBERING

Some of you showed interest from the last repost I did a couple of weeks ago from the book, "The Courage to Heal." That being said, I will repost a few more chapters from the book in the next few weeks. Some are more sensitive and explicit. For those I will put up a Trigger Warning.

Keep in mind this is from three years ago. I am much different today! These were my thoughts three years ago.

Today's repost pertains to Remembering from the book. Below is the original post. You will see where I was on my journey back then:



* * REMEMBERING* *
There is a lot to cover in this chapter. So I will take piece by piece for each one and blog about it in different posts.

“The experience of remembering abuse varies greatly from survivor to survivor. Many women have always remembered their abuse. They may have minimized its importance, denied its impact on their lives, or been numb to their feelings, but they have never forgotten the events themselves. One woman explained, ‘I could rattle off the facts of my abuse like a grocery list, but remembering the fear and terror and pain was another matter entirely.’” (Courage to Heal)

I can relate to this woman in not being able to recall the fear, terror or pain. I do have the memories of hiding in my bedroom closet to avoid my brother’s advances, so I must have felt fear at the time, even though at this point I cannot actually “feel” the memory.

“Some women have blocked out entire segments of their childhood. For instance, they may not remember anything at all-or only the slightest fragments-before the age of seven. Other survivors have selective or partial memory. They remember some occurrences but not others.” (Courage to Heal)

As far as I can recall, I have always remembered my abuse to some degree. Throughout my years, I could recall the incidents in my mind, but never thought that they had any effect on how I relate, until I finally realized that they did!!

Within these past few months in t. I recalled, after finding a picture that was taken around the time my brother was abusing me, my uncle’s great nephew or someone like that (only met him that one time), who was around my age or a year older, we were visiting them, he made both verbal and sexual advances on me. It is amazing to even have a photograph of that very evening (of us all) and this pervert who I had to fight off grabbing me at every opportunity throughout the night until my family and I left to go home. I do remember being very, very naive and giggling a lot. On the car ride back home, I recall telling both my parents and even my brother who was with us what this idiot tried to do. Naturally, what I said was ‘poo-pooed’ and nothing ever came up about it again.