“Each morning I wake up, …”

I found this on my phone notes. A quickly jotted down pile of words. An attempt to channel the battle between longing for it all to go, pushing memories away, or fooling yourself you’re OK today, to inescapably be encompassed by it all still.

Traumatic memories tend to not enjoy being pushed away. The more you ignore them, the more frequent and intense they become. This is because they are fragmented pieces of memories that aren’t processed just yet. And they’ll keep changing themselves and bothering you until you give them the care and attention they need to process.

At the beginning, and still sometimes now, I found this confusing, disorientating and upsetting. As if my brain was broken. I felt vulnerable and out of control. Like when I was allowing the memories to run free it meant they were winning. He was winning. But the more time has gone on, the closer I’ve allowed myself to get to the memories, and the more in control I have felt.

Blog soon on fragmented memories and flashbacks and the differing experiences I’ve had in reaction to them.