ok. everybody take a breath in. everyone’s different and their processes are different and this is us talking about what we know of ourself. ok breathe out.
we were reading many voices newsletter, as one does, and found this advice from Kim Kubal in Healing From Ritual Abuse: “Re-experiencing and releasing the cult memories”. which is something many other folks talk about quite a bit and we’d consider a staple of did specific therapy.
and also Keepers talk in “Too Much Repressed Memory Work” about how being pressured to remember things, in a very extreme way that was actually unprofessional, was damaging to them. and this was in the issue before the article mentioned above.
the international society for the study of trauma and dissociation aka isstd have the dubious honour of being the medical experts on did. they recommend to have three stages for did therapy: stabilization of symptoms, integration of trauma memories, and eventually full integration and “rehabilitation”. some folks even politely note that very few people reach the last stage and the whole process is really long anyway.
so like. why are we, like us specifically, so hung up on trauma processing. and we’re so hung up on it that our therapy man had to explicitly tell us that no, we don’t need to go looking for things in the past. no, he doesn’t need to know. no, it’s ok if it comes up and he’s more interested in helping us move through times like this with less pain.
for one potential reason, the Kubal’s story resembles many stories we’ve heard from other plurals. it could be because they are more believed and therefore publicized. could be also because these folks theoretically got through the stabilization part of things and are more capable of communicating their current experiences. the days before feeling stable could be really hard and scary and maybe few want to talk about it or are capable of talking about it. because how long does “stabilization” take anyway? how do you know you’ve reached it. who gets to say that.
we’ve been trucking through our therapy work and we keep cornering ourselves into jogging up memories and that rarely helped us. our therapy man never asked us to remember anything and stops us from jumping hurriedly deep into memory. maybe we don’t need to know every single detail of every single bad thing that happened. but we sure feel like we have to.