The mind can be our greatest ally, and our greatest enemy also. Some survivors automatically repress the memory of their experiences as a way of coping, by believing they never happened we are able to move on and go forwards with our lives. Unfortunately we can only bury memories for so long before they resurface.
It all started really when I was 16. I'd had a couple of years of blissfully repressed memory, not really affecting me in the slightest, but then I began to have some severe problems. I was studying for my A levels when I started suffering from depression. The condition quickly worsened and I started self harming and having episodes of amnesic dissociation. Basically, I would wake up, or just come to my senses, and realise I had a black spot in my memory. This would often turn out to have incorporated a violent or destructive outburst. I remember once waking up in my room one morning surrounded by ripped up paper of an essay I was supposed to be handing in, with cuts on my ankles and still fully clothed. I'd have no memory of falling asleep, no recollection of how things were damaged or of hurting myself. Sometimes I'd just find bruises or cuts and have absolutely no clue how or when they'd happened.
At the time, I was put on anti-depressants and sent to appointments with both a psychiatrist and a psychologist. The psychiatrist mainly just prescribed the anti depressants, and we had to change them several times because of their side effects. Eventually he gave up on them entirely because only the last one I just began responding to had the side effect of making me bruise extremely easily, which is a risky sign, and I was too young to be tried on any other drugs at the time. He once spoke about wanting to put me into hospital for observation and further evaluation, but decided against it purely because I was due to take my exams soon. I've sometimes wondered what would have happened if I had gone into hospital care back then, would it have really helped?
The psychologist was always giving me tests, multiple choice or questionnaires to find out what was going wrong in my mind. This was how we discovered the dissociation was a part of the problem. The thing neither of them evre found out was the memories that were troubling me. I actually recall few details of my visits there because I was so distressed when I went that I found myself having panic attacks. I would sit there in the chair shaking and sometimes crying a little, not saying much unless asked a question. I didn't make their jobs easy but I am unsure if they really noticed what was going on. I never spoke up about the abuse because I was still so terrified, and wanted to get better but couldn't even bear to go near the building in the end. I recall the last visit to the psychologist he started pressuring me with questions about abuse specifically, I think at that point he had figured it out but I was far too scared by the pressure in the way he was asking that I clammed up completely and didn't go back after that.
For a couple of weeks after I was sent to group therapy for people with emotional problems, because I said I often didn't know what I was actually feeling. Unfortunately I panicked more, I was 16 in a group full of people old enough to be my parents being patronised by the people running the group giving me forms with lots of words describing emotions. I knew what they were, I just couldn't tell how I was feeling inside.
I was also assaulted around that time, a couple of girls at a fair decided they didn't like the way I dressed so they got me in a headlock and twisted my head around, ripping all of my neck muscles, then tore out a lot of my hair and kicked me, kneeing me in the face a fair few times as well. Although the injuries didn't come out for a few days, I spent months in a neckbrace in agony trying to exercise my neck to rebuild the muscles and suffered another devastating blow to my already shattered confidence, which made it virtually impossible to consider continuing therapy.
Another problem I had back then was the flashbacks. I know other survivors are probably familiar with this experience, the vivid reliving of traumatic memories which flood back almost without warning. Because the memories had been repressed and in effect forgotten for so long I found it particularly troubling to go through it all again in my head. A lot of these episodes were accompanied by the amnesia again, I know this because people I was with at the time had since told me what happened to help fill in the gaps. I still don't remember but I have no reason not to believe them. Apparently one time I thought my boyfriend at the time was my abuser during a flashback, which was traumatising for him as well as me. I can't imagine what it must be like to try and deal with someone who is reliving the past and thinks you are trying to hurt them...
Emotionally I was a yoyo, I found myself bouncing backward and forward between happiness and extreme depression, often without reason. My moods would switch like a light in the space of anything from a few minutes to sometimes weeks at a time in one state of mind. It was impossible to control or describe, but I can only assume it is yet another effect of the repressed memory resurfacing.
In the end, all of these issues resulted in the dissolving of my first real relationship when my boyfriend could not support me, my next boyfriend leaving me because he couldn't cope with me "being crazy" and my academic results plummetting, leaving me to abandon my dreams of going to university and acheiving highly and settle for whatever crap job I could get.
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