@Chasingsunsets @Taali @MissGremlin @PeppyPatti @Bunnykins @Shaz51 @TAB
I wrote a prose about the trauma memories sparked by yesterdays traumatic nightmare but turned into self revelation about those distant and confusing times in my early life.
Trauma Memories — Horror Relived
My memories are not always clear pictures.
Neither can they be always exact events
For my child is deeply buried by time,
not only me terrorised by fears.
Sometimes they are only fragments,
traumatic moments flashing
like broken film clips played too fast.
Overwhelming sensations.
Bodily feelings speaking in extremes.
Sudden fears beyond understanding.
Loneliness and grief without words.
A tightening chest.
Voices frightening.
Shadows chasing.
Suddenly the forgotten child within
is no longer remembering bad times,
but painfully reliving them.
For my trauma did not always live in words.
More often it hid beneath emotional layers,
inside overwhelming moments
I lived long ago.
Trauma stored years of terror within me,
creating a highly reactive nervous system
because of terrible things that happened to me.
Breaths held far too long.
Muscles tensed into injury.
Constant danger ruling my mind.
Forced to relive horrors from the past,
with a mind thrown into turmoil,
a heart beating wildly,
through countless sleepless nights
and terrible stored sensations,
where dying again and again
felt as if fear would never end.
Most of my memories
returned in this manner.
Never neat stories,
but storms breaking open.
Bits and pieces.
Floating images.
Lost feelings.
Terrors without explanation.
Many times I doubted myself,
for trauma often buries truth
beneath utter confusion.
Yet slowly,
with gentleness instead of force,
with truth instead of accusation,
with safety instead of panic,
with mercy instead of judgment,
with love instead of hate,
the buried child began speaking.
For the trauma memories
had not come to destroy me,
but to reveal
what had long remained hidden.
And I finally began to see:
What I called weakness
was often survival.
What I despised as madness
was more often than not
terror that had never been given a voice.
What I experienced as shame
was often unbearable pain
carried alone far too long.
Healing did not come
through winning battles against myself.
Healing came
when truth no longer demanded
that I hate
the wounded child within me.
For trauma memories
are not merely about the past.
They are about learning,
at last,
that the frightened child
never deserved abandonment
in the first place.
