Dream or memory??

Potentially TRIGGERING !!

This is going to sound so jumbled and confusing because my thoughts are all over the place at the moment.

Last week I saw 2 people that sexually assualted me almost 40 years ago when I was 8 years old. It sent me into a bit of a tail spin and I’ve had a hard time coping since then. I’m like a duck on a pond, all calm on the surface but paddling like $hit underneath.

Stepping back a bit here - I started seeing a councillor last year regarding my past sexual abuse. Aside from the group assault (the 2 people I saw were from the group), there was a single sexual assault when I was 10 and then the worst of any of the abuse I suffered happened when I was 11 and 12 by an old man known to the family. My councillor knows EVERYTHING, every horrible little detail. One of the things he has said to me was how much worse things would have been if a pregnancy had resulted. I agreed, I always thought myself lucky (for a better word) that that never happened.

A few nights ago I had what I can only describe as a really dis-jointed dream. As a child I always spent the September school holidays at a friends farm about 300kms from my town. This dream was about a holiday I had there. It was like watching photographs as they were being taken. The photos were of an event that did happen when I was there, but the photos were taken out of order. I woke up crying, my husband was already up, he had got up early to go spraying before it got too hot, so he didn’t see me, and I haven’t told him about it.

I remember everything that happened to me when I was a child, but I’m not sure if this was a dream or a flash back??

One of the things we discussed at a councilling session was that the old man used to ask if I had started getting

my period, which was, to me as a child, hugely embarrassing and something I didn’t want to discuss with this old man so I always said no - never realising why it was important to him (knew nothing about sex Ed back then). That’s why my councillor said it would have been so much worse.

I have now gone over and over this event that I dreamed about. My period has never been regular right from the start. When the abuse was at it worst, being more frequent, the September holidays came and I went to the farm. I was in the bathroom because I did have my period and I went to change the pad. I was really uncomfortable, I wasn’t having cramps or in pain, but when I went to change the pad it was a total mess !! I remember feeling hugely embarrassed and wondering how I was going to dispose of the pad so I opened the window and through it into the overgrown garden. I slipped out of the house later, picked it up and ran down to a timber area and discarded it there.

I’ve always remebered that event as feeling embarrassed - but now I’m remembering it as the mess on the pad, that’s why I’m now confused as to wether this was just a dream or was it a flash back. The closest I’ve ever had to a flash back was to do with when I was 10 (the first time I “stepped out” and went somewhere else in my mind while I was being assaulted, so I can’t remeber the actual assault) but I get a flash, like a photograph of looking down on my body.

I honestly feel that the whole event in the bathroom was a miscarriage. I have had miscarriages between my pregnancies when my husband and I were having our family, I knew they were miscarriages because the pregnancy tests were always an undeniable positive, but I never had any pain or cramps.

How can I remember every horrible detail of what happened as a child, but not this? How could I have not remebered this? Why now?? I’m so angry with myself, another great big fu€king red flag that everyone missed, myself included !!

I can’t even describe how sad I feel right now. Sad doesn’t even come close to how I’m feeling, god how I wish I could erase every damn memory in my brain. This pain just never ends