Childhood Trauma and My Blogging Philosophy

I put up a post in August ( https://apostateturtle.com/?p=843 ) in which I shared a video but didn’t explain why I thought it was important. This was quite the oversight because I actually thought it was deeply relatable, and that it both described my approach to blogging (and life in general) and also helped me not to feel bad about myself for it. So without further ado, here’s the video again:

Sometimes, people have told me that they thought I’d stopped blogging because I hadn’t done it in a while. In fact, I find this blog deeply therapeutic and I don’t plan to give it up anytime soon, if ever. I will be the last one blogging when the rest of the world has moved on to beaming a hologram of themselves into virtual reality and sharing their lives that way. So if it ever seems like I must not be blogging anymore because I haven’t done it in a month, rest assured that I will get back to it and it is worth your while to keep checking for updates if you like following my life.

Another thing that I put away for a while and am now getting back to is working on my book. Every time I think of something traumatic that happened to me either as a child or as an adult, I write it on an index card and plan to put it in my book. (I’ve never been one who can write things down and then destroy my own work and actually feel good about that. For me, it’s not out of my head unless it’s written down somewhere I can retrieve it again someday!) Anyway, I have a ton of index cards at this point and a lot of them are repeats and I had them loosely organized into categories held together by hair ties and put them on a shelf. So I finally got a special index card organizer. It is the best thing ever! Now my index cards are safely in a box. However, I do need to organize them now, which obviously means going through a lot of traumatic memories. It’s taken me a while to get to a point where I feel strong enough to do this, which is why I put it off. But a huge thing that bothers me in writing my story is that there is so much that I can’t remember. Thankfully, I have YouTube. Dr. X recommended the channel, “The School of Life” and one of their videos has been comforting to me and has helped me a lot, especially in situations like these. That video is this one:

The gist of it is that we don’t have to remember our childhoods at all because the way we are currently gives us all the information we need to know basically what happened. So the fact that I currently have all the symptoms of C-PTSD (for example, constantly feeling nervous or on edge) is enough to know that I have trauma, and what strategies will help me. I do happen to remember a lot of ridiculous things that happened when I was a kid, but that is a bonus. The fact that there are so many gaps in my memory doesn’t make it impossible for me to get better.

I also thought another video was useful. I have started the book The Body Keeps the Score twice but both times had to stop because it was too “triggering,” for lack of a better word. But this video is much shorter and easier to manage than a whole huge book:

Even when we don’t remember what happened, our trauma re-wires the brain. Almost everyone I meet seems to think that a trauma disorder is when a person thinks about things that happened in the past, judges the events as being things that should not have happened, and then feel sad about that. This is just patently untrue. It doesn’t matter if you remember the thing; what matters is that the physical structure and inner workings of your brain were affected by the trauma. So when people say to just not think about the past, they mean well but they just don’t understand that thinking about the past is not what’s causing my troubles. Thinking about the past honestly is me trying to make sense of and heal from it. If I got ECT and forgot everything that had ever happened and believed that I had had a great childhood, the symptoms of C-PTSD wouldn’t go away. The reason I find this comforting is because it aligns with my experience and feels validating. When people really really want me to believe that something will work (like just choosing to believe that I’m not traumatized), it frustrates me that they can’t see that I’ve tried that endless times and “just trying again” to solve the problem in the exact same way is pointless. Furthermore, the reason I have a trauma disorder isn’t because I’m a pansy and I can’t stop feeling sorry for myself. It is a real thing.

I feel like the paragraph above was a bit disjointed but I’m not going to go back and edit it because I have a book to write. I just wanted to put these videos up because the second two have been helping me as I write my book and the first one is helpful for basically everything I undertake in life.