Hunger Games

I am pretty sure, from rational deduction, that I have lots of childhood trauma about being hurt while I was in an altered state of consciousness, or hurt by people’s responses to that change in consciousness.

Logically this seems a reason I might have flashbacks when regaining consciousness, particularly with other people around. Seems like a reason I might feel so intolerably trapped when waking after anesthesia. And I’ve got trauma I can remember about waking in general, even when I was merely asleep and not unconscious, which I’m sure pushes some of the same buttons.

But when I think back to my childhood I have no availabile memory of such a condition – awaking from altered consciousness. That’s not super plausible, given the facts of my existence at the time. I explicitly remember leaning how to not pass out – or at least how to be less noticed when when I did – so that people wouldn’t be upset by me. I trained for that suffocation fetish Mother had. I dissociated regularly to get through my daily life. So it happened all the time. But my feels are blank when I look back for the experience itself.

That seems like a thing we could do LI about. It’s probably possible to build some sort of episodic experience that makes it easier to feel the thing.

I think it would also help me be less resentful about parenting, because currently I hate it even when I do it to myself, and I’m ashamed to attempt it with anyone else, even when they ask for it. It’s hard for me to not resent the idea that anyone wants to be a parent at all. I (accurately) justify that by citing the oppression of young people, but I’d be a better advocate if I didn’t resent the concept of parenting in and of itself.

This resentment is how I taught myself to accept that I can never depend on the availability of help in any situation, no matter how overwhelming, and to ensure that I do not want it even when I am desperate. It was eventually a rational choice to improve my survival, but it’s also an emotional response I had much earlier, and that part feels invisible to me.

ZiB

—
Sent from a phone.