A Life Narrative

Just a few thoughts on a lazy Friday because I have not been very good about blogging recently. I have been directing the bulk of my writing to coming up with my entire story, which some people – like psychologists – like to call a Life Narrative. I have two main motivations for trying to tackle such a huge task.

First, I recently finished my fourth step and it raised a lot more questions than it answered. I can see pretty clearly what my positive and negative behaviors and habits have been but I am at a complete loss as to why I feel the need to do them. For example, I get very defensive and even angry when people have expectations of me. I couldn’t quite tell why I react this way but have a gut feeling that it relates to the abuse I endured as a kid. This leads me to my next point.

Second, I just finished a book called “The Drama of the Gifted Child” by Alice Miller. My sponsor recommended it and it’s about children who survived abuse and adapted to extreme cruelty by becoming numb. She emphasizes again and again the point that in order to deal with the emotional scars we need to face the abuse and our resulting emotions. In order to face them most of us need to unpack a lot of repressed memories and figure out exactly what happened to us.

This is where I have to put in my plug that I always thought the idea of repressed memories was something drama queens made up to get more attention. I thought this until about 6 months ago when I was doing some writing and started to remember traumatic events that I hadn’t thought about since they happened 10 or 15 years ago. If you have ever suspected that you might have endured abuse, you owe it to yourself to do some exploring of your own.

So I sat down about 10 days ago to write my life story and have been going ever since. It’s currently at about 18 pages and growing. It’s hard to explain what it feels like to attempt to write down a traumatic event and realize for the first time that such experiences are not normal. It was as if my brain had previously refused to label the experience as bad or scary or dangerous. It was a memory labeled with the same emotions as my memory of eating breakfast this morning. There were no emotions – until I looked at it and realized the abuse for what it was.

I don’t even mean for this to sound dark because it has been one of the most surprising experiences of my life. I had always taken for granted that I would remember big events in my life because that’s the way it’s supposed to work. I guess the mind has its own way of surviving. So much to learn…