how forgotten traumas from infancy can have an impact on us as adults.
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I have a dissociative identity disorder. I have a number of traumas that are repressed and I have limited or no knowledge of them. They seep through to your everyday thinking, without you becoming aware of them.
For instance, I get anxiety when I walk beside a road with fast moving traffic. I never understood why, but I worked with it. I’d avoid large roads and wear hoodies with headphones so I couldn’t see or hear the traffic.
In my mid-thirties, I had a series of terrible, repeating nightmares of being stuck in a car doing high speeds. Turns out I’d been in a high speed car chase whilst younger: the driver was intoxicated. It was a situation where I had no control – a recurring theme of my traumas.
Whether you know it or not, your brain’s perceived traumas will effect your subconscious in a variety of different ways. I have so many of these little traumas that my mind is unable to keep them all bundled up: they leak out.
When I encounter an unexpected trigger, my brain deletes the memory of it and I am physically removed from the situation, by a protective brain function that we all have (mine is just trigger happy). I simply wake up somewhere else, having never re-experienced the trauma my brain is avoiding.
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