Hey Ryan.
I'm sorry I did not address this before.

When I was very early on in my own healing process, I would also try to deliberately Trigger myself, because I did not then have clear recollection of what had happened to me in some of the instances.

Sure I had Mem's of the Abuse, but they were weird, like they were distorted and not like any of my other memories, the normal ones.

My therapist explained to me that there is a process to follow because of safety reasons. That it is possible to become re-traumatized just buy trying to evoke Memories of my own situation. He then went on to decribe to me how trauma mem's and normal mem's are not processed and therefor not recorded or stored the same way in the brain.

That is why many of my memories frightened me when I though back to them.
For example, Many of the Mem's of the real bad stuff happening to me, is from the prospective of me being on the Ceiling of the room! Now obviously this in not physically possible, but at the time I did not know why I saw things from that perspective and upon later recalling the events, was terrified more by them because I thought I was going crazy and I thought That I could not possibly be remembering what had ACTUALLY happened back then.
It was only later with discussions from my T, and reading a lot about it that I found out that trauma memories can be like this and are pretty common to some degree.

I hope this helps you know that your definably not alone in the way that you are trying to get a response from you mind, so that you may be able to actually deal with the issues.

You really need to see a Therapist that Deals with trauma and they will be able to explain to you a lot more than I can.

Take care, Man!
Your Buddy,
Logan

Forest Gump had the most profound impact on me and it wasn't because of the abuse sub-plot with Forest's girlfriend, it was the soundtrack.

The music from the 60's and 70's sent me into blubbering mess and caught me completely off guard, so that I didn't even see the movie.

I spaced out and as each new song played more tears flowed. You could call it the soundtrack to my abuse, meaning that it comes from that time period in my childhood when the abuse was happening.

That was quite a profound experience I must say, given that it triggered my sub-conscious.

Oh and I don't cope well with zombie movies. I remember 28 Days Later (British horror zombie flick) gave me nightmares for 3 days after I saw it. I am Legend with Will Smith has a similar affect. Cringe.

This is my first post. I am not sure why I am motivated to post in this thread as opposed to the welcome thread, except that I recently had an odd trigger. I saw Roger Waters preform The Wall and it fouled an otherwise great show. Prior to my abuse I saw the film of the same name. A few years latter I was abused for a couple of years. I have never really watched the film again. The trigger was during the "Trial," when I saw the rag doll with no expression at the bottom of cell just before the judge shits on him. I recognized what I had been carrying around as a self image was the expressionless rag doll from that movie. It was as vivid as if you looked into the mirror in the morning before shaving and recognized yourself.
I am not sure if this will work but here is a link. About 4:32 is the specific frame.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5fKD17HaE8

The curious case of benjamin button.I have never seen such a good movie like this.

I think that happened to me. That is, when I remembered the abuse (or the amnesia lapsed to use different words), I actually re-traumatized myself. I did it on my own. In retrospect, it seems like it would have been better to have the help of a T.

Also, I had another T, later, for DID. He taught me how to do deep relaxation in his office for therapy. He used it to bring up memories linked to different alters in my childhood. Then I took the technique and ran with it. I started doing it at home. I would put on a tape recording and then put myself into deep relaxation and play the tape in order to speed up the therapy process. It worked well at first but then after a few months it crashed. I guess it was like taking a Ferrari out at 250 mph. I'll explain more in another post.

Allen

pufferfish