Have been reading a little bit about PTSD and CSA recently and it seems that generally about 26-30 years of age is when suppressed/forgotten or whatever types of memory's tend to surface.

Which is certainly true for me, surfacing about a year ago at the age of 29. when I got clean from the drink and drugs, shit started to hit hard.

I'am genuinely interested to hear from you guys about when or how your abuse memories started to hit the surface. Not your actuall abuse but how it was for you when the 'penny dropped'

Its now a year on and things are a little better for me, but there definitely a looong way to go.

What were thing like for you after a year of recovery?

take it easy

Oz

hey, Oz!

i was in my early 30s when the memories started to emerge. part of the reason for that timing, i think, is that i was unemployed, had just moved cross-country, had no friends or social support and got really depressed because of feeling like a failure. i was at a low point already my resistance was down - and then the dam broke. got isolated & withdrawn - almost catatonic, suicidal, etc....

a year later, after having worked with a T for most of that time - not my idea, but it was very helpful - i was doing much better. functioning almost "normally" - employed, re-engaged with family, making progress with social aquaintances, etc. i stayed with the T until he moved - maybe 18 months after we started together. at that point i thought i was OK and tried to go it alone. big mistake. the work was not done. i did fine for awhile but after a number of years, gradually lapsed back and needed to get into therapy again - but not till a couple decades later. now it has been about 16 months with another T and i'm doing OK again. ups and downs but generally more ups.

not that i'm typical, necessarily - but in case it helps.
lee

That's intersting. Mine almost came to the surface when I was in my mid-late 20s. I lived alone, I wasn't married and I was struggling in a post-college career track I didn't like. Grad school? Law school? CSA? Dig ditches? Run away and float down the Mississippi?

That time period all runs together. I ended up in grad school, met my wife---so the CSA went on ice for a few more years. It wasn't all that nice and settled. I was all kinds of crazy...and wanting to chuck it all and go off the grid. I was ready to sell all and move, but my (then) future wife kept my attention long enough to get through the storm. I found 100 acres of cheap land in New Mexico perfect for living off the grid...as if I could really run from it.

Oh yeah...I was long off of ADHD meds...so it all came together in a perfect storm.

It is a liittle short of a year, but I have finally told others---still not my parents. I have a new perspective of what happened---if not why. My anger waxes an wanes...and the anxiety is still there but manageable. Certain triggers can put me in a miserable state---but those aren't quite as common. There is still work to be done.

Will

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Sorry if this sounds all cryptic. This thing happened to me and everyone found out about it, so I was in counselling and stuff. Maybe about 3 months after that I had a lot of confusing memories that had nothing to do with the thing that happened. That’s when I finally admitted to myself that this one thing that happened to me when I was 10 was more than a one-time thing. I think if the unmentioned thing above hadn’t happened then I wouldn’t have had any reason to be thinking about the stuff from age 10 and I’d still be living in my happy little world of denial. Which would be nice.

This past year I’ve barely slept more than 4 hours a night, self-harmed pretty much daily since about April last year, tried to kill myself twice, spent about 3 months in a mental health unit, got a whole load of letter diagnosis’s, PTSD, EDNOS and something else I forgot. Done CBT, DBT and family therapy, which didn’t help. Started antidepressants, which I don’t think are helping either.

But on the plus side, I guess I don’t have this stuff inside me threatening to come out at any time any more. And I figured out some stuff about myself, like why I act the way I do. I’ve met people I don’t think i would have met if everything was going fine. Like in hospital and in self help forums. I now have people I consider to be really good friends. I’ve managed to keep up with college work even with all this going on. (mainly by working like crazy when I feel ok so I can slack when i don't feel so good.) Managed to stay in a relationship. I’m still with the same girlfriend I’ve been with since age 15. With all the help I’ve had though I should be doing awesome. I just find it really hard to engage in any kind of therapy, I think because maybe I’m still trying to pretend it didn’t happen? Which is stupid, because I know it did.

2:30am O ballocks! Have an assignment due, looks like an all nightr' then. Anyway, thought I would take a break and add to the thread.

I can relate to everything said here. on reflection the 26-30 age theory could prob be when the majority of people start to feel the pressures of adult life. So that could explain it. Well, maybe. I don't know. Sounds more plausible than purely an age thing.



Hey, Lee
dam near a carbon copy of how it was for me. I moved back from University after flunking out for the 3rd time, unemployed, few friends, the ones i did have from before uni it seemed, were not very welcoming. Tho, to be fair I was still drinking very heavily at that point. And at the risk of sounding like a complete Dick! (don't mean to) but they kinda resented that I was handed university scholorships and grants and lots of stuff. hmmm.. Brains to burn, and hell did I burn them! This I am ashamed about, big time. Handed it all, and I throw it back in their faces. Least I am making up for it now! that's something. but yeah, it was the isolation that was the worst for me. Went from out every night and loads of mates to complete recluse. that's when things started to unravel.




txb: I hear you man. For me, it was at it's worst when the parents were away a few weeks for my fathers radiotherapy. I Paced endlessly up and down the house from morning to night. highly anxious, paranoid and scared about anything and everything. Tables, chairs, carpets, curtains, loud noises, quite noises, you name it, it freaked me out. Very glad I am much better now as is my father. I always feel the anti d's arnt helping, tho I know if I went off them things would get bad real quite.



Funny you mention ADHD meds. I started them about a year ago and I think they definitely helped to sort out and tackle the abuse memories. and have definitely opened up my mind in general.

Hey LAD

Any more luck with the OBE stuff? (think it was you that brought it up in a post somewhere). I don't know. any time i bring OBE up people either think I've lost the plot or high. ah, who cares, it real.

Take it easy

Oz

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Unknown1

My T really focused on my childhood ADHD diagnosis and prescribed Adderall for that. I don't take anything else relating to the CSA.

Just getting a handle on the ADHD has been a tremendous help in working on the CSA.

Will

Oz,

At 20 I suddenly out-of-the-blue journaled about my abuse, and found the matter inexplicable and embarrassing since, obviously, the abuse was no big deal and hadn't effected me at all. Duh! I put it right back to sleep that afternoon.

At 34 my life - personal, financial, and career - imploded, due to those "adult stresses" mentioned above all manifesting in really fucking awful ways simultaneously. The alignment of disasters woke up the CSA for real, for keeps, and the "penny drop" moment came after desperation drinking, a pathological absorption with death, multiple time-lost blackouts, total loss of sleeping and eating, and several s**c*de attempts. October 24, 2012.

By two months later, I at last felt safe enough to be able to fall asleep without pills.

Now, today, I'm better than I've been in at least six months, and my wife agrees. Better in the dictionary sense - as a relative term, not an absolute. So the therapeutic and pharmacological industries have made a believer out of me.


Matt

I always remember most of my abuse... (if you asked me 3 months ago I would have told you everything, but we'll get to that). As a teenager/in my early twenties I just refused to deal with it. I was already suffered from serious PTSD, but I medicated it with heroin and booze and tried my best to run away from my past. My granda made me see a long list of therapists (she new about the CSA) but none of them were able to get through to me.

I was arrested at 23, and once again forced to see a T. This one, however, managed to get through to me. Kept seeing her until I was about 26, at which point I decided that I was cured and ready to go on with my life. Which I did. With my past firmly tucked away out of sight, I built a career, got married, bought a house and started a family. By late 2009, at the age of 37, I was as happy as a pig in shit. I was successful, I had a beautiful house and an even more beautiful wife who had stood by my through those hellish years, a 3 year old daughter and another child on the way. Life was good. And then everything changed in the space of 30 minutes. 30 minutes in which I saw my beautiful wife's car crashing into a barrier and being thrown across four lanes, coming to a halt against the barrier on the other side of the road. She was pronounced dead when the ambulance reached the hospital, our unborn child with her. October 11, 2009.

A few weeks later I came nearer to committing suicide that I had been since the last time I actually attempted it, at 17. Fortunately, I ran out of courage just in time and didn't go through with it. More for the sake of my daughter than myself, I started putting my pieces of my life back together.

Late 2011, I decided that I was now once more stable enough to "carry on", and for some inexplicable reason "carrying on" meant writing down my story, in all it's gory detail. The more I wrote the more triggered I became, until I completely lost myself, kicking off a sequence of events that ended with me sitting on the bathroom floor, cutting myself for the first time in over a decade. That was when I knew it was time to go back to therapy.

It has now been a little over a year since I started therapy again, and if you told me at the start of it what I would experience, I would not have believed you. I finally admitted to myself exactly what happened between my foster father an me, and, bit by bit, learned to talk about it. Sharing that part of my story here was a very important part. In the process, I reconnected with my younger self and finally accepted my own innocence. For a few blissful weeks, I was truly happy. Then, for some reason, my subconscious decided I was ready for the next fight, and started unleashing memories I had I no idea I had even blocked out, in the form of almost daily flashbacks... At the moment, I'm back on medication and I re-started EMDR last week in an attempt to cope with this new phase in my recovery.

And that is how the penny dropped for me.

A little over a year back into recovery, I'd have to say, I'm ok. I suspect I'm only ok because of the meds I'm on, but for now, I'll take it. I'm coping, I'm healing, and I'm also functioning as a father and as a professional. I trust my T completely. I know that if I put myself in her hands and commit 100% to what she asks of me, I will be ok again, even without meds. I look forward to that day.