My imaginary world used to be safe. My escape and my protection. I’d call it up at first and hide myself in it.
Later it came unbidden, with an invitation to slip through the ‘door’ to safety.
Later still, I just suddenly find myself there. Protected and dissociated. I’m safe and maybe others are too. Usually I know I’ve gone there and can hold on to an imaginary line and fight my way back into the present world.
But lately I dissociate into a place I don’t like where there’s anger and hurt and uncontrolled expressions of needs left wide, raw and empty.
And another where I’m the scared and frightened child and I’m back THERE again.
The latter two I can’t choose to leave. I have to wait til they eventually chuck me back out. I am terrified of who I am in them and how they hold me.
The lines between the worlds are blurring with more and more of my hallucinations and flashbacks. The scared child world is flashing into the present.
Knowing that as a child I could enter, at will and without will, the alternative worlds, I’m scared that other things are also false. That things I thought were in the present world then, are actually not true. That this means the awful frightening things – the abuse – things my mother did and said – did not really happen. What if I’ve somehow imagined it happened? And it didn’t really and I’ve invented it? What if I was a horrible sick evil child? Or what if I was psychotic?
So much that happened when my mother and I were alone means it can’t be corroborated.
What about the things I’m sure happened when my father was there or that I told him? And that he now says he didn’t know?
I do not know what the answer is I just know it could mean I’ve done something terrible I can never make up or make right or hurt myself enough to punish myself for.
How ever do I get an answer?
Dignity Beyond Trauma 