Body Memories

On the post, Punishing the Parts Within I was asked anonymously to do another post. This one is about body memories.

For those how have not been victims of rape or other forms of abuse, you may not be familiar with the phenomenon. Body memories are believe by the experts to be the storing of the memory within the body itself. It is also believed that storing trauma in this matter can lead to actual physical illnesses as well as the "expression" of the experience.

Whether these memories are actually stored in the muscle or stored in the brain and expressed in the muscle, I don't know. But what I do know is that when a victim has no idea that such a thing can even happen, experiencing it can be quite terrifying.

Body memories express themselves as if the actual trauma was taking place for the first time. There may be no cognitive memory of the event to accompany them. Just the physical reactions of the body to the trauma will materialize. That includes physical pain, distinguishing marks, secretions, anything the body may have gone through because of the trauma. Sometimes emotional memories will accompany them without an picture memory of the event.

There were a couple of different body memories in particular that I used to experience that were very disturbing to me. The one would show actual physical signs of fingers wrapped around my throat. The finger marks were quite red and angry looking and whenever they appeared, I struggled to be able to draw any breath at all. One more than one occasion, I passed out from lack of oxygen.

The other body memory that really disturbed me took a number of different forms. I would get red marks, muscle cramps, even joint popping and other indicators of physical torture. All of these were accompanied by abdominal cramping, the excretion of gobs of sticky vaginal secretions and sexual feelings that were not only alarming but totally humiliating.

With those physical sensations and manifestations I also experienced extreme terror. Sometimes all I had to go on to identify what was happening to me were by what my body showed my and the emotional memories that accompanied them.

The most unnerving part of body memories seemed to be that they would come without warning. I could have been sitting in church, talking on the phone to a friend or walking down the street. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to their occurrence. The only thing I could count on for sure was they would be terrifying and humiliating.

Because they usually lacked a picture memory to go with them, body memories seemed to be much more insidious to resolve. It was so much easier to throw the blame on me as some sickness or perversion of mine than to accept that this was something real that had happened to me. But I found the sooner I was able to own this memory as real and resolve my feelings around it, the sooner I was able to get free from its occurrence.

I know that I have had body memories that were associated with my victimization by the cult but I have also had body memories associated with abuses that happened no where near the satanists. It just seems to be another way the mind protects us victims at the time that needs to be resolved if we are ever to get free.

While experiencing pleasurable sexual sensations during all forms of sexual abuse is common, it is one of the biggest traps for victims. Victims tend to believe because there were some sensations that felt good, they somehow asked for, were willing participants, or deserved the treatment they got. Betrayed by our bodies responding with pleasurable sensations to heinous acts is just one more cruel trick played upon victims that interfers with the healing process.

multiple personality disorder MPD dissociative Identity disorder did body memories