A Spiritual Experience, Piecing Together a Shattered MInd

If you are just now joining us and reading this post, I want to let you know that most of my writings here deal with combat PTSD. I have written about my childhood trauma a couple of times and want to update on where I am in therapy. Below I have put together some connections, associations and revelations. For someone without a traumatized mind some of these connections would seem to be an easy puzzle to put together, but for those of use who have survived, it is experinced as a spiritual experience putting together the pieces of our shattered minds.

Here I pick up from my post from March 17, 2009 "Thoughts of Nothingness We Now Find to be Everything":

Later, to defend against remembering an extreme trauma experience, I had convinced myself that aliens had replaced me, and took me with them to a better place. OH MY GOD, this must have been when I had the angels take me to explore the universe. I wrote earlier about this out of body experience, the angels told me to not look down. They were so peaceful, serene and angelic we soared above my body and escaped to a timeless existence flying away.

I never connected this phenomenon, the memories, beliefs, amnesia, and trauma. I had separated the information into the deepest recesses of my mind and compartmentalized them to guard against fully realizing the terror that little 5 year old boy endured.

I could not for the life of me learn my left from my right hand in first grade, I learned it when I was probably 7 years old. I was at a baseball game and my coach told me to go out to right field. I was ashamed that I did not know which direction right was, so I asked a family friend. He taught me to associate my right hand with my writing hand, so from then on I knew my left from my right. But, still to today I have to picture writing to discern which choice to make concerning left or right.

Another connection I made today was the problem I had with telling time. I did not learn this until I around the same time as the which hand issue. But, that was a digital clock, it was not until my young teen years before I learned to tell time from a traditional clock. I had such an unreconciled sense of time due to the "lost" time frame mentioned before, it lacked such substance that I did not trust "time," it escaped me.

I have had these thoughts periodically throughout my life, I guess when something triggered them and I would have a glimpse of a realization and memories. I never even considered connecting them together, it seemed to me that they were separate and not related. It was not until last night that I was able to piece together the memories and give a complete narrative. I did not see the obvious interrelation of these insights until last night.

I wrote this first on paper, in doing so I had written in third person conjugation and kept writing in this manner. I had to go back and edit it several times. Referring to oneself as him, they etcetera, etcetera, could be an indication of structural dissociation, an unconscious and pervasive referral of self as someone else. The thoughts of having been replaced with a "different Scott" is further evidence of the same.