I think somebody hurt me really bad when I was little…too little to remember.

I can’t be sure who, but at such a young age it can only be somebody from my immediate family of origin.

I think it was either my narcissistic mother, or my 2nd eldest sister who I believe is a malignant narcissist. I’ve not talked about her much. She is 8 years older than me and I believe she envied me for the treatment I got by being the baby girl of the famiy. I remember I was always frightened of her and her friends for some reason. She was mom’s original scapegoat, the 2nd born, but she wasn’t your regular empathic scapegoat you hear about. No. She tended to have a violent streak. She got it from our mom. Mom liked to “spank”, except it was more like a rage filled crazy person taking their insane rage out on you. My violent streak came out when I drank, so I quit.

I’ve been linking some things together that might help me understand myself better. A lot of things that I have noticed lately during emotional flashbacks might be clues to my original trauma. The incident, the moment in time that I flash back to when I’m in an emotional flashback.

A lot of times, when I am having an emotional flashback, I feel like I can’t catch my breath. It freaks me out and makes me even more anxious. Sometimes, getting out of breath doing physical activity is enough to cause me to have an emotional flashback. I reasoned that it must cause me anxiety because my Dad died from lung cancer, but I’m beginning to wonder if it is tied to my original trauma and somebody causing me to lose my breath. A knee to the back comes to mind.

To add to that, I’ve started experiencing a burning pain in my upper back, but only when I’m having an emotional flashback. It literally burns from the inside out, and when it first happened a couple of weeks ago, I started weeping while trying to tell my husband about it. I recorded a video with my reaction to this. I will upload it and link to it here.

Since initially feeling that burning pain, I now feel it every time I have an emotional flashback, and also when I try to focus on that “memory”. I’m not sure what to make of it, but every cell of my being says it is from something bad happening when I was either too little to remember it, or I dissociated and compartmentalized it in my brain.

One more piece of this puzzle could be tied to a memory I had last year. I have a memory from childhood of my mom standing over somebody in the small upstairs bedroom. It looks like they are fighting  I can’t see who the other person is because mom is over them and they are on the small twin bed. Here’s the strange part. I am seeing this happening from above like I’m floating under the ceiling. When I asked my scapegoat sister if that memory meant anything to her she told me I was probably remembering my mom and the violent sister I mentioned above fighting, because the two of us were very frightened when that happened. At the time, I accepted that.

While writing this I am remembering what I wrote to the “violent sister” before I went no contact with her. I’ve thought about this before and wondered why I called her that. I was in an emotional flashback when I wrote it. I mean, I remember being afraid of her when I was little, and I remember one incident when she hurt me by kicking me when she was babysitting us younger kids, but I remember that time clearly. I was older. Some of my other siblings were there too. I remember the golden child sister helping me and getting mad at the “violent sister”.

Here is a portion of my parting message to my “violent sister”. See this blog post for more details on this as well.

“Somebody out there might still believe you have a caring heart, but it sure isn’t me. You watched her abuse me, and then copied her. Goodbye abusive one.  

In case you’re wondering,  why now?  The bitch abused us so bad my little girl brain blocked it out so I could survive in that hell. Living there made it come back.  It’s called cptsd. Look it up you violent bitch.”

So, it appears that when I am in an emotional flashback, I see this particular sister as violent and abusive,  and I’m willing to bet I have very good reasons for it. I just can’t remember anything but that one incident.

I hope to remember the trauma, no matter how difficult, so that I can process it and recover from it. Perhaps I will never fully remember it though. I have to be prepared for that.

It does strike me how nonchalantly I can accept that either of them could have hurt me so badly when I was so little. I do though. I wouldn’t put it past either of them. Memory or no memory, I feel that about them to the very core of my being.