Integration ?

[WeAreKaren]

Actually, Silent Society, I totally understand what you are saying. I have experienced exactly what you are experiencing. You don't get "peace" all at once after you process memories of trauma. Especially since, as The People says, you do not usually get a single "incident" all at once. My experience too is that emotions usually come after the other parts of the memory. although sometimes the emotions have preceded the "factual" parts of a memory. I've also gotten the visuals separate from the sound, or several visual/sound chunks of the memory arriving separately, and not necessarily in sequence.

After I'd described that happening to my therapist several times, she finally told me (she didn't want to prejudice me by telling me before I figured it out for myself) that that is how the brain stores traumatic memories. It breaks them up and stores them separately. That is a safeguard so that it doesn't all come at you at once. Isn't the brain an amazing thing?

So it can make it seem tougher because it strings things out time wise. But that protects you from the impact of getting the whole thing all at once. And of course, that's exactly why the memory has been buried - because the experience was so awful and so intense that you couldn't handle it as a child and had to dissociate from what happened. That's how you survived into adulthood.

I hope this makes sense. We are still learning about this ourselves.