Hometown Brings Painful Memories

Reader’s Question

I have been married for 18 yrs. We married young and he was in the US Navy til recently. During all these years I have worked and taken care of our son and our autistic/mentally retarded daughter. He recently retired and we moved back to my hometown. It has been a nightmare! I am having to deal on a daily bases with an aunt and uncle who raised me but who also abused me. It is partly my fault because I didn’t know how to stop it. I am having nightmares when I sleep, which is not a lot. I am having anxiety and panic attacks. I have put on 20 lbs in less than 6 months. I am terrified of the dark, spiders, and heights and now they are becoming to the point of unrealism. I can’t go upstairs to bed unless I have my back to the wall and all the lights are on. I have been cutting myself and taking pills like Xanax to sleep all day when I can. I had a herniated disk in my neck fixed, but the plate is rubbing up against my esophagus and making me feel like I am choking. I finally am healed enough to have the plate removed, but I also found out that I am hired on for an unloading job at night for 4-6 hours, and I have been offered a full time day job at a dairy container plant. The problem is now my husband wants me to take both jobs and cancel the surgery. I have waited 1 year for this. The other part is I just don’t know how I will handle all this. My husband is working long hours himself. My son who is almost 18 will be home at night with our daughter and she is in school during the day. I will have to spend a couple hours with her in the evening. I know we need this financially but I am at a loss as to how I will handle it. Any suggestions?

– pips

Our Consulting Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

The US country music group, Montgomery Gentry, has a song titled “My Hometown” with the verse “Where I was born, where I was raised, where I keep all my yesterdays…” Your return to your hometown, and the presence of your aunt and uncle, has also prompted a return to your childhood psychological and emotional state — complete with childhood fears, insecurities, being frightened, anxiety, panic, etc. The mechanism is called “Emotional Memory“. Your hometown has a huge collection of emotional memories of abuse that have now been activated. These emotional memories contain feelings, attitudes, and beliefs created over twenty years ago. They have returned you to your childhood AND to a state of childhood fearfulness. Your old fears have returned (spiders, heights, etc.), you are walking in your home as though you were fearful of assault (guess where that memory comes from?), nightmares have returned, and you have returned to behaviors you used in childhood such as cutting. Your husband doesn’t have these emotional memories and will have difficulty understanding what’s going on.

Emotional Memories are powerful and often totally ignore our real-life situation. This is why adult men often become “little boys” in the presence of their mother. It’s also why your reaction seems unrealistic to you. It’s unrealistic to an adult working mother — but not the abused child who made those memories years ago. You’ve returned home, but you’ve also returned to being 12 again. You’ll notice in your email that immediately following a comment about your aunt and uncle, you offer “It’s partly my fault”. That’s a classic comment from an abused childhood as the child victims often feel they are somehow responsible for the abuse. That’s your childhood emotional memories talking.

Treatment involves first stabilizing your situation. Xanax and other antianxiety medications will only make you calmly depressed and stressed. You’ll probably need a combination of a antidepressant and antianxiety medications. Next, emotional memory is a speciality of mine and I’ve written an article called Emotional Memory Management that’s available on this website. It provides practical suggestions for dealing with these memories when they surface. Lastly, seeing a counselor would be helpful. Your recent life changes, as well as these emotional memories, have produced a lot of stress. You may need guidance in sorting out the memories from your life in the here-and-now real world.