From nightmare to healing journey that maybe I can share

Warning - this may be triggering.

Decades ago I was trapped in child abuse and gas lighting with so many terrible memories and no one to trust.

It went on for years.

What you need to know is I was driven some pretty dark places by my abusers, warped, tarnished, and the only reason I *didn't* fully break is because I have a very strong will and they never knew how close it was. Out of pure desperationI I put up walls, and a shell persona, disengaged from emotion and lived that way for more then three years.

Years passed, I did a lot of reading, child development and psychology among the topics. While I managed to heal some and my life circomstances improved a bit - It just wasn't enough. I'd tried and tried and shattered glass that is glued together is still shattered glass - I was never really going to heal and always be warped by the abuse - in effect my psyche needed to be reforged but there was no one safe to entrust this project to except myself - which was admittedly not ideal without formal training.

And so I started down a desperate path, one where I used a form of self-hypnosis and months of careful planning to deliberately break under my own control and come back stronger.

But that is only one piece of what I did. I also created memories I am one hundred percent aware are false. Presenting myself as a time traveler to my younger self, explaining that we couldn't change what was going to happen but it could ve made easier. I am aware that there was no time travel, not even actual interaction between multiple versions of myself - yet it "feels" real enough to provide comfort.

Every one of my worst memories goes with a hug, or someone holding my hand, or some one telling me its not my fault and I can get through this - I remember the real version of events right alongside both giving and receiving support from myself. Three memories braided together.

How I did this is complicated and I have no idea if it would work for anyone else but I'd like to get a group together to talk about this and *maybe* try.

This is *not* something you do lightly but it can blunt trauma a fair bit - and there are a few other tricks that are less extreme people could try first.

I want to talk over the risks, the benefits, the enormous amount of soul-searching and planning involved, the safe guards I took.

It will not solve all your problems, taking all the pain away, actually erasing memories is to dangerous - or at least I'm pretty sure it is. You can destabilize yourself and end up way worse off.

You could lose compasion or other important pieces of who you are, if you mess this up.

What this can do is blunt the worst memories. Allow you to put them at one remove so you remember witnessing rather then living a bad experiance, tie comforting constructed memories to which you know to be false to the real event, or even use various tricks to break up a chain of bad memories into smaller pieces.

You can try alternate scenarios of a memory, or explore things you wish had happened after a tough moment but the one rule is that you must wake up knowing what is real. The crafted memory is there for comfort, a detour you can take when triggered.

Having an adult perspective on some stuff will help but to mitigate a memory you will need to be ready to relive it and that won't be easy.

It is a grueling process with risks and I am scared to try and teach someone else but if it can help someone who is in the kind of pain I was -maybe I should.

And that is why I was technically diagnosed with recurrent "adjustment disorder" rather then PTSD, why despite still having many issues and triggers - I function reasonably well - because I went through this process.

I'm not sure how to get a chat room made or what the next steps should be but I am open to a responsible and cautious exploration of the topic and attempting to help others try it. Please, please be careful with this. I want to help not cause harm.

Thoughts?