Just a quick update

There hasn’t been much spanking going on in our house lately. I wish I could say that it were because I haven’t needed it, or even that we’ve been too busy, and had guests too often.

Unfortunately, the problem is more complicated than that. I have needed spankings. But the window of opportunity is slim, because I’ve been having panic attacks almost constantly for the last month or two. I was having them pretty often before that, as well.

Part of me knows what’s going on. My brain has decided, in the absence of any input from me, that it’s time for me to start processing through stuff that I would rather keep buried in the back of my head. Actually, my goal is to drop it into some mental bottomless pit, and never hear from it again.

I approach the problem intellectually and logically. At least, that’s my goal. There are two rational explanations for what’s going on.

Explanation one is that I have a serious mental illness, one that keeps me from being able to trust people, that makes me uncomfortable with touch, that keeps me constantly on guard against making mistakes of any kind, that gives me nightmares. And that I have had this mental illness since infancy.

Explanation two is that I was abused starting when I was an infant and small child, causing me to have all of the problems listed above.

Most people who know me say that explanation two makes more sense.

But there is that constant voice in the back of my head that insists nothing bad ever happened, and that I’m just making things up. The voice in the back of my head isn’t able to give me a good reason for why I would want to make things up, but it still insists that it’s true. It warns me that no one will believe me, and that no one likes someone who tells lies, and so if I talk about things that might have happened, or even if I admit them to myself, then no one will love me ever again.

Intellectually, I know this isn’t true. Unfortunately, these problems go on at the emotional level, and there is no reasoning with my emotional side. It points out that blanking out anything bad has kept me safe all of my life, and it’s got no intention of letting me talk right now.

Or maybe it does, because I assume that the panic attacks stem from my emotional side, and if those aren’t a demand to remember things, I don’t know what is.

My intellectual side, the side that I understand, the side I can control, spends hours every day trying to puzzle things out. Trying to figure out what really happened, what could have been so bad. And the scary part is, even with the things I know for sure happened, that I do remember, or that family members have talked about, things were pretty darned bad. So there’s another part of me that is afraid to remember.

Because if the things I know for sure happened are as bad as they are, there is no way I want to remember the things I managed to block out.

So there have been panic attacks, and while there have been a couple of spankings, it’s been difficult, because it’s been hard to get into the right head space.