Numbness in Childhood

[Twoapenny]

Hi all

I was at the park with my boy yesterday, playing on the swings.  I was swinging through the air and I could feel the sun on my face and the air rushing over it as I went backwards and forwards.  It felt lovely.  I tried to think back to feeling sensations like that when I was young and I couldn't think of any examples.  The only other time I could think of feeling any kind of sensation on my skin was one time I went on holiday with my girlfriends, just after we left school.  I remember slipping into the sea the first day we were there and if felt so cool and refreshing.  But other than that I can't remember any - not pleasurable ones, anyway.

Anyone else find the same thing? xx

[BonesMS]

Hi all

I was at the park with my boy yesterday, playing on the swings.  I was swinging through the air and I could feel the sun on my face and the air rushing over it as I went backwards and forwards.  It felt lovely.  I tried to think back to feeling sensations like that when I was young and I couldn't think of any examples.  The only other time I could think of feeling any kind of sensation on my skin was one time I went on holiday with my girlfriends, just after we left school.  I remember slipping into the sea the first day we were there and if felt so cool and refreshing.  But other than that I can't remember any - not pleasurable ones, anyway.

Anyone else find the same thing? xx

I can identify with not having many pleasant memories from childhood...only unpleasant ones.

Bones

[sKePTiKal]

Yes, and no....

Yes, my "linear" memory could only pick up a handful of times I had pleasant physical sensations like you describe. One was greeting the sun on an early summer's morning... after a hard, long, cold winter full of chaos. One went way back to when I might've been 4-5... and walking along the southern shores of Lake Superior, where the "beach" wasn't sand - it was many small quartz & granite pebbles... and the water was like ice water. Another was the feeling of climbing a tree, flipping around the limb and dropping; running; sort of a sense of my body's own physical strength and ability to "think it" then "do it".

Later, after "removing" a lot of old, very unpleasant memories that together seemed like some kind of black hole - it was a single entity, not separate parts - until I started dismantling it - after I got into that work... I "discovered" some more memories that I'd forgotten about completely... better ones again!

How our memories work is probably the least understood by science, second only maybe to emotion. I've scoured a lot of different kinds of lit on this topic... because my brain acted like a video recorder - complete with smells, sensations, even what I was thinking then, sometimes... up until "that day"... and then things got fuzzy, like my camera was out of focus... the memories were jumbled and not in any linear order... and none of it made sense (not according to the "official" gaslight version that I was told was "real"). And later on, at some undefined point... the video recorder sorted itself out and started up again.

There is the theory that what we remember years from now - is the content of those times when we're most "present". Yet, in older people - who are very present in their daily lives - the most vivid memories are from their youth and they can't remember what happened the day before. There's the theory that our memories "stick" and become snapshots in our minds, because there is a very strong emotion attached to the memory.... but that contradicts the theory of memory used in blocked or repressed memories... dissociative episodes... amnesia... and conversely helps support the basic premise of PTSD.

There's some good stuff - that you can't see yet - also buried in the depths of that black hole, too.

[Meh]

I'm not sure that I acutely remember that sort of physical sensation from my childhood. I'm sure I had them since I have favorite foods.

The first thing that pops into my head is a summer camp that I went to as a kid. I think someone complained to my father that I was left at home too often so one summer only I went to a camp. I remember, at first I did not engage at all with what was going on around me or the other children. Honestly I drew a complete blank when being in a group of kids that were playing I didn't play with them and kept to myself. One of the camp leaders got angry with me and told me that I would get in trouble if I continued to behave that way. I remember looking out at the world from within my eyes and my psychological space and thinking how these people had no idea who I was or why I was.

I guess my sensation was that of looking out onto the world but not being a part of it somehow. I don't think that is so much of a sensation but it is a way of seeing.
My perspective of looking out onto the world never confirmed my experience or my existence even. It was like I was looking at impossible situations that never made sense....and all my sensations were more of a world that I lived in that was separate from the world around me.