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The memory that is most intrusive for me is imagined one, how my husband might’ve looked or behaved while acting out. Since I obviously don’t have firsthand knowledge of what happened. Is this an okay topic to write on? Also, how is this similar or different from prolonged exposure therapy things?
The premise of writing about this is actually giving it a voice. And the goal in giving it a voice is for you to be able to put it out there. So you can see the experience that you’ve been feeling internally, because if it’s just stuck inside of you and going around, you’re going to feel anxious. You’re going to feel just this internal anx and we’re trying to let it out and give it a voice. So giving it a voice is a critical part.
And so the prolonged exposure therapy, I’m not necessarily a fan of prolonged exposure therapy Dr. James Pennebaker in his book opening up, he talks about the importance of writing about difficult or painful memories. And he suggests doing it for four days in a row for 20 minutes each day, same topic.
And what he found is that individuals who did that reported less depression and their immune system went up. So there’s actually some pretty good evidence that when we give trauma or memories, traumatic memories of voice, and we do it consistently over a period of time, it loses its power. Other examples of how to deal with difficult memories could be eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing EMDR, internal family systems IFS.
These are also ways that you can get so to speak, give a voice to your pain. The other thing your mind is doing is it’s imagining things. If you had a full disclosure of what your spouse did and he did a disclosure, I wonder how that would be helpful to you. So you’re not what I call making a worst case scenario.
Sometimes we make it the worst case scenario because we don’t know the story. So our mind is imagining all this stuff. Rather than actually having some of the information. Anyway, that’s something to consider some things to consider.