Looking for My Lost Mind

This work represents an emotional palimpsest - an experience from decades ago that pushes back through all changes and overlaying remedial structures and emerges in the present.

At age 17 I entered the strange inner world of PTSD.  In response to chronic overwhelming and deranging parental oppression, I made the classical unconscious decision to disassociate.  On the basis that if I didn’t experience the endless eradication of my presence it couldn’t have impact, I closed down my ability to interpret and process information and lost the capacity to think constructively.  

This is about the presence now of the emotional impact of then. Not about the (protective/defensive) ‘switch off’ but about the inevitable consequential ‘switch on’ - of fear and confusion and searching for the lost part of self without knowing what is being searched for.  It’s about shame and exposure (others will find out) and the impotent vulnerability that accompanies this.  It’s about being trapped and not knowing how to find the way out.