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Start changing antifreeze or coolant by draining the radiator after checking the upper radiator hose to see if it is hot or pressurized. Use a ...

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In order to change radiator fluid, a drain pan is needed that is capable of holding the amount of fluid that the cooling system holds. Get anti ...

Repression Lapse

When I first met with my therapist, she described what was happening to me as a repression lapse. When someone keeps a traumatic past past hidden for a long period of time, eventually they can no longer repress the memories and they surface. Apparently this is common.

While it took me until March 2010 to get into therapy, I’m pretty sure my lapse began in the summer of 2009. At the time, I was having a lot of raw feelings surface – mainly related to my parents. Every time we would visit or talk on the phone, I would be agitated. As time went on, I had a shorter and shorter fuse with them and also with my wife. Something wasn’t right, but I had no idea what. My wife was frustrated. I was frustrated. I was hating myself.

One night in July, after returning from a trip to see my parents, I broke down in the kitchen while talking to my wife. I couldn’t figure out why I was so unhappy and I couldn’t contain my emotions – it was surreal. Sure enough, the next time we saw them, it happened again. After some conversations with my wife I started to realize that my emotions were somehow related to the abuse. To that point, my wife knew that I had been abused – in fact, I first told her not a few months after we started dating, but I kept the details vague. After thinking for a few weeks I realized that I needed to talk to my parents about the abuse - I had to do something that I had been trained not to do.

I drove to their house one weekday evening. I was in the middle of raising money to start a small beer brewing company, and my parents had decided to invest, so the visit wasn’t a surprise to them. I went there to talk business, but in the back of my head I knew I needed to cover the abuse. After we ate dinner, I raised the subject. My heart was racing. My mom quickly acknowledged what I said, but changed the subject. I went back to it. This went on for a few minutes – they were clearly not comfortable discussing “him”. After a few attempts I started to increase my level of commitment to the subject and they had no choice to but to talk with me about it. By this time, my heart was in my throat, and I could feel myself getting emotional. For the next hour or so, I became unglued. I told them there was more to the abuse than a “close call”. I went into a few details, but mainly spent my time explaining how much it was haunting me. From the size of the snot bubbles formed on my face, it wouldn’t take much to realize that I had an issue. Overall, they were good to talk with – and we hugged it out as I left around 10pm for my two hour drive back to Richmond.

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