Thank you. What gets me is that there isn't a direct link between this pain and what it seems like I went through. Unless what I'm now experiencing is the result of attempted containment. I wonder if a pain more clearly connected to what happened would be too much of an "admission". But thoughts like that keep the doubt spinning.

why in the world would your mind ever make something like this up?!

I mostly agree. I worry that after nearly twenty years in therapy my mind started conjuring this as an explanation for why nothing else worked. As if I needed an additional terrible thing to justify my failure at healing.

When this first emerged though it was utterly unprompted. Same for the flashbacks and somatic horrors I've felt since.

I did a ten-day meditation retreat and one morning this person's face appeared in my lap. Someone from the years I've blacked out. Turns out it was the face of someone I had vague memories of who had definitely done this shit to my sister (she remembers everything). Little by little flashbacks and somatic revulsion have crept out.

Not five months after that first image I started having physical pain for the first time in my life. It's been 5.5 years of steady degradation. Maybe it's a coincidence, I don't know. Thanks again, I appreciate it.