What lies beneath
Recently I wrote about my healing journey and the steps I’ve taken to overcome all of my trauma. While I know there are certain things that will never leave me, the more I process, the easier it gets. But what happens to those things that stay buried? And I’m not even talking about the vault memories that I have no access to. I mean those deep-rooted traumas that wouldn’t come up in a normal every day situation. When those get triggered, it’s a whole different ballgame.
Recently, I was hanging out with a new friend and everything was going great. We were getting along and I was having no trouble opening up to them. The following day, however, I was finding myself very dissociated. My anxiety was starting to climb and I assumed that I knew what had been triggered and tried my best to talk myself out of the dissociated state. Unfortunately, it only got worse as the day went on. By the time night rolled around, I was in a full-blown panic attack - the kind where you can’t catch your breath and feel like you’re dying. I was texting with this new friend and they were trying their best to figure out what happened, what went wrong, and how to help. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to articulate what had happened.
The next morning, waking with a clearer head, I knew exactly what had happened. It made so much sense that I was baffled why I didn’t realize it sooner. But the truth is, when you’re in it, you can’t always see the reasoning. However, even though I had figured out the cause, I could not fully pull myself out of the dissociated state. It was a long week of self-reflection, meditation, and talking myself through it. One thing my therapist always tries to have me do is to sit with the feelings of a memory. She reminds me constantly that it’s not the memory itself that’s important, but the feeling associated with the memory. Once I was able to name that, things became a little bit easier.
But here’s the biggest issue…
Living with PTSD or CPTSD is more complex than most people realize. Even if you think you know what all of your triggers are, something could happen one day and it feels like you’re back at square one. For me, the trigger was due to something that I had not been exposed to for years - something that was buried so far down that I barely even remembered it. Once it surfaced, though, it was like a tidal wave of memories and I couldn’t stop it. If this had happened even two years ago, I would have been so knocked down by the wave, it would have taken me weeks, if not months, to recover - if I recovered at all. But I also know that if this had happened prior to this healing journey, that my response to it and my actions following would have been completely different than they have been. While I can’t always see the progress I’ve made, it’s situations like this that really show me how far I’ve come.
I know I am stronger than I give myself credit for and as a dear friend reminded me recently - HEALING IS NOT LINEAR. I’ve said this to myself and others so many times, but in the throws of a crisis and severe dissociation, I couldn’t get to that reminder myself. I know there are going to be hard days - that’s just part of life when living with trauma. But the growth is in how I’m able to overcome it. When I get hit by a ton of bricks, am I able to push them all off at once or do I need to dig myself out brick by brick? As long as I’m working on getting myself out, the speed at which it happens doesn’t matter.
- Danielle
