PERSONAL GROWTH | HEALING
A Trauma Recovery Walkthrough
People talk about the road to recovery or the path to enlightenment but few are prepared to walk and not just intellectualise these.
Because a path or road can be rocky and difficult at times.
Those further along the path often tell us we need to walk things in action for them to work, but we prefer to regurgitate knowledge word for word hoping it’ll have the required effect if only we repeat it enough.
It seldom (if ever) does.
Today the chronic pain in my upper right back that has plagued me for almost three years disappeared. A spasm that began in 2019 when I was being hurt and nobody would believe or help me.
When I speak of the mind/body connection (and I’m certain this holds true for others who speak of this too) people imagine it’s some kind of ethereal and energetic thing.
But it’s totally logical.
Our perception affects our thoughts. Our thoughts affect our behaviour, reactions and habits.
And all of these directly impact our bodies physically.
Say, for example, a person was being continually hurt and nobody believed them. Say, for example, this person developed some low grade depression due to the ongoing stress and isolation.
This person may begin to hunch over slightly.
In defeat. To make themselves smaller because they feel ashamed. In sadness because of the ongoing emotional pain. Or burgeoning depression. And also because of the physical fatigue, that would naturally set in, after years of ongoing stress.
This would lead to back problems.
Of course.
If this person was being constantly threatened and was kept in the fight/flight reaction on top of all of this, there would probably also be what’s commonly known as “muscle armouring” after some time.
Muscles becoming locked, or spasming, because the person stays mentally and physically tensed in high alert, ready to react to the next unexpected “attack”.
No. This isn’t hey shoo wow hippy-dippy-bullshit.
Physical ailments and diseases are, more often than not, a direct result of our environment and perception.
Stress has been scientifically proven to impact the lungs now.
There’s nothing mysterious about this at all.
Three years of chronic back pain. The muscle in question so hardened, it audibly clicked when I rotated my shoulder upwards. Yes. A muscle that clicked.
Some trauma counselling. Ongoing anti-inflammatories. Pain killers. Yoga. Stretching and movement to try and shift the physical manifestation of the terror of 2019. It would come and go. Get better, or worsen again, depending on what was happening in my world at the time…
but I was waiting for this moment and it presented itself at last.
An opportunity to heal it in full.
Over the last weeks a situation presented itself online that mirrored the experience I had in 2019. Someone else’s story that was my story too, with a similar reaction from those that caused me even more harm because of ignorance and bias back.
I asked for help and was told to stay silent, was accused of lying, was accused of causing trouble, was called crazy…
but mostly I was just ignored.
I avoided the recent onslaught of social media posts and personal opinions for a week or so. I was reluctant to get involved with such a thing. I was afraid to become a target again.
“It’s not my problem,” I thought.
“I don’t care,” I tried to convince myself.
Thing is…
this is not who I was before that experience in 2019. And by avoiding this good fight, I knew I was avoiding doing the work necessary to reclaim a bit of the person I once was.
Because a change in worldview is a symptom of C-PTSD.
And I used to care. A lot.
Probably too damned much, in fact.
We use clever expressions that are entirely misconstrued.
Or simply not put to any beneficial use.
Sometimes the things that hurt the most teach us the best lessons.
— Anonymous
This leaves out some really important words:
if we acknowledge our reactions to them and do the personal work to release what isn’t ours to keep, to heal and grow.
So I took a public stand despite knowing the possible consequences of going against mainstream popular opinion.
My son says before 2019 I was Starfire, but these days I’m Raven. We laugh about this together but it isn’t really funny at all.
A major part of my becoming more hardened was experiencing the no response or fucks given by authorities and the general public while my child was being hurt as well.
That kind of shit is hard to come back from.
I shared about why people shouldn’t be judging stuff without knowing more because of how badly the pack mentality hurt my son and I.
I didn’t share about our experience. I touted a balanced, rational approach as more empathetic and conscious in situations like these. I offered that nobody could pass judgment with the little knowledge we’re privy to. And some information on how unconscious bias affects situations like this as well.
I could feel the displeasure growing. I could feel the lack of support and the immediate rejection because I didn’t agree with mainstream judgement. And judgement it was.
But since I’ve come back more of a Raven than a fluffy cupcake, most folks are a liddle bit cautious of me these days. They’d rather back away quietly than shoot me down or tell me to be quiet.
Apparently I’ve earned my stripes.
There was a quiet retreat instead of suggestions to shut it, laughter or accusations of crazy this time.
I’d totally exchange my stripes to be able to still believe in the common decency of human beings, quite frankly. But it seems, in the society we’ve created, that fluffy cupcake do-gooders generally get the shit kicked out of them.
And I’m too tired to take another hit.
So most people chose to ignore me instead.
The being ignored these last few days reignited the last bit of the PTSD I’ve not yet been able to shake off from the similar experience I had in 2019.
It was less the experience that left me with three years of PTSD to try and heal and more the reaction of those around me to be clear. Most people don’t understand how trauma works though. It’s not the incident that creates the trauma.
It’s the isolation during the incident.
This was my concern for the parties involved in the very public dispute of their very personal and private lives.
I chose to continue sharing, quite brashly, regardless. I chose to stand in my truth regardless. I chose to accelerate the amount of posts I was sharing… to make a point about societal expectations, bias and consequent opinions. I refused to be silenced because I wasn’t being mainstream and abiding by the now toxically “polite” rules of a society running on fear and adrenalin.
I was fucking triggered and I was well aware of it.
But this time I stayed totally conscious of what was happening for me personally while I stood my ground.
This time, I shared confidently knowing my intentions were sound.
It’s often easier to fight for others than to fight for ourselves. Isn’t it?
As my emotional flashback escalated the pain in my back became unbearable.
To the point, yesterday, that I took more painkillers after nothing else worked and lay curled up in bed. In miserable agony. Full of hurt, deep despair and sorrow.
I was aware of what was happening though. I knew this was an emotional (C-PTSD) flashback. I knew it wasn’t “real” and it would pass… I knew enough to no longer be afraid of this part of the process. I knew enough to sit with it and move through it as it came and went.
I stayed awake and alert as things unfolded knowing, full well, after the last years of experiential recovery and the learning I’ve received from actively walking it…
that this was the only way out.
We use clever expressions like, “The only way out is through.”
But we still do our best to avoid walking through anything that feels uncomfortable.
Did you know every time a trauma is triggered and avoided, it embeds even more deeply and it becomes even harder to heal?
Fact.
Last night was unsettling.
If I’d know less about mental health and the way the nervous system response plays out during a major trigger, I may’ve thought I needed medication of some kind.
It’s that full on when a primal wound or deep trauma is triggered. And make no mistake… ostracisation and rejection by society are experienced as an actual threat to survival by the “reptile brain”.
Coupled with the “real” fear I’d experienced in 2019 by being actively threatened by police and in physical danger for doing fuck-all illegal, the sensation last night was intense.
I could feel my nervous system “zinging” as I tried to get to sleep.
Sleep was understandably elusive.
I know this part of the healing well now and I chose to get up and go back on to social media to continue “sitting” in the flashback of that horror story history of mine —in real time someone else’s same but different shit storm.
I finally got to sleep around 11pm, but I woke up still “angry”.
Anger is my go to fight/flight reaction when I feel threatened.
Perhaps if it weren’t things would’ve gone better for me back then. There might’ve been more people who felt some kind of empathy or compassion.
Perhaps more people would’ve even been able to believe me.
But my go-to in the Stress Response is the “Fight” Reaction and I didn’t know enough about how all of this worked back then to make myself heard.
Today, even more stubbornly, I continued to stand my ground on social media knowing full well the general consensus by this stage might be I’m “off-kilter”.
The exact same general assumption that led to me losing everything I held dear in 2019. I’d refused to remain silent then as well and sane women don’t question authority apparently.
I was distracted all morning.
Remembering bits and pieces of 2019. Memories I’d prefer not to remember at all. How terrifying it was to be totally alone in the situation with no help coming.
And the false accusations that drove me to almost insanity for real.
I stayed with the “fear” and continued with my day regardless.
Observing my distraction. The anger. The outrage. The disgust. The despair. I even cried at one point. That was good! That was more of the grief I’d been avoiding.
This time I accepted all of it as it came.
So many painful memories and feelings. All of the thoughts and feelings I’d had to shut down to survive 2019. All of those same thoughts and feelings arising again, as I walked through this not mine repeat of 2019 experientially.
Because this is how unresolved trauma “works”.
I knew it would keep coming back to haunt me unless I dealt with it in full. By engaging and participating in the flashback and current situation with awareness instead of choosing to turn away…
I knew I could process it properly and may be able to move on at last.
What an incredible opportunity to do this with the resources I have today.
Between sitting with all of these half buried thoughts and emotions, I danced.
I stretched my back. I ate. I played. (Yes. I even played.)
I stayed grounded enough to stay present and alert to the process. But I did not try to become grounded enough to “forget” the pain I needed to grieve, to release and move on from all of this in full.
And by this afternoon a thought began to arise…
“It doesn’t matter what people think.” it said. “You already know this.”
I’d reached this “enlightenment” back in 2019.
An understanding that people see and hear what they’re able to at any given time, with the information they have or are willing to engage with at that point in their journey.
It’s nothing personal.
But back then I hadn’t met the people I have in my life today.
People who accept me for who I really am, who encourage me to be me and who support my personal perspective and way of walking in the world. People who are also not afraid to speak up about the things that matter most to them.
People who are also not afraid of the “dark”.
Because there are always those people, by the way. The ones, like you, who celebrate the you that you are.
You may not have found them yet is all.
By not backing down in 2019 and walking through the loss of the people, places and things that were not meant to be mine, I found new people, places and things that are more in accordance with the authentic me that I am.
It took some time, but we found each other.
The result is…
these days I no longer feel the need to act out on addictive substances and behaviours to deny the who that I really am. And I’m not lonely (or mentally distressed) as fuck because I need to pretend to be who I’m not to be loved.
To be accepted.
By standing in my truth and walking though the inevitable fallout, I found my way out.
Being able to “relive” the events of 2019 by engaging with the content that “triggered” me into wanting to completely fucking avoid it, with the support I have today, enabled me to process things properly in a “safe” space.
And this is how trauma recovery “works”.
A bit later today I realised the pain in my back, that has been plaguing me for three long years, is gone. The muscles are tender as fuck. As though I’ve been worked over by a decent masseur. I guess that’s all of the movement I’ve been busy with to try and get the spasm to release to no avail.
I knew it would just come back if I didn’t deal with the mental and emotional cause of it anyway. This is why I never bothered to spend money on a physio, in fact. Pointless.
So yeah. I’m still going to be a bit tender for a while. But that three year fucking spasm?
All gone.
What remains, after a trauma is properly processed, is an inordinate sense of inner peace and contentment. I feel that this evening. It’s worth every moment of agony and fear during the hours or days of allowing and accepting.
The hours or days of actually healing in full.
Sure. You can manage the triggers and flashbacks with programs, routines or medicines if that’s easier to do right now. Or forever. But these are not cures. They aren’t the way out in full. They’re just some good tools to help you stay calm while you do the real work.
Lasting recovery is possible.
But the only way out really is straight fucking through.
It is not advisable to try and do trauma recovery work without someone who will validate and support your experience or the trauma can be further embedded.
By day I work as a recovery coach for addiction and mental health. Feel free to add a private note to get in touch and find out more about my services.
