Perseverance 

Perseverence is exhausting, but so worth it. When approaching anything in life giving up is a sure way to derail progress. When healing from trauma perseverance is key. Not only does it take perseverance to survive during the period of time that the trauma is occurring, it also takes perseverance to stay committed to the healing process.  It is easy to slip back into old habits and feel a pull to stay there where it is comfortable. But the unlocked freedom, clarity, and joy that is on the other side of healing is worth all the ups and downs you have to push through to get there.   It’s a daily, sometimes hourly, choice to continue on the healing journey when everything in you wants to stop.

Perseverance is a loaded word, it means falling, failing, backsliding and choosing to get up and try again. For me it means forgiving myself when I fall back into a depressed, paralyzed state and finding the energy to get up and try again over and over. The cool part is that each time I start again, I get back to a stable place faster. It is something I preach in OT to parents that watch their child regress with skills due to a seizure, growth spurt, illness, etc., once a skill is learned, even if regression occurs it’s much faster each time you have to relearn. 

I have learned that healing from C-PTSD is a constant cycle of regression, relearning, and regaining joy. It’s not easy and it’s extremely disappointing when you take steps backwards but deciding life and those you love are worth the process of  relearning again and finding joy.  

I think this is not only hard on the one doing the healing but also on those standing and going on the journey with them. Those that support you are kind of experiencing the trauma by-proxy and when there is a regression it is a sort of trigger for them that illicits fear…fear that things will be bad again, fear that you will give up, and just an overwhelming nervousness for the future.  

Letting those around you truly express their fears and disappointment with any step backwards is hard.  Your fighting a shame battle so discussing what you may view as failure is a trigger for the shame cycle that those with C-PTSD are often stuck in. But it is unfair to assume that those riding the rollercoaster with you aren’t going to have difficult times and negative emotions. Perseverance also means weathering the storms relationally that come from the rollercoaster that is healing. 

Learning to hear criticism and not retreat to a place that shame usually takes you to, a place of self hate and withdrawal, takes lots of perseverance. Being real with yourself about how your journey impacts those you love is a huge part of the journey. 

Imperfection, regression, mistakes, and causing pain are all a part of the healing journey that require us to get to a place of forgiving ourselves for “not healing fast enough or hurting others with our pain and length of the healing journey.”

Perseverance is truly the main thing between you an healing fully. Don’t give in to old patterns, it’s worth it keep going! 

 

Strong and Fragile

Ever since I can remember people have told me, “You’re so strong.”  I guess in some ways I am, but in other ways I’m extremely fragile. It’s a very complex mix of two extremes. My strength has always come from a desire to fight, my definition of life was a big fight for many things including success, independence, worthiness, stability, safety, etc. Today though, I define strength differently. Strength is no longer defined by a fight but instead a peace so deep and unwavering that the need to fight is non-existent.  Strength isn’t something gained through fighting daily through life, but is something that has always been present and just needs to be quietly exposed.

My fragile side is most often only exposed in private, and not for long because the truth of my own fragility scares me.  Lately I have learned to sit with it longer and longer. What I have found there is a need for Christ and a volunerability that is both freeing and terrifying. This weekend I have had time to sit with the fragility of my own emotional and spiritual healing. It’s so important for me to carve out time for self care and time to spend with God. The past few weeks Work and life have overshadowed all of the things I know to be necessary to maintain healing. I have prioritized everything over my self care and it has left me with the familiar feelings of paralysis and numbness. It’s scary that my body still defaults to that so quickly, thus the fragility of healing.

When you start feeling better it is easy to want to be “normal” to drop all of the boundaries and controls that you set so you could heal and resume the busyness and distracted lifestyle that the world (Satan) calls us to. Trying to maintain boundaries and other self care activities is hard, and the devil knows that slowly chipping away at them is the best strategy to take you back to feeling numb and paralyzed emotionally.  That is where he wants me. When I am there I am easily irritated, angry often, and lonely. I am incapable of seeing the big picture and I’m irritated by all the details and overwhelmed by all the dysfunction. I hate going back there. I hate that the neural pathways that I default to are so deep and easily accessed. I dream of a time that emotional and spiritual health won’t take so much effort. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe self discipline, boundaries, and Godly priorities that reflect an eternal perspective aren’t supposed to come easy.   Maybe the fragility of spiritual and emotional health isnt just true for those who have experienced trauma, but maybe it’s the truth for all of us.

What is interesting is that when I finally accept that I am fragile and that because of that I need to be diligent with the safeguards of boundaries and self care, I then feel strong. I want to encourage everyone to embrace their volunerability and fragility, find security in Christ, and as a result find their strength.

 

 

TRIGGERS

C-PTSD has ways of popping up when you least expect it. The simplest of things can be triggers. They can come just about any form.  For me, mine have included:

1. Gentle rubbing of my arm or a hand on my shoulder

2. Men older than me getting too close or being alone with an older male

2. Laundry rooms

3. Sports cars

4. Phone ringing

5.  Hand bells in a traditional church service

7.  Certain smells-musty houses, foods, etc

 

There are more but I don’t like trying to recall them all. When I am triggered the first thing that happens is my heart rate and breathing increases and my mind goes to a panic disorganized state.  Flashbacks come to me in pieces and flashes. In the beginning, I would trace the flashback and find it’s origin buried deep in my memory. It would come out in nightmares or fragmented memories. This was in the beginning of my healing journey. It was important to me to know what I had repressed and to explore how those things affected me and why I have the coping strategies and habits of self protection and perfectionism that I have.

But there came a time that these details no longer mattered to me. I knew enough, and I was ready to start healing, not just remembering. I asked my therapist if it was necessary to uncover everything to fully heal, because I really had no desire to dig further. She said it’s different for everyone, but I knew I was done digging.

 

Now I had identified what was stealing my joy (C-PTSD), why I had it in the first place, and now I was ready to take my life back. It became a battle to become my authentic self. The self that wasn’t damaged, that wasn’t scared, and was most importantly whole.

 

Once that became the goal, things happened fast with regard to my healing. I had wayyyy fewer flashbacks, and when I did I saw it as saying F-you (only phrase strong enough) to the devil when I used strategies to stay present, control my breathing, and not let the flashback cause me to dissociate or steal my enjoyment.  Then saying F-you to the devil became addicting.  Each time my new strategies worked I stole more and more power from the C-PTSD and aquired more power for my new “whole” authentic self. As this repetition happens, neurologically speaking we develop new neural pathways. This is the basis of what I do as an OT with kids, help them develop and through repetition solidify new neural pathways for motor, sensory, emotional, and behavioral responses to stimuli. I knew this worked, I had seen it over and over in OT practice so I was excited each time I had the opportunity to deepen my new neural pathways by not letting my old strategies surface when triggered. It became self perpetuating, the more I did it the better I got at it and the more confident I became that I could have my life back.

 

Life has a layer of spiritual warfare happening all around us that we are not always aware of. The devil will take note of our struggles and try to keep us distracted by the pains of the past. My battle with C-PTSD is a spiritual battle and through deepening my relationship with Christ, spending more and more time with him in prayer and meditation on His word, I found the power I had from God to fight the evil in my own life with wisdom and self control. The importance of alone time, time with God, and self care was TREMENDOUS. God gave me this in a very strange way. My physical health was not good,  likely due to the emotional stress of C-PTSD and some physical issues I was having that were unrelated.  This resulted in time out of work and lots of time alone.  This became a blessing that allowed time for true healing emotionally and physically.

 

Trauma shapes us but it doesn’t have the power to define us, we can choose to take the power back and weaken it to the point that even when it raises its ugly head we can say F-you, stay present, and enjoy the present without the past stealing our joy.

 

I still have times that the triggers will alter my mood temporarily (a few hours now) but they no longer cause me to dissociate, panic, or have physical responses like chest pain, diarrhea, etc. I’m now on a mission to keep them from even altering my mood and making me grouchy. I’m hoping that once they don’t have any power at all they will disappear completely, because the frequency of their occurrence now is minimal. But my goal and prayer is that they will be extinct!

 

If you are experiencing your own battle with C-PTSD, please know healing is possible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have always gone through life like a bulldozer for as long as I can remember. However, I was also a procrastinator, but for very specific reasons. I didn’t want to start something if I didn’t have time to do it perfectly and complete it in one sitting. You can see how these guidelines would lead to everything piling up. So it always did. Then once the pressure of the list got to be too much, I would be like a bulldozer and do it all at once leading to many, many all nighters. Then I would crash from exhaustion afterward and start letting things pile up again. I was never able to ration the work and do a little at a time.

Yes, this is somewhat personality driven but it is also common in those who have experienced trauma. I was never good at pacing. My expectations of myself were that I get it all done perfectly or not at all. This can be paralyzing! This is one of the examples of how all or nothing thinking ran my life.

I was also also pretty good at making snap judgements about things, bulldozing my way through relationships.  At the time, putting  people in categories almost immediately kept my world simplistic enough to manage while having the chaos inside of me.  If someone hurt me, made a poor choice, criticized me, or overtly challenged me then they weren’t to be trusted. I didn’t push them out of my life necessarily but I was just really cautious and kept them in the not to be trusted category. Well that’s a problem isn’t it? All people have fallen short and are in need of forgiveness. Not just from God, but from those in their day to day lives. Trust is a fragile thing, but for those with a traumatic history it is almost too fragile to touch.

Because of my past, I despised people who were dishonest, selfish, made poor choices that hurt others, and had no self control; so if I put you in that category for any reason it was next to impossible for me to see anything but the bad. But the truth is that very few people are truly as sick as my father was and I have learned not to so quickly put others in that box, or any box for that matter.  I have had to learn to look at the whole person and determine if the mistake they made was a part of a pattern of behavior or one singular event.  If it was just a mistake and not a pattern, then I have learned to see the whole person, their good qualities but also reminding myself that they are human and will make mistakes. This has opened my world to the true complexities that make up people. In addition to taking my blinders off and truly looking at others, I have also done so looking at myself. It’s amazing the pieces of ourselves that we can’t see when we are avoiding hard feelings, especially shame, and in ‘self protection at any cost’ mode.  Through looking hard at myself in therapy I have uncovered my own complexity as a human-the good, the bad, and the ugly. The difference is that now the imperfection does not illicit SHAME, instead I give myself GRACE and in turn I can more freely give grace to others.

As a part of my healing journey, I pray that God will help me continue to take blinders off when looking at myself and others, leading to a new level of gratefulness for the gift of forgiveness, grace, and mercy and that I will wholeheartedly accept these gifts that were given to me freely through Jesus instead of rejecting them through insisting on carrying my shame.