a journal through trauma therapy and healing C-PTSD
On Monday night I pushed through a difficult Pilates class, my heart racing from the exertion of my workout and fear of drawing my instructor’s attention if my form was off. This particular teacher challenged us in a way that often intimidated me. But to be fair, most people intimidate me. Continue reading “Flashbacks – Hijacked by Body Memories”
I spent a lifetime stuck in my head – thinking about, analyzing, and feeling distressed over my past and future. Trauma does this to our minds and bodies, leaving us unable to fully live in each moment. EMDR Therapy has given me my life back. With deep internal healing and embodied self-awareness, I can now welcome every emotion, feeling, and physical sensation. I never imagined this was possible – or knew what I was missing. Continue reading “Embodied Self-Awareness Through EMDR Therapy”
Each time I gathered enough courage to put a few raw pieces of my trauma into words, hoping to find support in a friend, my face would freeze into a ridiculous fake smile. How did that happen when I was crying and falling apart just moments earlier? Once I was face to face with another person, something inside me took over and shut down all expression of emotion. Continue reading “Why Do I Smile While I Voice What Feels Painful?”
I didn’t start therapy to process my trauma. I just wanted a peaceful marriage and not to feel like I was drowning in motherhood and, well…life! I didn’t even know my history could be labeled trauma. It sounded so dramatic! Clearly, my experiences were not worthy of such a heavy description. Continue reading “Why Therapy Takes So Long (Part 2): We Minimize the Impact of Trauma”
With each passing month after beginning counseling, I fought against the shame around my slow progress. I feared I would never “be better”. I was successful in all other areas of my life…so how was I “failing” at therapy?! Continue reading “Why Therapy Takes So Long (Part 1): Trauma Memories Are Stored Differently”
Our brains store the memories of our experiences, but so do our bodies. Processing the many layers of trauma that remained stuck in my mind and body has been a uniquely physical experience, different from anyone else’s. While there is no right or wrong way to experience emotions or process shame and trauma, if you desire deeper healing, it is important to experience the physical qualities of your emotions. They are unique to you. Continue reading “The Physical Experience of Working Through Shame and Trauma in Therapy”
Physical touch does not come naturally to me, whether it is receiving touch, knowing how to touch those I care about, or recognizing my own physical sensations. Physical touch seems to be directed by my head instead of any innate feeling in my body. It takes focus and conscious effort to think about touching someone or think about how to respond appropriately when touched. Continue reading “When You Cannot Force “Good Touch” to Feel Good”
Feeling disconnected from my own body and who I am as a person is one of the many frustrating realities rooted in the sexual abuse, assault, and emotional abuse I experienced. It interferes with my ability to connect with other people, to feel experiences physically, to know what I want or need, and of course, it interferes with my sexuality and intimacy. Reconnecting with my body has happened through experiencing trusting relationships and processing my trauma in therapy. To FEEL my own body, know myself, let my soul shine through…this has been the most incredible healing and spiritual experience. Continue reading “Reconnecting With My Body After Abuse”
If you have experienced childhood abuse or an abusive intimate relationship, it is hard to imagine that there can be any more painful layers under those invasive and often violent experiences. It took decades for me to gather the courage to face my sexual abuse and assault memories in therapy. I never expected to later uncover far deeper layers of pain, but this reality is present for many survivors of interpersonal trauma. These are such feelings as neglect, betrayal, and abandonment. It is the pain of knowing, even as a young child, that nobody cared to help you process your trauma…or to even prevent it in the first place. For me, this betrayal was the deepest layer under the violence of trauma. Continue reading “My Deeper Layers Under the Violence of Trauma”
We all have parts of us, parts of our mind that formed in childhood…this is normal human development. We all know struggles like: “part of me wants to eat healthy and feel good, but part of me could care less and I’m going to devour this piece of cake right now!” However, when an individual’s nervous system remains overwhelmed due to trauma, these normal parts of our minds become fragmented. They begin to act in extreme ways with complicated and rigid strategies to move through life. The strategies of behavior become patterns that feel vital to our survival. Continue reading “The Parts Inside Me”
One of the worst realities of complex-PTSD (C-PTSD) is how it keeps your brain and body hostage. Even with years of therapy, gaining significant insight and awareness on the effects caused by my trauma, I don’t often feel free. There are moments I do – even whole days, and for that I am incredibly grateful. So grateful on those days that I can’t keep it to myself! I let everyone know how happy I am, wholeheartedly believing that my depression is over. Continue reading “Dancing with Complex-PTSD and the Darkness of its Depression”
I find myself frequently angry at my body for all the ways it’s still “broken” and even seems to functions separately from my brain. My struggle with social anxiety is a perfect example of this disconnect. Therapy has given me awareness of my internal chaos, and helped me calm this chaos, yet when I want to connect in groups I’m attacked out of nowhere with a racing heart, feeling lightheaded, and I can’t catch my breath. Panic and anxiety continue to disrupt my life in these situations. Continue reading “Finding Compassion for Social Anxiety”
One of the most common features of trauma survivors is that they lose the ability to sense danger. How ironic is it that trauma can leave you functioning in a state of constant hypervigilance, yet with no cues for when you are actually in danger? Most of us can think of someone that has fallen into horrible situations again and again. Despite having bodies that are constantly on edge, on high alert, and waiting to be hurt…when we are in the face of danger, we have no actual urge to leave or even an awareness of the risk. Understanding that a traumatized nervous system works this way feels alarming and unfair! Continue reading “An Irony of Trauma: Hypervigilance with No Cues for Danger”
It’s Sunday afternoon and I was beginning to think about my schedule for Monday. I remembered my friend always goes to the gym Monday mornings and thought I’d love to join her. Picking up my phone I texted: Would you like a ride to the gym tomorrow cuz I’m planning to go. I hit send. Bam! It was done. 5 seconds. My eyes got big and I was suddenly hit with the significant contrast of those 5 seconds to the previous 3+ decades of my life. I thought about how different that 5-second process was even a year ago. When did it change and how I did I not notice? Continue reading “One of the Rigid Strategies My Mind Created (Anxious Attachment Style)”
I feel like the weirdest freak in the world when happy times with friends, filled with positive feelings, leave me flooded with sadness, hurt, and despair. You would think I just had a big fight with my husband instead of a coffee date with my favorite people! How the hell do happy times and sad or angry times leave me feeling the same!?!? Am I just wired wrong? Continue reading “When Positive Feelings are Unsafe”
When you’re recovering from trauma, with years and years of secrecy, you have no idea the extent of untruths or false negative beliefs, you hold within yourself. I’m calling them that instead of lies because lies denote a choice. I never chose to believe so many negative things about myself. I didn’t choose to live my life according to these negative beliefs. But that is what happened. When your body does not feel there is enough support, enough safety, to experience and know the truth of your trauma, then your mind creates a gift to keep you surviving. It gives you a whole set of twisted and false negative beliefs to live by. Continue reading “Truths and Untruths: Irrational Beliefs Stored in the Body”
It’s ironic how the behaviors that I have always hated most about me, aspects I thought were my personality, are one by one being identified as trauma adaptations. In all my important relationships…the ones I cannot bear to lose…I aim to please…to serve…but I do it to a fault. Through the lens of Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory, these efforts of desperately trying to please someone I love can be seen as a survival mechanism. They are please and appease behaviors. Continue reading “Please and Appease Behavior in Relationships: A Trauma Adaptation”
I desperately search for connection – not just friendship, but rather lifelines to pull me out of the trauma my body still lives within. I get consumed with the turmoil inside and it comes out in clingy, needy, desperate thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It is a cry for help – a yearning to be rescued by another person – rescued from the desperation, fear, and hopelessness of trauma, even many years later. Continue reading “The Clingy and Desperate Ways Trauma Shows Up in Relationships: A Cry for Help”
The word “dignity” has been on my mind a lot lately. I can only speak from my own experience, but am guessing many individuals who have been in an abusive relationship, been sexually assaulted or abused, have experienced a violation to their dignity. But what is dignity? And was it taken from me? If so, can I get it back? Is it damaged forever? Continue reading “What Happens to Dignity After Abuse?”
In a session this week, my therapist asked me to go back to a horrible memory, one of abuse. I voiced it in a previous session and hoped I was done with it. Why can’t speaking traumatic memories be enough? In talk therapy, I would have been done and moved on. Voicing it the first time was unbearable and sent me spiraling into several weeks of depression. I have learned that speaking memories is never enough for me. I remain detached from memories; I have not integrated my emotion into them. Although I didn’t need to verbalize the details of this memory, still I had to be in it, to hurt for what it was…and recognize what parts of it caused me pain. Continue reading “Somatic Therapy Integrates My Emotion into Memories”
I never told anyone about calling 911 because I was ashamed of my actions. Feeling like a foolish child, I watched the police walk out my door and I was left alone with him, unprotected. I wished I had cuts and bruises to show them that night. In my hallway I listened as they said “it was nothing, just a domestic dispute” in the police radio. The words left me with such shame and I never felt more alone as I faced an intensely angry husband who made me promise to never take such action again. Continue reading “Believing I Was Alone”
Oh the regrets I have! They are endless. But the biggest one of all is letting my ex know I was pregnant. If I had been brave enough, strong enough, smart enough to realize I could handle life on my own…Oh! How much better our lives would have been! It’s like a vortex my mind gets sucked into all too frequently. I play out the beautiful, peaceful life my baby girl and I would have created. And then I wrestle with God, questioning why we must struggle and endure such pain in this life. Continue reading “We Must Struggle”
I never put any thought into it but I always felt that my secrets kept me safe. Growing up I maneuvered around other people’s trauma secrets, finding ways to thrive without asking the wrong questions or touching on a topic that would spark emotion. Secrets kept me from experiencing vulnerability as a child. Then for 10 years with my ex-husband I kept all of his abuse secret out of fear and shame. Secrets and silence minimized his attacks along with the risk of being judged by friends and family. And for 14 years since, even in a healthy second marriage, I continue the cycle of secrecy because my body and mind do not know how to voice things…at least outside of therapy. My secrets continue to armor me from the painful emotions of processing my past. Continue reading “My Secrets Hurt the Ones I Love Most”