Ya know when people told me “when you’re finally safe enough that you can leave survival mode and start to let go of and process your c-ptsd/trauma things are probably going to get really, really bad before they slowly start to get better” I thought that was reasonable. I did not understand that by “things are going to get bad” they meant “you’re going to find yourself in the worst mental state of your entire life, but dw, that means it’s working” and tbh I simply wish someone had been more clear.
Not letting these stay in the tags, damn.
Let yourself be Goop.
I want everyone in the notes who is doubting the legitimacy of this to know in the first therapy appointment I had after making this post, when I said I was feeling down because I was realizing how much hard work I still had to do to address my trauma, my therapist immediately said “a lot of people with trauma give up on therapy because once they start addressing whst happened to them their mental state can really tank, and people are naturally going to want to avoid things that make them feel worse, but in reality this is a sign that you’re healing, and it will get easier with time” like I didn’t even have to bring it up she just said that right off the bat, so yeah I and everyone else on this post aren’t lying, when you get out and start being safe enough that you can dig into everything that happened it’s going to hurt really bad, but that’s part of the process and you shouldn’t give up.
It reminds me of that meme a went around a while back; it was a picture of a cabinet with a glass door, and you could see a bunch of plates about to fall inside of it. The door was stopping them, but it was obvious that if you opened the door they would fall and it would be very hard to catch them all.
It’s natural to be scared to open the door because you know the plates will break and there will be a huge mess to clean up, but you can’t ignore that door forever. If you don’t open it and face the problem that cabinet and the plates inside are useless, and they might break all on their own anyway, when you’re not ready, so you have to steel yourself, open the door, let the plates you can’t catch fall, feel sad and upset about the mess, and then clean it up so you can start using your dishes again.
Healing can feel good at times, but a lot of the time it is painful and scary and you’ll want to turn away because ofc you don’t want to be sad and scared anymore, but the truth is you will never really stop being scared until you face what happened and try to figure out how to move on from there. In my experience your body eventually won’t give you a choice, anyway, so you just gotta lean in and let it hurt, because there’s a better life on the other side.
