Seven Years In
I am now going into 7 years this year since I was first diagnosed with having CPTSD. During that time I have had many ups and downs. I have battled denial, anger, shame, and even sadness.
Healing is never a straight line. It’s laps. Sometimes progress, sometimes circling back to feelings you swore you already dealt with. Denial to survive. Anger to protect. Shame because trauma loves to turn pain inward. Sadness because eventually you let yourself feel what you couldn’t before.
When I Thought I Was Doing It Wrong
Early on in my journey, I didn’t understand that any of this was normal. I thought if I was still angry or ashamed years later, it meant I was doing something wrong. That therapy wasn’t working. That I wasn’t working.
What I know now is this: none of those emotions meant I was failing. They were signs I was finally paying attention.
Sitting With Feelings Instead of Fighting Them
Healing hasn’t been about getting rid of these feelings. It’s been about learning how to sit with them—without letting them run my life. Some years I’ve felt stronger. Other years, I’ve felt like I was starting over right back at the beginning.
However, it turns out both were part of the same process.
One of the hardest things to accept was that “starting over” didn’t mean I had lost everything I’d gained. It just felt that way. Trauma has a way of convincing you that any step backward erases all the steps forward, even when that isn’t true. In reality, I was returning to familiar terrain with new tools, more awareness, and a little more self-compassion than I had before.
My Nervous System Was Talking, Not Failing
I used to measure healing by how little I was triggered, how calm I could stay, and how “normal” I could appear. If I reacted strongly, shut down, or pulled away, I treated it like a personal failure. What I understand now is that those reactions weren’t defects. They were information. My nervous system wasn’t betraying me; it was communicating.
CPTSD doesn’t live in thoughts alone. It lives in the body. It shows up in tension you don’t notice until your jaw aches, in exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix, and in the way certain tones of voice or situations can flip a switch before logic ever gets a vote. No amount of insight can outthink a nervous system that learned, very early on, that the world wasn’t safe.
From “What’s Wrong With Me?” to “What Are You Protecting?”
That realization changed how I approached healing. I stopped trying to “win” against my trauma and started learning how to listen to it. Instead of asking, Why am I like this? I began asking, what is this part of me trying to protect? That shift didn’t magically make things easier, but it made them clearer. And clarity, it turns out, is its own kind of relief.
There were also long stretches where nothing felt like it was working at all. No breakthroughs. No dramatic insights. Just showing up, again and again, doing the boring, unglamorous work of staying present. Those periods were frustrating and, at times, deeply discouraging. But looking back, they were often the moments when real integration was happening quietly, beneath the surface.
Becoming More Myself, Not Someone New
Seven years in, I’ve learned that healing isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about becoming more myself, with fewer walls, less reactive, and less ashamed of the ways I learned to survive. Some days that looks like confidence and steadiness. Other days it looks like rest, boundaries, and choosing not to push through when my body is asking me to slow down.
If you’re reading this and feeling like you should be “further along” by now, I get it. I’ve said those words to myself more times than I can count. But healing doesn’t follow a schedule, and it doesn’t reward self-punishment. The fact that you’re still here, still paying attention, and still trying to understand yourself, that counts for more than you think.
Seven years ago, I thought healing meant fixing what was broken. What I know now is that I was never broken. I was hurt. And healing has been less about repair and more about learning how to live honestly, gently, and fully with everything that comes with that truth.
Photo by Jacques Bopp on Unsplash