Re-wiring my brain and shifting my perspective has not been easy. There are many days where I have messed up and got frustrated because I didn’t feel as if I was achieving any progress, but going through all the ups and downs has single-handily been the absolute best thing for me to pull out of the survival-mode cycle.
I started my journey 10 years ago. During that time I have faced a lot of hard moments, and it has been a slow climb because habitual thinking is hard to break. Even after all this time and the work I have done, I still have hypervigilance, but I can handle so much more of life now. I’ve learned to recognize my triggers and develop healthier coping mechanisms, and to embrace challenges as opportunities where I can learn even more ways to better understand myself.
Learning to relax was the turning point
I have lived in chronic fight or flight for as long as I can remember, and being able to loosen that trauma response as much as I have has been something I am proud of. For so long, “calm” felt dangerous to my nervous system and my brain, and yet that feeling of calm is what I craved. My regulation was so damaged that the thought of it constantly had me in a hypervigilant state, and my window of tolerance was so small.
The hardest thing for me to learn was allowing myself to relax. I was so afraid to lower my defenses that I found it near impossible to do. It started off as a slow and careful process, where I would find little pockets of time where I knew I was safe. Initially it was in my therapy sessions, but then I began doing it on my own time. It was in that space I began to explore letting go of the hypervigilance and allowing some comfort and well-being.
Re-connecting to our bodies is critical to our healing
For those of us with cPTSD, dissociation from the body is often a survival mechanism. We learn to live in our heads because our bodies haven’t always felt like a safe place to be. That’s when our thought patterns become normal. When they actually aren’t.
I had a habit of creating benchmarks in my mind. Where I constantly created conceptualized ideals as a benchmark and held myself up against them with no leeway. I believed without giving myself extreme direction, I would do things wrong. I spent my entire life creating an image of what a “good person” would do or think, and I would use that benchmark in how I should be. If I failed, the self-criticism would be overly harsh. I would self-attack.
In hindsight, all I was doing was torturing myself.
It was when, with the help of therapy, I started learning to reconnect with my body. Where I began unwinding decades of tension, memories, and emotions that got locked away. One of the most memorable moments for me was during a run where I pushed myself so hard that my chest began to burn, but it released things within me that I had to stop and allow myself to cry. I didn’t care that people were around me; the release was so powerful that I couldn’t stop from letting go of those emotions. In that moment there was so much freedom, and it felt so good.
Everyone needs self-care
It was in that moment I knew how crying in general is incredibly healing just on its own. Sadness is not bad. No emotion is inherently bad. Stifling your emotions and not letting your body feel what it needs to feel can cause further harm. When tension feels like it was melded in place for a long time, that relief can feel overwhelming and emotional in a really visceral way.
As someone who rarely cried, to now openly doing so was a huge shift, but one that I know benefits me in the long run, and is part of my self-care routine. I now take moments for myself where I feel safe to be able to release any tensions I may be feeling. I allow my inner child to have his moment, too. The playfulness is also an act of self-care.
Living with cPTSD makes us see life differently. To think differently, and it’s not until we manage to break the habitual thinking that we realize how worthy we truly are. That we matter, and we are not our trauma. Breaking free of the habitual thinking patterns, we create space for new narratives. Ones that honor us and don’t belittle us. We begin to understand that trauma doesn’t define our identity. When we are able to do that, we can separate who we are from our past experiences.
I’m not merely a survivor; I am a thriving individual who has learned to live above what tried to break me, and that is something I remind myself of every single day.
Photo by Keegan Houser on Unsplash