*Disclaimer: This is a personal exchange with a friend I met at PIW in the trauma center. I thought his courage in asking questions could help others, so I asked for and received permission to share the email conversation. Sharing your trauma narrative may or may not be something you need to do. It may be something you are not ready for. It may be something your therapist is not trained to deal with. You MUST decide on what is right for you with your personal, trauma-informed therapist.
Becks – I need some help.
I’ll never forget the day I met you. July 3, 2016. PIW. I walked in there so excitedly. Some smart person had finally suggested that the reasons I was slowly killing myself stemmed from my childhood experiences. It made some sense to me, and I figured a couple of weeks in DC and I’d be cured. I saw you and thought, here is this smart, confident, kind woman. When I leave this place, I will be just like her. I didn’t realize how right I was.
Granted, most of my understanding comes through the opaque lens of social media, but it seemed to me that your trajectory was no more straight up than mine. It gave me a feeling of comradery even though we had the smallest bit of direct contact.
I spoke to you nearly every time I walked my dog along the lake. I wished you well and hoped you would be spending some time in your soothing, beautiful places because I knew what it was doing for me.
Then, I started reading your blog. And again, I felt like we were in similar places at the same time. I too am faced with my challenge of choice. I’ve been stuck in the same vicious oscillation between self-love and self-loathing. And with the help of my therapist, I’m asking myself “if not now, when?”
My problem is that the words just don’t flow. Some of it may be the nature of CPTSD—the need to forget to survive. Some of it may be the “don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel” ethos. Some of it may be the passage of time. Some of it may be the sheer volume of material.
I tell my therapist I can’t describe my abuse with any more clarity than I could describe a snowflake in a blizzard. Guilt, shame, fear, and deception were part of the very air I breathed. It’s like asking someone who grew up on a pig farm to describe the smell, and their reaction is, “What smell?”
I guess I’m asking for help getting over this hump and reaching that point of painful honesty. What was your experience when you started putting words on paper? Did you struggle? How did you overcome your resistance? I’d appreciate any help you can give. And if it isn’t anything you want to do or can do, I totally understand. Take care, Becks.
Dear Friend,
Wow! I could not have come up with a date, but I remember our time at PIW. You made an impact, and I have held you in high regard ever since. I think about you often and enjoy our occasional interactions over the years. Your healing, as well as that of a few others I have met over the years, has felt somewhat personal. And it helps that we have that glorious Wolverine state as common ground.
First, I can assure you that just as you have observed, the trajectory continued to shoot in the wrong direction for far longer than I wanted or anticipated. I was at PIW two more times before things began moving in the right direction. Perhaps it was finally the right combination of medications, my own readiness to work a little harder, or the opportunity to finally work with a therapist who is both trauma-informed and personally intuitive. Or maybe it was all three with some continuing factors. I have been working with my therapist since May 2018, and I do attribute a lot of my healing to her, but it has come with a price tag. This is what I mean…
I began blogging shortly after starting with my therapist. Some of the things I have talked about are the multiple types of therapy we have tried, and I can assure you there have been many others I have used *somewhat* successfully. Cognitive Processing Therapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Internal Family Systems, etc., etc., etc. Here’s the thing. It isn’t that none of those were successful. It is that they have been a stepping stone to get me across “the bog of eternal stench,” as seen in Labyrinth.
It has never been about the different therapies, but rather my take on what was going on internally/externally. In my mind, I was succeeding at being a failure because I lived in a place of “stuckness.” I desperately wanted to change my mind about what happened. You know, I desperately wanted to believe none of it was my fault. At the very least, I just didn’t want to feel the shame and guilt. Those are the things that keep us stuck. And those are the things that push us to hate ourselves, to make us want to end our lives.
In my mind, I can pick apart many turning points that have helped me be like, following the Labyrinth bog illustration, Sir Didymus, who closed his eyes and ran. That run sucked. It was risky, it STUNK, and it sounded atrocious (or, to my little kid brain, it was a little funny). Two specific turning points for me were things I have written about. 1. Being at Steps in Utah and 2. One specific rupture and repair with my therapist.
Being at Steps was extremely difficult. There were a lot of painful and challenging things to encounter. It wasn’t just about facing my own trauma in small ways; it was about facing others’ trauma. I heard firsthand and very specifically others’ stories. There was no censorship. It was shock in each and every group session, and most specifically in Matt’s groups. Yet, this was the place where I not only felt most triggered, ashamed, and afraid but also accepted. I wrote my story as best I could to read to the group. What I got was disconnection. It was bizarre, painful, and confusing. So, I worked harder. I worked to connect with others. I worked to connect with myself. I worked to connect with my own story. Slowly, I was able to rewrite my life story. It went from about ten-ish pages to around double. The story remained quite vague, but it was the start of me owning it.
It’s one thing to read your narrative out loud, no matter how vague it is, but sitting in a group and being called on to share an issue you are working through is something altogether different. No, actually, that wasn’t it. It was that I had to look the therapist in the eyes and tell him what happened. The shame was overwhelming, but I wasn’t allowed to look away. That was pretty life-changing. It wasn’t my first experience with compassionate, judgement-free acceptance, but it was probably when I felt most ashamed AND those things. Matt looked into my eyes as I spoke the words out loud, and without breaking his gaze, his voice lowered, tears built up in his eyes, and he said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you.” I experienced every ounce of the genuine remorse he had for me. And for a moment, I was able to extend that to myself. It was a flash of self-acceptance and love where loathing used to be.
The experiences I had in Utah set me up with the confidence to push myself when I came home and began working with my therapist again. Remember, that was December 2020-March 2021, and it is now 2024. It wasn’t a fast process. In fact, it was a lot of trial and error. My therapist and I revisited EMDR. I felt stuck again. In my “stuckness,” my therapist communicated that I may need to seek therapy elsewhere. She was not confident that what she could offer was what I needed. I was devastated. This came during the same session I had intended to tell her I had an idea of what I may need, and I thought it would be pretty simple. In my hurt, fear, and protective anger, I basically called her incompetent and unworthy of hearing what I had to say. What an a-hole I was! I had to sit with the discomfort and dis-ease for days. I couldn’t even get out of bed! In the following session, I apologized and communicated what I had wanted to say in the previous session, and we proceeded. Two things were huge in that experience. First, I had to sit with my own feelings of shame and hurt. Second, there was a rupture and a repair. The repair was one I had not experienced before. My therapist had every right to respond differently than she did. Do you know how she responded? Vulnerably. That opened a door for me.
Never once has my therapist asked me to trust her. She has asked me to trust the process, though, and I’ve struggled with that many, many times. The rupture and repair allowed me to understand the process better and trust my therapist. It drastically changed things. That was also not yesterday.
Here’s the thing. I am learning more and more, probably with the help of the concept of Internal Family Systems, that it isn’t just compassion and trust in others that make the difference. That certainly makes a VERY BIG difference. No, I am noticing that I need to be willing to have self-compassion and self-love. It is me who I need to be able to trust with the story.
That is why I wandered into World’s End State Park. It was to talk with the parts of me that have been hurt. I do that over and over. Sometimes I listen to awful stories, and sometimes it’s just ramblings of daily life. I promise to come back and listen again, and I leave the stories. The more I listen, the more I tolerate. The more I tolerate, the more I can feel without being overwhelmed.
Now, to answer your questions, Friend. Writing the seven pages my therapist reads and rereads took me a while. And that wasn’t the first draft. I crumpled the first several chaotic, non-linear attempts before finally allowing myself to write the narrative as chronologically accurate as I could, throughout many sittings. I reviewed the vague things I wrote in Utah a few years before. I sat outside at the lake, in my zero-gravity chair watching birds, at the coffee shop, in my car at a trailhead, and many other locations. I needed much more stimulation around me than a desk in my office could offer. I needed to write it, but I needed to dampen the feelings, sensations, racing thoughts, judgments, and emotions to get it out. It was awful. Ten minutes here. Fifteen minutes there. Sometimes, I could get a page written. Once, I only wrote three letters. I was moody. I was dissociative. I was triggered. But I used coping strategies, did things I enjoyed, and surrounded myself with people. I think this may have been around the same time that I self-harmed again after over 1000 days.
I didn’t write every detail. Not even close. I wrote the parts that hold the most shame for me. I wrote the parts that needed to see the light of day. I wrote the parts I most want to keep quiet, hidden, unseen. Why? Because those are the parts keeping me stuck. How did I overcome that? Two things: Courage and compassion. When I first wrote, I wasn’t sure I would tell my therapist that I did. Once it was written, the next logical step was to tell my therapist. Then, allow her to read it out loud. Now, each time she reads, I feel softer. I am realizing that fear and shame have lied to me for a very long time. Those things survive in the quiet, dark corners. I am shining a light on things and realizing how badly I need to do this.
You, Friend, need to figure out what you are afraid of. Are you afraid of yourself? Are you afraid that someone will judge you and be as disgusted with you as you are of yourself? Are you afraid sharing your narrative will be just as unsuccessful as all your other attempts? Are you afraid of feeling free of shame and self-hatred? Are you afraid the same and self-hatred will be worse? Are you afraid to be happy? Are you afraid you will never be happy?
You need to figure out if this is what you need. And why? What is the goal of sharing your narrative? What is the goal of talking about the specifics of your trauma? Is it a confession? Talking about that won’t change your self-judgment. Is it because someone told you that you should? Is it what you really want and need?
I think you are already headed to the platform. You aren’t on the ground. No, you are doing the work. Reaching out to me was just the next step. Trust yourself, Friend. Trust that you are the hero of your story. Trust that you will be the one who that little boy needs to guide him out of the atrocities of his childhood. Don’t look away when he starts talking, though. Don’t leave. He needs you. Feel it. Hear it. See it. Sense it. And let it change you. It will. At first, it might be ugly, but it starts to soften. I promise. Trust the process.
Warmly,
Becks
Burn the Boat! 