I want to talk about the assumptions that many people make about therapy, myself included.
There's this idea that therapy is meant to ‘fix’ or give you ‘strategies’. There's also this idea that therapy starts to ‘help’ straight away and that the aim of therapy is for you to go ‘back to normal’, as if this was just a trivial blip, a lapse in judgement where you overreacted for a moment.
PTSD can’t be swept under the carpet and forgotten about, as much as I'd love that to be my reality. My brain has radically changed and I'm not even the same person I was before.
‘Going back to normal’ simply isn't even an option.
I am going to have to rethink what “recovery” might actually look like for me because some days, ok, actually a lot of days at the moment, it feels like I'm never going to recover and that makes me feel very distressed and overwhelmed.
Perhaps I have set my recovery goals too high? Perhaps I am not taking into account that I can't actually return to ‘as you were’, because that person no longer exists….
This is not the recovery I was expecting
Recovery is not what I was expecting.
‘Back to normal’
The formal recognition of ‘as you were’
The blur of yesterday‘s blip
Snipped from existence
To fit with the ideal that I’ve now got a grip
And clipped that bit of my life
Cut out the strife caused by the slippery trip
Into that filthy, dark crypt
Frit with fears, endless tears
Self and sanity lost in a pit of overwhelming grief.
Recovery is noticing I am still full of pain
Drained by the tug of default shame
Committed to change the urge to blame
Or judge my frame of mind as insane.
Recovery is being kind to my thinking
Unsurprised by the sinking into
Trapped memories of lonely abandonment
Telling the child me that I am heard and I am seen
And praising her for raising her head, and her voice
For realising she has a choice
To ask for help, to rely on another
To trust again, explore and discover
Recovery is holding the thought in my head
That I am not alone, instead
I can hold myself in the belief that
that am truly valued and loved
The embodiment of feeling at home
In my skin, in my head, in my heart
Recovery is letting relief flood over
As I weep tears of hope
That this sadness will pass
As I ask the parent within
To soak my skin with compassion and pride
As I choose to confide my deepest wounds
First with myself,
Where I’m standing at my own side
Holding my hand to give me strength
As I take one day at a time
I'd like to think that I'll look back at this a year from now and wonder why my vision was so limited. But I honestly don't know what is even possible at this point.
My best guess is that there'll be a lot of trial and error, some ups and downs, and maybe more errors and downs than I'd like, before I manage to figure out who I am and what my best life is going to look like.
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