If we need to change our routine, we need to change our routine.

Sometimes we need to change our everyday routine to accommodate our trauma symptoms and responses. 

It doesn’t mean we’re doing recovery “wrong;” it means we’re realistic about the limitations our current functioning imposes on us. 

At certain points in your recovery, you’re not going to be able to do certain things. 

You may not be able to go certain places; or interact with certain people; or function at particular times of day without getting slammed with trauma responses. 

In the bigger picture, of course one of the goals of trauma recovery is to reduce our reactivity to trauma responses, so they become less intrusive in our everyday life. And yes, “exposure therapy” can often be part of this goal. 

However, we don’t always have time for true exposure therapy (which involves more than just exposing yourself to a trigger and hoping for the best, by the way); and there will also be times when reducing reactivity to a specific trigger isn’t going to be our top recovery priority. 

In those situations, it makes perfect sense to avoid the trigger in question if we can— and sometimes that involves changing our routine. 

Survivors often experience shame when we have to shift our daily routine to accommodate our triggers. 

The thing is, our trauma and our trauma responses aren’t anything to be ashamed of. 

If you broke your leg, you’d have to change certain things about your environment and your routine to accommodate your injury, and we wouldn’t think twice about it. 

(Well…trauma survivors might think twice about it, because we tend to feel shame for ANY display of “weakness.” But the rest of the world wouldn’t think twice about the fact that OF COURSE we’d need to change up our routine to accommodate a broken leg.)

If, right now in your trauma recovery, you can’t go certain places, do certain things, or interact with certain people without being overwhelmingly triggered, that’s just a fact. It’s not a judgment.

Our symptoms at any given time are our symptoms at that time. 

We might wish we didn’t have those symptoms; we might do our best to ignore or minimize or pretend we DON’T have those symptoms; we might be furious that we have to think about our symptoms, or any of this “trauma recovery” stuff, at all. 

But that doesn’t change the fact that our symptoms are our symptoms— and we still have al life to life here. 

Everybody reading this has probably had to shift something in their life to accommodate their current symptoms. 

And that’s okay. 

We don’t resolve post traumatic symptoms by pretending they don’t exist, or trying to plow right through them— in fact, those are EXCELLENT ways to actually PROLONG the time it’ll take to meaningfully recover. 

What we need to do in realistic recovery is make the accommodations we need to make, and keep working to resolve the symptoms that require the accommodations. 

We need to stay off the broken leg, in other words. 

How long? For as long as it takes to mend. 

I can tell you, as a distance runner who was so frustrated by a stress fracture that I returned to running WAY before it was healed and caused myself even MORE pain and time away from my sport, that we don’t do ourselves ANY favors by getting up in our head about this. 

We can, and need to be, honest with ourselves about shifts we need to make in our lives to accommodate our trauma symptoms. 

That’s how we realistically function AND heal at the same time. 

You’re not doing yourself or your trauma any favors by pretending we’re not exactly as impaired as we are right now. 

You won’t need these accommodations forever. 

But flexility and humility now will pay off in your recovery later. I promise.