Let ’em see.

To do this “trauma recovery” thing, we’re going to have to make our peace with the fact that we’re going to struggle— and, sometimes, our struggle is going to be observable to the people around us. 

I know. We don’t like that. 

Many of us have built basically our entire identity around over functioning. 

(Notice I didn’t say “functioning well”— I sad “over functioning.”) 

We’ve lived our lives by the rule that no one is allowed see us struggling or suffering. 

For what it’s worth, we come by it honestly. For many of us, if we acknowledged struggling or suffering growing up, we were mocked, or scolded, or punished. 

For many of us, that’s how the dissociative symptoms started in the first place: we had to divorce ourselves from our pain, because not feeling it made it possible to not express it. And not expressing it was necessary to stay relatively safe. 

It’s yet another example of the uphill battle so many of us are waging with our trauma conditioning. 

So here we are, conditioned to not feel or express pain— and we’re confronted with the fact that meaningfully confronting and recovering from our trauma hurts. 

Trauma recovery, whether we’re working with a therapist or not, requires us to get close to feelings and memories that sting and ache. 

Confronting and processing those memories can leave us exhausted and sore (yes, I mean physically sore as well as mentally). 

It’s not an exaggeration to say that working our trauma recovery can sometimes feel like experiencing a car crash on the daily. 

That’s not to say trauma recovery isn’t worth it. I assure you, it is. 

If we’ve endured trauma, w have a choice: get our ass kicked by our trauma conditioning and symptoms, or get our ass kicked by trauma recovery. I will always, always take the productive, chosen ass-kicking of trauma recovery over the unchosen, unproductive ass-kicking of trauma conditioning and symptoms. Every time. 

That said: this sh*t is exhausting. There’s no need to deny it. 

And doing this exhausting thing called “trauma recovery” is going to leave us dragging. 

We’re not going to like that. That’s going to clash with our “don’t let anybody see you struggle” programming. But it’s going to happen. 

When that does happen— when we’re tired and sore from working our trauma recovery, and when it becomes basically impossible to hide it from the people around us— it’s real important we not get not a shame spiral. 

We’re going to hav to accept that what other people do or don’t see of our struggle isn’t the end of the world. Honestly, it’s not even all that relevant to us. 

Most survivors, including myself, over invest in what others think of us.

We come by that honestly, too— for many of us, we had to carefully track the approval and acceptance of the people around us as a risk management strategy. 

But one of the gifts of trauma recovery is, it forces us to break that habit of over investment in others’ perceptions or opinions. 

Yeah. They’re going to see us suffer. They’re going to see us dragging. They’re going to see us sweat. 

And we have to be okay with it. 

We don’t have to love it— but we can’t let their perceptions or opinions influence us to back off our trauma recovery. 

This project of trauma recovery makes us confront not just our trauma but— more significantly, in my opinion— our programming and conditioning. Notably: “thou shalt not acknowledge thy suffering.” 

Or suffering is authentic. We can allow it to exist, and we can allow ourselves to outwardly acknowledge it. 

Even if it breaks the old “rules.” 

Especially if it breaks the old “rules.”