The reality is: the feelings and memories aren’t suddenly going away.
No matter how much we wish they would. No matter what we do.
We can do things to make ourselves less vulnerable to them and we can do things to diminish their intensity— and, yes, we can process them so they don’t affect us the same way anymore.
But they won’t suddenly go away because we want them to.
So: we need to find a way to be with them. To coexist with them.
We need to find a way to sit with and tolerate those feelings and memories, at last temporarily.
That requires patience. That requires realism and compassion and the willingness to allow those feelings and memories to exist— to not demand they go away or not exist.
It requires our willingness to not beat the sh*t out of ourselves for having those feelings and memories. Not that anybody reading this— or the person writing this— ever does that, right?
Right?
Among the things we want and need our trauma recovery to be, is realistic. And realistic trauma recovery does not indulge fantasies about sudden transformation.
The changes we make in our nervous and endocrine systems in trauma recovery will take time. That’s the reality.
No, we don’t love those feelings and reactions and memories. And we don’t have to love them.
But we do have to accept that they exist. We do have to let them exist.
And we do have to commit to not attacking, shaming, rejecting, or abandoning the “parts” of ourselves that hold those feelings and memories.
I know— tall order.
But welcome to trauma recovery.
It always, always starts with acceptance. Accepting reality. Accepting what happened, happened.
Accepting that we do not have a choice about whether or not we’re trauma survivors— but we do have a choice whether to work our trauma recovery with patience, self compassion, and realism.
Those feelings and memories are not suddenly going away.
But we can work with them— if we’re not too busy denying and disowning them, or punishing the “parts” of ourselves that hold them.
Use Your Damn Skills 