Something many people don’t understand about trauma recovery is that it is a crash course in a lot of things.
Psychology.
Philosophy.
Health.
Art appreciation. Music appreciation.
Sociology. Hell, even history.
You know how I keep saying that trauma recovery is about life, in some ways even more than it is about trauma? This is what I’m talking about.
People who succeed at trauma recovery don’t learn everything there is to know about trauma, and find themselves recovered.
Knowledge about what we’re up against is always useful. Know thy enemy.
But what many trauma survivors find even more useful is learning about life.
Much of trauma recovery is actually learning life skills that we didn’t have the safety or support to master once upon a time.
Very few people were taught a straightforward course of “how to regulate emotion.”
They were taught about life— if they were lucky.
Many of us had to figure out the “life” thing on our own— to the extent that we figured it out at all.
By the time we get around to working a trauma recovery, we have become field experts on a lot of things.
Successful trauma recovery means becoming an expert on applied psychology. Applied philosophy. Applied art and music therapy.
And here’s the thing about all that: the stuff we trauma survivors have to meaningfully think about every day can make us difficult to relate to, to people who haven’t had to think about all that stuff.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably had the experience of running into many people who just don’t dive as deeply as you do.
Who don’t feel as deeply as you do.
Whose sense of life isn’t as gothic or neoclassical as yours.
And the reality of that is, it can feel isolating at times.
Of course they don’t relate to us— they haven’t had to dive as deeply as we have into what makes humans and reality tick.
Another way of expressing it: caterpillars don’t speak butterfly.
Which doesn’t, of course, mean there’s anything wrong with butterfly speak.
So don’t let the caterpillars convince you you’re “crazy.” Or weird. Or “dramatic.”
You keep working your trauma recovery, one day, one minute at a time; and remember all the tools you have at your disposal to help regulate.
I’m not just talking about tools I or another mental health professional gave you. I’m also talking about the type of tools Beethoven and Nietzsche and Jung and Lennon passed down to us survivors to help get us by.
Breathe. Blink. Focus.
And don’t look back at the chrysalis.
