I wish CPTSD recovery was easier.
I wish it was more intuitive.
I wish, to successfully recover from CPTSD, we didn’t have to always be pushing back against what feels normal and natural.
I wish we could just “go with the flow” and still recover from CPTSD.
Unfortunately, though, we really, really can’t.
Why? Because the damage CPTSD does is through conditioning. Programming. Brainwashing.
That is to say: “the flow” that feels “natural” to us was shaped by our bullies and abusers.
The things CPTSD gets us saying to ourselves and focusing on and doing to and with our bodies may be painful— but they may also feel “right,” because those things are familiar.
Taking care of ourselves, talking to ourselves supportively, focusing on who we are and what we’re all about as opposed to our last bad decision or how we’re supposedly “failed” at life— all that may feel unnatural, abnormal.
That’s because it goes against the grain of our CPTSD conditioning.
If the rituals and tools of trauma recovery felt intuitive and natural and easy, everybody would recover from CPTSD overnight.
We wouldn’t have to work so hard to do this.
But that’s what we’re up against.
“Going with the flow” is going to leave us feeling like garbage.
Not doing the trauma recovery stuff because it feels too hard, too “unnatural,” too weird, is exactly what our bullies and abusers want.
They WANT us thinking of recovery supportive self-talk, mental focus, and physiology as “too much work.”
They WANT us depressed that we can’t just “go with the flow.”
I don’t love the amount of work trauma recovery asks of either me or my patients.
Wouldn’t it be great if life just equipped us to ask good questions, to focus on empowering things, to take care of ourselves, instinctively?
But that’s not the world we live in.
Many of us were raised by people who were more interested in controlling us than teaching us how to solve life problems.
They were more interested in our submission than our success.
Even into adulthood, many people reading this have had the experience of someone who was supposed to teach them or support them or heal them, instead reinforcing mental and behavioral programming that makes us feel like ass.
None of that is our fault.
But unwinding and rewiring it all requires us to give up the fantasy that we can just “go with the flow.”
The good news is: as we recondition ourselves in CPTSD recovery, the recovery rituals and tools get easier. They really do.
They don’t get effortless, because we don’t live in a reality where anything worth doing is effortless.
But our nervous system will absolutely mold itself around what we repeatedly say to ourselves, focus on, and do.
The plasticity, the changeability, that resulted in our trauma injuries can also work FOR us in our recovery.
But getting there can be rocky. It can be awkward. It can feel unnatural.
You know what, though? Most people out there “going with the flow,” cruising around on autopilot? They’re often not all that happy.
I would not have chosen trauma or recovery for either myself or anyone else— but the reality is, the things that CPTSD recovery asks of us will absolutely make us more focused, more effective, and ultimately more fulfilled humans than the vast majority of people.
Yes, it would be better if this, all this, was easier.
But the fact that this, all this, is as difficult as it is, as counterintuitive as it is, as energy intensive as it is— that doesn’t mean we can’t do it.
Breathe. Blink. Focus.
And go scramble some “natural” patterns in your nervous system today.
