Treating PTSD: How Flexible Are You?

I hear over and over, “I want to be healed, like, yesterday!”  And I really have great respect for that PTSD attitude because that means there’s a strong desire for wellness, and that feuls healing.

However, it’s necessary to give yourself room while you’re healing. Recovery does not go in a straight line. It can be a slow, methodical process. There will be successes and failures, ups and downs, good days and bad ones, good decisions and mistakes.

Expect that. Be prepared for it. Don’t be so narrow in your healing thought process that you don’t give yourself any room. Don’t be so dogmatic in your small goals that you refuse to give yourself room to take a detour on your route to the largest goal of all.

Monday’s post had 2 great comments about this topic from survivors who’ve walked the healing path (take a look at the full texts!):

LeSan wrote:

“How do you plan and strategize your healing process?” I have been trying to find a way to answer this question and not having much luck with it. Not because I don’t have an answer but rather because there are too many… I had multiple traumas over a long period it was more like unraveling a tangled ball of yarn. I had to allow for incompletion along the way.

And Mike wrote:

In the early days I focused on desentisiation for all the triggers that would prevent me walking out the door. In later years I worked on everything that prevented me having a proper social life.

The point in defining goals is to give yourself an idea of where to get started. It’s to take the tangled ball of confusion and say, “I’m going to begin by pulling this string, and then we’ll see what happens.”

There’s an element of surprise to healing, and of the unexpected. Having an end goal lets you know where you desire ending up. Having small goals along the way give you more manageable parameters to work within. It’s like skiing and learning just to look at the next ten feet.

And then there’s the necessary aspect of being flexible, of allowing the healing process to define itself; of understanding you have to live the questions of healing rather than seeking immediate answers.

In the words of LeSan:

Healing something like this is such a layered and complex effort. You have to work with your own mind and how you process things. It requires following your own clues about what is hurting you. You have to be willing to listen to youself and that is probably the hardest part of all.

As we proceed to the goal setting work of this month, a word of caution: See your goals as road signs on the path to healing. Follow them, and if some lead you to a dead end turn yourself around, follow new signs and see where they lead you.

It’s important to remain flexible so you can create and improvise.

The point of goals isn’t to hold yourself hostage. It’s to give yourself a context, and a plan with which to approach the amazing feat you’re about to accomplish.

 

(Photo: StephanM_61)

Tags: confusion, failure, goals, healing, ptsd, recovery, Setting Healing Goals, success