Treating PTSD: Staying on your healing path
Friday, October 9th, 2009 • Uncategorized •
It’s one thing to say you want to heal PTSD and all its symptoms; quite another to go about the business of healing it.
Healing is difficult, it takes grit, determination, commitment and resilience. It’s so very easy to become lost in the chaos of emotion (and what feels like healing failure) and then find yourself unable to navigate moving forward.
Today’s BTG Big Question: Are you doing whatever it takes to stay on your healing path?
Sound familiar: You get your PTSD diagnosis, find yourself a therapist, do the talk therapy dance around and around the subject of your trauma, finally dance over the grave of your distress and then – WHAM! somehow you’ve fallen down and can’t get up. You can see the path you just fell off of, but it’s simply too difficult to drag yourself back over there, dust yourself off, get up and get on with it.
Any of that ring a bell? That happened to me many times. So often I lay in the proverbial grass of my distress, stared up at the sky and said, “Oh, forget it, this is just too hard!” A few days or weeks (months?) would go by and then I’d get that familiar itch. That little voice somewhere deep inside me whispering “Heal me….”
Eventually I’d get up, find my footing, step back on the path and try again. Usually this meant trying something new or following through on something I had already begun. Picking up where I left off gave me a quick way of reacclimating myself. I could use the energy already in progress to fuel my next steps.
Sometimes, I tapped back into an abandoned topic in therapy. Sometimes I tried a new treatment technique. Sometimes I dove in and finished a healing task I had started but didn’t follow through. No matter what, I found a way to begin again and move forward.
In healing only YOU can find your way back to the healing path. Only YOU can point yourself in the right direction. Only YOU are responsible for seeing you’ve fallen off the path. Only YOU can choose to step back on. Are you doing it??
What methods have you discovered for staying on, or getting back on, the healing path? Leave a comment so others might find something they can use.
Tags: Doing Whatever It Takes To Heal, heal, ptsd, symptoms, treatment
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I so agree with these words: “In healing only YOU can find your way back to the healing path. Only YOU can point yourself in the right direction. Only YOU are responsible for seeing you’ve fallen off the path. Only YOU can choose to step back on.”
I have found that I have to listen to that still, small voice inside of me that says, “yeah, that feels wholesome” or “no way!” when I’m being presented with healing path options by books or blogs or therapists. I really do believe we each know best what is best for us.
Great post!
- Marie (Coming Out of the Trees)
@Marie — You’re so right, we do have to listen for that small voice & we DO know what’s right. I think what’s so confusing in PTSD is we don’t hear that voice and when we do, we no longer trust it. Part of healing is getting back those skills. How have you developed them? Would love a guest post from you on that topic if you’re interested. Really enjoy your blog, too, so honest and insightful.
I was actually pretty consistent with my therapy actually, in that I’d turn up to my appointments and go through what I needed to at the time. However, in between sessions I probably needed more support but I don’t know… was it that I felt like I could cope, or felt like I deserved it or both or something else?
Anyway, I’d let myself suffer until my next appointment. And then I’d get there (often late even though conciously I never meant to be late), and feel so sick and go through whatever I needed to. Sort of.
Actually, over on John’s Storied Mind blog, I left a pretty honest comment to his question about what we do with our therapy. How, we can hold back for various reasons and sneakily shape what we put in and get out of it.
I think in part we do this out of self-preservation and fear, because we think we can’t cope or that our therapist won’t be able to handle it all either. Or they won’t really get it. I’ve had that experience, too, thinking my therapist isn’t getting me.
We hide and stall until we don’t need to any more. And dang, that can really sting but at the same time, its the only way up. But we need to be strong enough to handle whatever will come from our next round of ripping off the bandaid, so to speak…