I was talking to a friend today about recovery, whether that be recovery from addiction, recovery from trauma, etc. and I realized something about myself;
The biggest reason that it's being so hard for me to recover is because I am just as afraid of recovery as I am of not recovering.
Let me see if I can explain.
I don't know exactly how to heal, but I do know a lot of things that would help. Eating better, getting on a decent sleep schedule, exercise, doing a hobby, working with a therapist, bettering my personal study and prayer habits, etc. And I think that I've talked before about how the things that will help the most are the things that PTSD and chronic illness make most difficult to do, but I want to delve a little bit deeper into that idea.
Recovering is really hard. It takes a lot of hard work and it takes a lot of pain.
I have had a handful of people suggest that I try the therapy method called EMDR. The gist of what that does (as explained to me by my EMDR-trained therapist) is that it is moving traumatic memories from the emotional side of the brain to the logical side of the brain. I won't try to explain how they do that because I only kind of understand, but I have talked to people that have been majorly helped by it! However, one of my friends that suggested it did say that going through that process made for a very difficult and painful few months. Nevertheless, I did seek out a therapist that could do EMDR with me because I do so badly want to recover and get into a better mental/emotional state of mind.
I absolutely LOVE the therapist that I worked with in Ohio, but I only ended up doing EMDR a couple of times. We did it two sessions in a row and then we weren't able to do it for various reasons for a few weeks. And then I just never picked back up on it because life was really, really hard last year and I was struggling enough with the NOW issues and couldn't bear to try to handle the THEN issues on top of it.
And that's when my fear of recovery took over.
I knew that continuing EMDR would likely be very helpful for me, but I was terrified of the pain I also knew would accompany it.
Honestly, even just starting up therapy again is super daunting for me, because when I had to start over in Ohio, it brought back anxiety and triggers that I hadn't been facing in a while. Clearly I hadn't healed of those things or else they wouldn't have come back with so much force when I had to start therapy from scratch. Just talking about my life without EMDR was enough to send me reeling emotionally. So then when things got so hard in my life after I finally DID start EMDR, I felt that there was no way that I could possibly handle the additional pain and suffering that EMDR would bring. But that also meant that I wasn't going to be achieving the healing that I have so desperately wanted and needed.
We just moved back across the country and I'm going to have to start all over again. And life hasn't stopped being really difficult in the here and now. And starting over is going to be that much harder as I go through these last few months of pregnancy and then onto motherhood with Liam outside the womb. But as terrified as I am of the pain of the recovery process, I am equally (if not more) terrified of not recovering.
I have been in recovery from abuse and trauma for just about three years now and I feel like I'm no closer to my goals of getting back to school and finishing my degree or being able to hold a regular job again. Some progress has been made in some areas of my recovery, but many others have been left untouched because of fear and the feeling that I simply can't handle the hard work that it takes to recover.
But I don't want to keep feeling broken. I don't want to keep feeling weaker and weaker. I don't want Liam to be raised by a broken mother. I want to be better for him. I want to be better for my husband. I want to be better for me. I've felt so, so tired of being broken for so long, but I have been unwilling to re-break so that things can be set properly (think of a broken bone that has set incorrectly and has to be re-broken in order to be put into the optimal healing position).
Guys, I'm terrified. I'm terrified of starting over. I'm terrified of adding more stress and pain and exhaustion (both mental and physical) to my already stressful and painful and exhausting life. But I'm MORE terrified of not moving forward. I'm more terrified of remaining stagnant, which is to say, regressing.
Recovery from anything is not ever going to be an easy road. Recovery from addiction is going to involve withdrawal, retraining your mind, breaking down barriers, etc. Recovery from a wound may require the sting of antiseptic, the excruciating pain of physical therapy to break down scar tissue or injured muscles in order to strengthen them back up correctly. Recovery from trauma is going to include facing painful memories, increased depression/anxiety, the return or triggers and nightmares, the complete debilitating exhaustion that it all brings. But the healing is worth it. I have to keep telling myself that. Being able to be a better wife to Jonathan, mother to Liam, and daughter of God are all worth it. All of it. Every single moment of distress. Every single terrifying moment. And I need to remember that as terrifying as recovery is, NOT recovering leaves me in a horrible place while recovery will, in time, lead me to a much, much better one.
The only person that can dictate my recovery is me. No one else can make me recover. No one else can force me to do the hard things. No one can face these fears for me. I have to decide that not recovering is scarier than the difficulty of recovery.
And I'm trying guys. And I've been trying for three years. But I haven't been trying hard enough. I've been trying my very best, but I haven't been trying hard enough. I need to bite the bullet and do every single thing that it takes to heal. I deserve to heal.
And so do you.
No one can recover for you, but you are also not alone in this.
My friend that I was talking to said something to the effect of "recovery requires connection." Not that someone else is responsible for your recovery, but that we need other people in order to make it. People to love us, people to support us, people to be accountable to.
We are not in this alone. We were never meant to be.
Heavenly Father sent His Only Begotten Son down to earth for this exact reason; so we would never, ever go through tribulation alone. Because we can't.
I can't do this alone. I can't heal all by myself. The responsibility for my recovery rests on my shoulders, but I have a God who has sent people into my life, Christ being one of them, to not carry the burden for me completely, but to lighten the load. Christ is here to be equally yoked with us, taking our pains and our struggles and our fears and shouldering some of the weight of it all. He can't take it away completely until we let Him. But that takes difficult, painful, terrifying work.
And He is there for every moment of it.
PS- This is the same quote as the picture up top. It's been the background of my laptop for as long as I've had a laptop and I love it, but I feel like it looked a little bit too cheerful for the message of recovery being excruciating, so I found a different one. But I wanted to share this one too because recovery is also what gets us to a higher, holier, happier state of being.
PPS- It was actually seeing this on Facebook that spurred me writing this post right now:
Hello Annaliese... I actually don't know you at all, but I'm one of the Dilts' daughters-in-law. I've shared with them some of my experiences with EMDR and Laura forwarded your blog to me and wondered if I might share some of my experiences with it with you, since it was so helpful for me in recovering from my traumatic experiences.
ReplyDeleteMy trauma was from hyperemesis gravidarum, so a different flavor of trauma than yours, but... I completely agree that recovery is excruciatingly hard. Necessary, but hard... I have often said that getting to be traumatized is the easy part. Getting untraumatized is the hard part.
I'll share with you what I wrote in a couple of my family emails I sent to Bryan & Laura:
1.
In the afternoon, I went to MY therapy appointment, and did some good work. Something broke in my head---in a good way. I explained a few emails ago that I'd somehow developed a belief that I was weak while I was pregnant and throwing up all the time, and... well, it was weird. It was almost like that feeling shattered during EMDR this week, and I was a little scared to notice that I was angry. Angry? I don't get angry, do I? Apparently I do sometimes. But I was, I was angry at somebody, some vacuous somebody, for making me believe something so obviously wrong. And when that belief that I was weak broke, I was also suddenly starving and I desperately wanted a real hamburger: not a fast food burger, an actual BURGER.
Anyway, with James' permission (since he's not allowed to work while being the sole caregiver of children), I dashed off in quest of the mythical Real Burger. But as I was driving, I found myself yelling out in rage. The rational part of my brain was quite freaked out and I was really worried about feeling so angry at someone---humanity, maybe? because truly I didn't think I knew anybody who had wanted me to think I was weak, and yet I kept feeling like somebody had told me I was. I didn't think anyone had wanted to hurt me, and I didn't really think the people who didn't help me when I asked for help truly realized how badly I needed assistance... it was just ignorance on their part, not malice.
So I was praying about it while I drove, because I didn't feel right about feeling so angry, and OH. Do you know what He told me? Jenna, someone DID tell you that. It was the Adversary. And I think I screamed in anger when it hit me and pounded the steering wheel, because I'D BEEN HAD. I'd been fooled! Deceived! Kicked by the devil when I was on the floor in a puddle of vomit! I think this is the first time I've really had a testimony that Satan really is real and is trying to make, me, Jenna, feel miserable, and prevent me from doing all I can for the Lord.
So anyway, that was that. I was able to calm down and eat the burger in peace. I went to Fuddrucker's and ate a gloriously delicious real burger with real fries and unfortunately I was too full to indulge in a milkshake afterward, but it was wonderful. It was a thoroughly enjoyable meal.
2.
Oof. A long week. I did EMDR in therapy again on Thursday. Therapy is rough. I hate therapy. I also question whether it might be better to do it twice every week... because I'm still really struggling but I know therapy is helpful. Still I hate it. Oh well. The big cream-filled trauma we're presently trying to eat through is the fact that after pregnancy being so hard... there is a part of me that resents the children for doing that to me... a lot. It doesn't make a lot of rational sense, but emotionally it's happening anyway and I have to work through it so I can love and nurture my family better. Because as a mom there is nothing worse than knowing deep down inside you're mad at your kids for something they didn't do on purpose. It's the worst.
((to be continued))
((Sorry, it didn't all fit in one reply.))
Delete3.
Therapy continues to be the worst. Ugh. This week and last week in particular I have suddenly become touch-averse, which is really giving James a hard time. When you're in therapy, and strange things like that happen, the obvious thing to do is blame it on the therapy, because honestly, if you can't think of any other reasons for it to be happening, therapy is probably involved, somehow. My most recent therapy session confirmed it, and it was just slightly mind-blowing. I've been working hard on making it so I can be emotionally available to my family members, my kids in particular. I honestly could not figure out how being suddenly touch-averse looped into that, but I figured it out on Thursday.
In a nutshell, it goes to back to pregnancy. (It feels like it always goes back to pregnancy.) When I was pregnant, if one of the older kids needed love or comfort, they would come and try to sit on my lap. And, well, I was so sensitive to heat, that even the tiny bit of added body heat from a kid on my lap would give me unspeakable nausea, and I might vomit, or maybe pass out or something. I would feel like I was going to literally die. The same sort of thing would happen to me if James cuddled or even sat too close to me, and whenever James needed love from me he wanted it via physical touch. Figuring this out totally blew me away because, seriously, brains are so weird. And apparently mine has decided being emotionally available is the same as throwing up profusely and passing out and maybe dying. Very scary, very threatening.
I get so frustrated at therapy sometimes because it feels like I'm trying to work through everything that's ever happened to me in my whole life while I work through this big kahuna of an issue. If everything's involved, doesn't that mean it'll take forever to work through, since apparently I have to untangle ALL the things? My therapist says, though, that actually it's not so hopeless, because it's a lot more like one big knot than lots of little ones. Untangling the big knot smooths all the ropes out at once. And the fact that as we try to smooth it out, the fact that it is popping up in other ways is also a good sign of progress. But man, it certainly doesn't feel like it.
On the plus side... I'm pretty confident that all the nausea I've had for the past three years is psychosomatic. Because therapy is making it go away. And I'm not terrified of oranges anymore. (Still potatoes, though. Potatoes are evil incarnate.) Hey, I can even cook! But it's acting kind of like whack-a-mole. I'm not having psychosomatic symptoms. I'm not terrified of food. But now I can't handle being touched. Blegh. Sometimes progress doesn't feel like progress.
One thing that happened this week that gave me some hope, was that at some point Dragon was screaming because he'd gotten hurt somehow. For many months, I've been completely unable to comfort any kids who come screaming to me. This one time, though, after I repulsed him a few times, and it didn't work, I managed to take a big breath, and intentionally hold him and comfort him. Honestly, I felt a little like a robot while I was doing it. My teeth were on edge and I wanted to throw the kid out the window. But I didn't. And when I picked him up and held him, he quieted immediately, and nearly immediately fell asleep. But before he did that, he exhaled and smiled a bit in pure relief. Probably that should have made me feel good, but instead I felt mostly profound guilt at this evidence that he's needed me to be emotionally available for so long, and for so long I've done nothing but push him away when he comes to me for comfort.
((to be continued again))
4.
DeleteSo I've been busy and tired this week. Therapy was actually a good thing this week. I've been spending months and months trying to untangle a specific knot, and... it finished unravelling this week. The relief was palpable. I mentioned that battling this has been like battling a whack-a-mole. I started being able to do touch again... and at first I thought it was manifesting instead as headaches, but then I decided it was more likely to be the braces since I'd just had them tightened... So you know, it's *possible* I finally beat that whack-a-mole and done killed it, but I'm hesitant to have a funeral just yet... I'm kind of expecting it to pop back up somewhere.
It didn't pop up. That was the end.
---
I hope some of my experience is helpful. I feel like I should also clarify to you that as I worked through everything... It felt like every single thing that had bothered me over my entire life was all tangled up into one big knot, and so I'd felt like that meant I would have to talk through my entire life. I thought it was going to take forever, but then there was one week where the knot palpably got untangled, completely. It was kind of a shock, and it felt sudden, but it was done. It was over. It was particularly shocking to me, because the few weeks before the knot got untangled were THE WORST. I had had no idea I was so close to finally beating it; it felt like my life was coming completely undone.
Overall, I think it took about a year of weekly appointments for me to work through it all, and we did EMDR for at least half of them. I am confident I wouldn't have gotten through so quickly without the help of EMDR.
Good luck! Recovery is worth it, even if it is more terrifying than the trauma itself. <3 Jenna Dilts
Thank you so, so much for sharing!!! I feel like the internet gives unrealistic expectations for EMDR, saying that in just two or three 50 minute sessions things are better and things like that. And maybe some things do get better in just a few sessions, but the whole knot, as you referred to it as, isn't likely to come undone in just a few session. It's scary to hear that things took so long, but it's also reassuring in a way. I've felt so frustrated that it is taking so, so long to recover, but even with concentrated, hard work on recovery, it still takes time. Anyway, I just really appreciate you sharing you experiences!
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