When will I feel better? When will the pain go away or be less? These questions are often asked of me by trauma survivors who find my blog or youtube videos. The truth is I don’t know. I don’t have a real concrete answer because I can only speak from my experience. I will share some of them below and hope it can help someone. I want to precede this with a trigger warning. I will briefly address my feelings of self-harm/suicide, the abuse I survived, and my chronic illness. Facing where you are can trigger anxiety and feelings of hopelessness.
The pain is sometimes less and sometimes more intense, but it’s not as constant as when I started taking my recovery seriously in 2014. I have good coping tools that allow me to get through the worst times. I also have a little support system that I can lean on when I start to feel like hurting myself or suicidal thoughts arise. There are stages of healing that have been explained in several books that I have read. Instead of following the steps in chronological order, I weave through the different steps now. There is no order and I had to learn to live with the chaos that is trauma healing. I am learning to accept that I am mentally and physically sick from the abuse I survived.
It is my honor as an adult to heal and nurture my child, adolescent and young adult selves. I take my healing very seriously now because I know it’s a matter of life and death. No one will do it for me. I have to do the work myself to stay alive. The pain is still immense but I have learned to navigate through the storm in my head to a place where I can help myself. Healing didn’t get any easier but it changed over time. I have become stronger. I still have overflow moments where I can’t remember how to help myself. These are the worst times because I feel helpless. It passes, but with any pain and suffering it is very difficult to deal with.
I’ve read that for some, healing becomes easier and less painful over time. I don’t want to dash anyone’s hopes, but that hasn’t been my experience with CPTSD. I would say my symptoms are more manageable but the pain is not less. Manageable is no less difficult just different. I still go through the triggered symptoms throughout the day. If I stay focused on what triggered the trauma, I can stay stuck in the episode for days or weeks at a time. To combat this, I self-soothe and distract myself. I have plenty of other emergency coping techniques if what I try doesn’t work. Every day is different and different things help at different times. I have, over the years, learned to help myself.
So, dear reader, if you’re wondering when you’ll feel better…the answer is I still don’t know. I am only me and you are you. Your experience may be very different from mine. The comparison is generally not useful. I wish I had a secret to tell but I don’t. It’s hard work every day to heal from trauma. I hope we can all go on and find the answers. I hope we can all heal.
