Five Years; Trauma Unravelling

It’s been five years. Five years since the news that my life would be changing considerably and I would be living the rest of my life without some of my leg muscles along for the ride. 

The thing with trauma and processing is that it’s not neat and clean; it’s messy, hard, frustrating, and unrelenting at times. Over the last five years there has been a lot of wanting to “come to terms” with this life change and all the traumatic things that happened during my hospital stay. Unfortunately getting too close to those painful realities and staring them straight in the eye was often an experience that was just. too. hard. I’ve  spent a lot of time trying to focus on anything but myself. I poured myself into work and spent time working three jobs at times, just trying to fill every spare moment so there was no time to slow down and process life. I thought that if it just kept moving at a pace that was ultimately unsustainable, that maybe I could ignore having to deal with the impossibly hard processing. I spent many hours in therapy trying to work through this, often feeling completely overwhelmed. I numbed things in many ways, and spent a lot of time relying on unhealthy ways to cope. I had told myself that focusing on me meant having to rehash these things and focus on the toughest parts of this new reality and the larger questions it brings up for me. There was a fusion built between taking care of myself and having to deal with the pain (both physical and emotional), so I neglected taking care of myself altogether. 

I needed to separate the idea in my mind that taking care of myself was going to lead to pain. I needed to rewire my brain to recognize that I can take care of different parts of me and they do not all have to lead to me coming back to that trauma and the “tough stuff” that goes along with it. So as I now work with people experiencing trauma, I often ask them if there is a part of them that they would be willing to take care of that seems manageable for now. To me that has become an important thing, because over time I know and trust that I will be ready to process things in their due time, but sometimes the messiness of things does not need to be dealt with immediately.  

I have committed to taking care of myself by doing all I can to take care of my physical body, and this has already paid dividends in so many ways. My diabetes has never been so well controlled, my overall mental health is doing much better, and as a bonus I have lost 60 pounds already. But that isn’t the focus. The focus is taking care of me, and realizing that sometimes taking care of myself isn’t going to accomplish checking off that “deal with trauma” checkbox. But the most ironic thing that I am starting to find is that as I take care of the one part of me that seems manageable at the moment, it seems that the other unsurmountable things are becoming a lot easier to deal with. I am still very much on this journey and can’t definitively tell you this is the one way to do things, but I have found that taking control of what I can manage for now has been mighty helpful for my overall well-being and mental health!