Look at your pain head on. It’s absolutely excruciating at first and it will be everything you can do to not look away in horror. The pain is so real, so raw. Then the next day, you look a little longer. You take a deep breath, you let the pain wash over you. Now you feel it in your body. Your chest might grow tight — don’t worry, it won’t be this way forever.
Move your body and breathe deep. Do anything you can with your body that is positive — that brings you relief. Maybe go to yoga class, have sex or take a bath. Go for a run or a walk, punch a bag at the gym. Drive until you’re lost and then find your way back home.
All the while you’re not looking away. You are actively making yourself go there. As many times as it takes. Ask for help, you have no idea how strong you are, and someone else might need to tell you so you’ll listen. You might think that you can’t do it, it’s just too hard.
You’ve gone through trauma, and by Acadia Counseling’s definition: “trauma can be defined as a psychological, emotional response to an event or an experience that is deeply distressing or disturbing”. Feel your feelings, feel them all. One day you’ll breathe in, breathe out, and let a little bit of that pain go.
That’s all recovery is. You looked at your pain — felt it, walked through it, maybe even sat in it for a little while. Then little by little, it’s not so heavy anymore.
You might even fall asleep and not re play your pain again and again. There is hope. If you can conquer this pain, can you imagine what else you could do?
Why not become the person you’ve always wanted to be? Little by little, day by day.
You’ve always wanted to be a yoga going, farmers market shopping, book writing human? Be her.
You’ve always wanted to run a marathon? Well you just conquered your Mount Everest of trauma, so go for it. The hardest work is behind you now. That mental hurdle you just overcame — guess what? You can apply that to everything else in your life too.
Let’s talk about “auto pilot” for a minute. That’s the other way we could go here. We could begin to conquer our deepest pain, but not truly understand what it all means, because we don’t want to. Or we think we can’t.
So we let it define who we are, and then we just walk around with self pity strapped to our backs, exhausted from the journey we just took, taking the pain part of our story and leaving the empowerment and strength behind. We crave attention of any kind because that will make us not feel so numb.
Don’t let that be you, I promise to you I won’t let it be me. Because it feels so good to stay in that place, that dark, sad, achy place. We became friends with it a little bit in this journey, and maybe we held it a little too close for a little too long. That’s okay, it’s part of the baggage from the process. But it’s time to lay that heavy load down and thank it for what it’s done for you. It’s time to step into the new.
Daunting? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.
