Life Post Trauma Therapy (cw: csa, rape, trauma, DID)

(and face reveal)

On consciously living with mental illness & neurodivergence: “It’s not the same path that everyone else takes, and that can be hard and lonely, but I was reminded that there are amazing things I would never see with normal eyes and other paths.
I cried again, but this time out of a small thankfulness that my brokenness set me in the place where I am. Beautiful, terrible, unseen by most, unique.” –Jenny Lawson, Broken (in the best possible way)

So much. So many feelings. New experiences and strengths. Trying to accept that living my life is going to continue to be hugely difficult and sometimes painful.

Today marks one month from my final therapy session with my trauma therapist. I had a lot of concerns about ending therapy but I trusted my therapist and agreed to terminate. The feelings and fears that arose the week before we ended seemed endless and ginormous. I was skillful in regulating my nervous system and mindful in paying attention to thoughts as they arose.

I kept going back to Radical Acceptance. I was furious with my therapist for suggesting I was ready to terminate. It was clear to me (and my oldest kiddo and their partner) that I was still barely functioning. I was more capable of managing my emotions but doing more than keeping myself and my kids fed and basic (and I mean BASIC: doing laundry that has to be done, not mopping the floors or even clearing off the dinner table). So what the fuck was my therapist thinking when she said she felt I was ready to move out of weekly trauma therapy? Shouldn’t I be able to do more and move on with my life? Of course I remembered what she’d said during our first session:

If you do this work, you’ll be better regulated and capable of handling your trauma symptoms but you won’t be healed. Recovery from trauma is learning to live WITH your trauma and all the challenging things that come with it.

Ugh. Seriously??? But that’s not what I want. What I want is to be done with this shit. This living hell that pops up in my life on a daily basis. And I knew, even as I was raging about it, that it’s the truth. There’s no way I’m ever going to be the person I might have been if my dad hadn’t raped me as a child and I hadn’t been repeatedly abused by men for a decade after that. How could I be? My entire being (my nervous system, DNA, personality and alters) were all formed because those things happened to me. Fucking fuck, as I so often say! What choice do I have? I can fight this truth forever or practice accepting it and continue living my life with as much grace and strength as I can muster. And I can muster a LOT.

That process of raging, grieving and wrestling with the truth took about a week. And then one day I woke up and I could feel acceptance. I felt lighter, calmer. I made a conscious choice to accept that ending therapy was appropriate. I had trusted my therapist throughout the three years of therapy, why stop now when the results so far have been amazing?

The first two weeks post termination were incredible. I drove 25 miles to a nearby town to get a celebration tattoo. I hadn’t driven 65mph on a highway in 25 years! I visited my grandma in her assisted living home 3 times; it was the first time I’d felt able to visit her and cope with the feelings that would inevitably arise from seeing her. I cleaned up things in the house I hadn’t been able to clean for 2 years. I continued doing 7000-11000 steps a day. I was more present with my kids and we played a board game and Minecraft together. I felt invincible. I wanted to do ALL the things.

And, as always, feeling invincible comes before the fall. I overdid it and my symptoms got worse. My sleep went to shit and I started having crying spells. And then my dear friend came for a visit.

I hadn’t seen her since I’d left my husband and she’d been a huge part of our lives for 7 years until she moved to the other side of the Rockies. The two of us sat on the grass with my oldest kiddo and their partner and we talked for 3 hours. Laughed, shared stories about patriarchal oppression, and talked about being queer. When she left I was exhausted, physically and emotionally, but my kids had just arrived the night before so I had to push myself so I could feed them and be the best mom possible.

What I didn’t expect were the big feelings that came up about my marriage. My friend had asked what led to the end and I’d shared as much as I could with my oldest kid present. I also told her that the ‘me’ she was talking to wasn’t the ‘me’ I’d been when we’d been close all those years. After my friend left, that ‘me’ (damnit, we still haven’t settled on a name for her) started sharing memories and feelings with me and after sorting through them for a day or two I realized I had a new piece of my trauma puzzle. That’s probably a whole ‘nother post.

The fact that a completely new (to me) pile of trauma stuff from my marriage was coming up while the kiddos were with me led me off a cliff into disregulation and pain. The presence of the younger kiddos was a constant trigger of these new memories/awareness. As always, when trauma gets triggered, I began to have massive amounts of pain in my hips and pelvis. Every day my youngest asked me to do something special with him and every day I had to respond that my pain was too high and that mitigation was going to require all the energy I had that wasn’t spent on keeping them fed. What I didn’t tell him was that I had to also keep the memories and feelings at bay until I had a week to myself. He was disappointed and accepting.

So here I am, a month from my last trauma therapy session and the first day I’ve been alone in 8 days. I’m allowing the memories and feelings to come up as they will and I’m letting myself feel them without falling out of regulation. Tears spilled into my coffee grounds as I made my mocha and I laid on the floor and wept with my dog after the coffee was made. And then I decided to write. It occurred to me, after a month, that I’m not processing stuff as much because I’m not seeing my therapist every week. Maybe writing is more important than ever now. My therapist did say during our last session that I should keep writing, use is as a skill to continue the work of understanding myself and resolving as much of my trauma as possible.

In summary:

I raged against ending therapy.
Then accepted the truth of my brokenness.
Finished therapy.
Had a fucking empowering couple of weeks and forgot to accept that I can be empowered and still have stuff that’s going to come up unexpectedly.
Had a fucking hard week that I ultimately managed and survived.
Ended up back here where writing transforms all this shit in an alchemy-like way.

If I (or an alter of me) am reading this sometime in the future, or if you’re another survivor who’s not one of the me’s, remember…
There may be more trauma in your body/mind/nervous system/soul than you can process in one lifetime, but it IS possible to live with it. You can ride the waves of life that alternate between living without being triggered and having the skills and agency to delve into the depths until you’re back on top again. More and more I’m realizing that this is the dance I have to accept and master while I’m here.