Sharing – Healing from trauma requires holding two tracks
Gretchen is right; they don’t tell you this when you start doing healing work on your trauma, but it’s a skill you’re going to need:
But for most people healing from trauma, it’s not about going away to get better, it is about learning to stay. Stay with the part of you that is healing. And stay with the part of you doing your day-to-day life. Healing from trauma is about learning to hold both: your life in the present and your trauma history–all at the same time.
I can still remember going to see my therapist on my lunch hour, talking about some heavy stuff, and then going back to work. In some ways, I was lucky; one of the coping mechanisms I developed as a child abuse survivor was the art of dissociating. It’s a dangerous toy to play with, but my uncanny ability to compartmentalize meant I could come away from a therapy session in tears and be back in work mode during the drive back to the office as if nothing had happened. It’s not a skill to be trifled with; I have a history of fugue episodes to prove that, but in small doses, it did allow me to live on both tracks together at times.
It shouldn’t require that level of compartmentalization. However, developing the ability to live in both worlds takes time. Sometimes, I almost envied people who were “worse” and could go to an inpatient center. They didn’t have to hold down a job, live with a spouse, and deal with everything else in their daily lives. They got to focus on healing. Then, I would remember some horror stories I had heard or read about inpatient care and reconsider that opinion.
None of this is easy, but it’s also not impossible. During the long path toward healing that I traveled, I had to hold both tracks most of the time, although there were also times when I couldn’t do it and had to focus exclusively on healing. I was lucky enough to be able to do that, but not everyone will be. For them, we should be honest about what it takes and encourage them to read more at the link below.
https://gretchenschmelzer.com/blog-1/2014/12/14/healing-from-trauma-requires-holding-two-tracks
