The Girl Without A Face

Healing is not linear, as they say. I’ve come to embrace that terminology. I feel now that I intimately know its meaning. I feel the changes within me, but also the changes that are being brought to the surface into my reality. What I didn’t know before now seems like second nature, what I never did before is something I now do regularly. I have tools in my tool box to heal myself daily.

Complex PTSD is called complex for a reason. From my understanding, most medical professionals don’t really know much about it or how to treat it. It’s not even recognized in the DSM-5, yet it’s something that many of us, with many different traumas, that lasted many years, have. The trouble is it takes so much time, love, grace, and patience to heal this ailment. The only doctor you can look to is yourself. It took me 33 years just to learn that.

Yes, I sill have to deal with the misdiagnosis on my record. I’m not as concerned with that though as I am with healing myself. The thing is over these past two years of focusing on me, I’ve learned to trust myself completely. To know when to work on something, to trust that something is coming up for a reason. When it’s time to deal with that, I will. It just isn’t time yet. It will be when I go to get off my migraine and blood pressure medication as well. Not one doctor put two and two together that maybe my addiction to adderall could be the culprit causing those ailments. I haven’t been checked out since. Interesting how that works.

Anyways, healing is not linear. Things come up out of nowhere. This is so important to understand if you’ve been through traumatic events (pretty sure everyone has, can I get an Amen?!). The funny thing is things can come up multiple different times and feel different each and every one of them. I call this levels of healing. Man, it’s a lot of work. For example, my abusive relationship has come up three separate times, each almost a year apart, and every time it comes up it shows up differently. I respond differently. I ask different questions, I release different emotions. This time, when it came up just a few weeks ago, I was ready to admit that I truly feared him. Then I admitted the fear was irrational. I spent a few days working through letting that go. Two of my mediums for this process are music and writing.

Another example popped up last night, and I had to share. This specific milestone has only happened to me twice while healing. I have a few things that I do that are meditative to me, which means that they allow my brain to relax. One of them is reading. Sometimes, while I’m reading, a memory will pop in. I’ll have to close my eyes and allow the memory to pass through me. Before I had my tool box, I think this is why I would sometimes struggle to read. My demons were too loud. They were suffocating me. Anyways, I shut my eyes and saw the image of myself at 14 years old. Lying in the bathtub, alone, crying, after my terrible car accident (that I caused). I could hear my mom and her boyfriend, their angry voices, but not at eachother. They were talking about me. About how awful I was. As I shut my eyes I could feel the pain I felt at that time. Then something inside me said, “Give this version of yourself a hug”. So I did. Tears fell out of me. Like I had released 20 years of pain. I took a moment and all the feelings went away. I was able to even start reading again.

This is what healing looks like for me. Instead of running away from the images in my mind I show them kindness. Love. Grace. I thought I would share in case there was anyone else out there ready to wave the white flag in their fight against themselves today.