Trust in healing

For years I’ve been what the professionals call in ‘constant crisis’. This means that literally for over 8 years, my life has been in one crisis or another. PTSD and trauma related, there being a physical crisis and therefore threat to my safety and life. But also with coping with what was happening, the entail health crisis’. For 5 years I’ve been in hospital, bar a few months here and there. Emergency sections, emergency treatments, short term detentions, long term detentions, you get the picture. Everytime I was coping better in one respect, Something else was falling apart that was either in my control, or not. 

Recently, after a lot of therapy and work on stabilising my mental health, and a considerably difficult time of safeguarding involvement to protect my actual physical self from threat of harm from other people, I’ve started to really get better. But I’m struggling to trust it. For so many years I’ve been caught in that cycle of constant crisis that my brain feels autoprogrammed to prepare for the next crisis right now. I struggle to switch off, to calm down, I get stuck in the hypervigilence/ crash cycle (I’ll explain more what this means another time!) because I’m so used to something going wrong. I feel like I need to prepare myself for another attack, but I don’t. 

I am getting better, but I can’t settle with it. All the benefits I’m feeling right now ( and I could write a list) feel meaningless because it all feels so threatening. In my mind, if things are going well, it means something terrible is going to happen. For me, there’s evidence behind that belief because of circumstances that were out of my control that have happened to me before. The complex trauma meant I was always in the place of life dangering crisis. Even when he trauma stopped, I couldn’t release this cycle I was in in my head and it lead to me almost self sabotaging and causing things to be unsafe again, through my eating disorder, self harm, suicide attempts. I always thought something terrible was going to happen because that’s how I had lived for so many years so it felt ‘normal’. 

But, it’s not. It’s not for months now. I am safe, I am okay. I haven’t hurt myself, I’ve had no critical incidents, I am healing. It’s scary, and very new, and I don’t know if I can trust it yet, but I’m learning to. Everyday that goes by that I get a little strong, my confidence in my abilities to manage grow, the hope and belief that this is a new start, a new life, gets stronger. The ironic thing is that the unsafeness of my life for the past 8+ years essentially became ‘safe’ because it was predictable. This, while it feels so much better, feels a lot scarier because it’s unknown territory. But it is also amazing, it’s happy, it’s belly laughs and joking around, it’s crying and meltdown mania, it’s shaking with fear and anxiety attacks, it’s smiling until my mouth hurts and spontaneous trips out, it’s not perfect, but it is all I’ve wanted for my whole life. I am getting better for definite now, I am healing.