This is just an idle thought brought up by what will doubtless be obvious circumstances, but: trauma recovery isn’t linear and that’s hard.
Like, you can have whole years of relatively good success and then just bottom out for no particular reason, and it sucks, because it feels like… It feels like, on the one hand, maybe you conned yourself into thinking you could ever be improving and therefore you’re terrible, or, alternatively, maybe you conned everyone into thinking you had problems to begin with and now you’re just acting the part for sympathy. And on top of that elaborately pointless circle of self-loathing, the part of you that knows you aren’t lying about any of it is just screaming in rage because look at all that progress down the drain.
Like, for various reasons I have some pretty hardcore PTSD wrt dentists, and I improved a lot over the last few years. Dentists and I will never be on good terms and exam chairs will almost invariably set me off, but I could sit still through a whole appointment and keep my breathing mostly regular, which is honestly as good as it might ever get. And I had years of that, of ‘as good as it’ll get.’
And then with no warning my latest appointment was a train wreck. I spent two days almost totally useless before the appointment even started. At the appointment, I almost threw up when something was placed in my mouth, and I almost started crying about halfway through, and I was hyperventilating so badly I genuinely thought I was going to pass out in the chair. Nothing I could do had any effect. And like…that’s still a lot better than what used to go down when I went to the dentist (I don’t remember almost six years of dental appointments because I was so out of it, but I know there was one time where I physically attacked someone when they tried to bring instruments near my teeth, and another where I ran away), but God, I felt like a fucking failure. Like I said: all that fucking work for all that fucking progress, and it was like I’d NEVER EVEN TRIED.
Now, I’ve hit this sort of badness before, where the bottom just kind of drops out of all my hard work (um…one time a dentist put me on laughing gas to try to calm me down, and we all learned that it’s possible to OD on nitrous oxide, needless to say that Did Not Help and instilled an even more virulent hatred of Spongebob than I had before). So I was able to kind of nip that one in the bud and point out to myself that, hey, I was able to speak during the appointment and neither I nor the dentist was injured, so it’s a net win. But…like…I feel like no one talks about the way that you can be doing better, you can be doing a lot better, and then you can still just…lose it.
And it doesn’t mean you’ve lost progress on your recovery, or that you have to repeat all the same work as before. It’s just that piecing yourself back together is hard, it’s exhausting, and sometimes your brain just gives out at the worst possible moment, like a muscle that’s been overworked, and it sucks, but it’s not the end of the line. Do what you have to do to take care of yourself (if you’re me, drink some gin and watch some movies) and get some sleep if you can, and then take a deep breath and look at the situation again. Have some compassion for the younger self who was subjected to that trauma, instead of beating up on them for being affected by it. People have emotions, it’s what makes us people, so try not to crucify yourself for feeling deeply and being scarred by the experience.
