The past few months has been a slow, sometimes hard, trajectory towards the up and up.
If you’ve been reading along for awhile now, you’ll know I’ve been openly talking about symptoms of PTSD, overcoming difficult interpersonal situations, and navigating new and old ways to move forward.
While I still have some difficult, or very low-energy days here and there, I’m hesitantly optimistic in saying … well, things are looking like they’re opening up. With a nervous system that is finally catching more spans of time in a parasympathetic or “rest and digest” space, I’m beginning to see a more birds-eye-view. I’m taking stock of what thoughts and behaviors have been helping me heal, versus which ones were me throwing things at a wall and praying for something to stick.
Two things have come into sharp focus over the past few weeks which ironically have the same root sentiment—healing does not happen in isolation. Let’s unpack this phrase in both ways:
One thing that feels resoundingly clear is that healing does not do well in single-player-game-mode. We cannot heal alone. People say this all of the time but it’s worth repeating. It’s worth looking at from different lenses. It’s worth considering in many of our decisions towards healing—how could I recruit more help? Where am I trying to do something alone unnecessarily?1
The other point of clarity, which is also a trope, is that everything we do is connected to everything else we do. Fixing one thing is rarely the solution. Reassessing several interconnected areas allows you to cultivate a deeper understanding of how you function and helps you build back a more solid foundation.
Let’s tackle both of these in order.
Finding Compassionate Witnesses
Finding a way to not heal alone requires finding people who can compassionately witness you exactly where you are at without trying to push you into some new space without your consent. Sure, sometimes we need a compassionate kick in the ass. However most times, if we can be met exactly where we are, we naturally want to move towards the next phase of ourselves. Especially if our current stage is painful and constricting.2
While many of us can probably think of family or friends who hold us well during difficult moments, sometimes paying a professional who is specifically trained for whatever areas you’re having difficulty can be useful for a more targeted approach towards a specific area you need compassion in. Additionally, finding people who understand and can relate to your situation is important. Nothing has to be exact, but individuals who have gone through something similar and who may be on the end of whatever challenge your facing, or in a similar part of the process as you are in can be soothing and comforting. Connecting with others who can relate helps us remember that we are not so broken that we are unfixable, but instead that pain and suffering is just part of the human experience.
When we share our stories about pain, we can often minimize the suffering.
Pinpointing Which Pieces Interconnect
If you identify as an athlete and you break your leg during the season you typically participate in your most favorite sport, it is not just your leg that is injured.
If the people you connect with most deeply during your athletic season are where you get your most quality social support your social support is now injured, too.
If your physical activity is something that stimulates your mind in a way that is rewarding and challenging your cognitive engagement is now at a deficit.
If your self-esteem, sense of self, and identity all stem from your ability to engage in your sport and engage in that sport well, each of these things will also endure injury.
I’m not pointing this out to be all doom and gloom or over-pathologize our fallow moments of life, but rather to objectively notice how none of these individual pieces exist in isolation. To tend to an injury holistically, it’s important to take an objective assessment of which pieces in the larger puzzle of ourself have been affected so that we can gently and compassionately tend to as many of them as we are able to.3
Putting the Pieces Together
Navigating a major trauma that results in something like PTSD is debilitating because so many of our puzzle pieces become affected at the same time. PTSD is literally an overgeneralization of a specific type of pain. Our bodies endured something so difficult that it lost it’s ability to distinguish which specific situation caused the pain. In an effort to protect ourselves, our bodies try to tell us that everything that even looks, smells, sounds, tastes, or feels like the initial incident is worth staying away from.
While this is a well-intended thing for our bodies to do, it is terribly inconvenient and wreaks havoc on trying to be a regular-ass human.
PTSD is often co-morbid4 with:
Depression
Anxiety
Social Isolation
Sleep Disturbances & Nightmares
Dramatic Changes in Appetite and Food Choices
Dramatic Changes in Physical Activity
Difficulty Regulating Nervous System Function
Anhedonia5
Emotional Flashbacks6
Dramatic Changes in self-esteem, self-worth, & self-perception
When reading this list it’s pretty easy to ask yourself the question—okay so what’s even left? And while something like PTSD exaggerates many of these co-morbid changes, in smaller and less dramatic life shifts, many of these things are interconnected on a smaller level.
Separated from a long term partner? Moved to a new state? Physical injury? Huge, unexpected financial expense? Certainly less impactful than full-blown PTSD, but still many of these parts of our lives remain interconnected. The puzzle pieces that are closest to the injury are the ones that are more prominently impacted.
Depending on the circumstance, it’s important to take a mental inventory of all of the different areas in your life that might feel impacted and try to focus on re-stabilizing and re-calibrating the top three most disrupted areas7.
Working Within Reason
During a time of recovery it’s important to compassionately meet yourself where you are at. It is not within reason to believe that re-stabilizing these areas will look they way they look when everything in your life is going extraordinarily well. It’s not reasonable to think that these areas will look the way they look when things are going normally. It is not even reasonable to think these areas will look the way they look when you have a one-off bad day.
Re-stabilizing is about asking the question “what is good enough for what I need in this moment, right now?”
If you’re used to exercising daily, re-stabilizing might look like readjusting expectations towards moving in a way that helps you feel connected to your body each day.
If you’re used to a full 8-hour cram-packed work day with a 10-item to-do list, you may consider starting every day with your top 3 most important items, knowing you might only get two of them completed.
It can feel demoralizing to meet yourself where you are at, especially if you are familiar with a high level of competency for yourself. However, meeting yourself at your current capacity allows you to build back faster and more compassionately long-term.8
What I Have Found Helpful
I could write lengths about my own journey, but starting around November I realized that my healing had substantially plateaued. I was functioning again, but still experiencing a crushing sense of depression and lack of purpose. I was able to laugh and spend time with close friends again, but being in public places was making me socially anxious in a way I’ve never experienced before in my life. I was no longer able to work out (or even go on a brisk walk!) without my body going into flight or fight or entirely shutting down.
Essentially, even though I knew I was getting better slowly, there were pieces that felt very uncomfortably stuck and I was out of ideas on how to move forward.
Although most of this was like fumbling around in a dark house with a blindfold on, I was able to recognize:
Working out became debilitating
My social anxiety was through the roof
I had stopped eating food
My sleep was still a wreck
After several months of trying my best to work through these issues on my own I decided to call in some professional help. I specifically looked for trauma-informed practitioners or people who self-identified as compassion being a value that drove their practice. I set up appointments with my regular therapist again, reached out to a dietician, and started work with a physical therapist.
My physical therapist helped me problem solve the “fight or flight” and “complete shutdown” nervous system reaction my body was having during exercise.
My dietician helped me recalibrate my energy levels and re-identify my hunger cues.
My therapist helped me navigate through elements of my social anxiety and catch feelings associated with everything else.
None of these things are “solved” or “perfect” but after 6ish weeks of working with a full care team around my most difficult issues I’m blown away at how much has shifted in my daily life satisfaction, my energy, and my sense of purpose.
At some point, I would love to write an article more specifically around why depression would offset your hunger cues, and how those offset hunger cues might cause some more nighttime binging, and how the nighttime binging can offset your sleep, and how the sleep can elevate the social anxiety and make emotions more erratic, etc., etc., etc.
I’d love to tie that entire article all together in a bow by reminding us that it’s really hard to love what you do when your body is just trying it’s damnest to survive the layers of stress that adulthood constantly pile on top of it.
Alas, another time.
But in the meantime, please remember:
There are few things in life that aren’t better with friends.
That the arm bone is somehow, in fact, connected to the knee-bone.
This has been February’s iteration of “If You Love What You Do…”
If You Love What You Do… is a monthly Pomegranate & Magpie substack segment that explores work rituals, value-based goals, and embodiment practice. I’ll be sharing about my own personal desires and dreams, and the rationale behind the methods and behaviors I’m using to bring them to life.
This, of course, should be taken into consideration with what you already know about yourself. If you struggle from co-dependency in a way where you tend to do most things with other people, challenging yourself to safely do something alone might be your own personal growth point. However, if you identify as someone who trends towards independence like me, you might be on the other end of that spectrum. Learning to let people see you in your whole and messy self is worth leaning into.
This isn’t optimism. This is simply a truth of the matter that we get bored enough to want to do something different.
Obviously, we cannot be comprehensive about this all of the time. Or even most of the time! Having the time, energy, resources, and awareness to tend to all of the pieces is a point of privilege that many of us do not have. The point here is to work towards identifying which ones are accessible to tend to at any given moment and triage the most important ones first.
Fancy science word for “often occurs with”
Fancy word for “things that used to give you pleasure no longer bring pleasure or joy”
This gets wildly sensationalized to sound like some kind of a crazy drug trip. Honestly, it’s more of a confusing sensory overload and is often set off in your brain by something in your memory that is loosely associated with the person/place/things that were present during your trauma. In Big - T Trauma (like a car crash) this is often more specific to the exact trauma situation (like busy traffic, icy roads, etc). In Interpersonal/Developmental or Complex Trauma this is often very hard to pinpoint how or why it relates to whatever traumatic events caused harm (for me, one of my triggers was reading of all things because my former partner constantly was pushing new information and books on me that he hand picked. He never forced me to read anything, but the loose association that reading was a covert part of the abuse cycle I was in made my heart race when I picked up a book even over 12 months after we stopped talking).
This is completely arbitrary
It’s important to remember you’re not building a new skill from scratch. Once your body has the capacity to hold more responsibility, it will, and it will do so without needing to learn something new, but simply remember an older, previously established pathway.
This holistic approach is really inspiring- thanks for sharing how you’re tending yourself through the messy bits.