Trauma and PTSD Recovery

I want you to know, I don’t know your individual story. I don’t know what you have lost, I don’t know what your pain is like, what you experience everyday and I wouldn’t even pretend to know. My story is not less or more traumatic then yours. I look at everyone’s story as the same because we only know our own experiences. I’m also not an expert on your life, far from it!! What I do know is what worked for me. And what I’am an expert in is healing strategies and human behaviour. It wouldn’t be fair if I kept this all to myself and see the numerous amounts of people suffer when I can offer some advice from my experiences. It only seems natural that I spread my knowledge to help another. I want you to know that I see you and I see your pain and extend my empathy for this time your going through.

It would be impossible for me to write everything I did to make peace with my trauma and PTSD in a blog post. So here are a few things to get you started on your journey.

Going through any type of trauma is an awful experience for all those involved, it can cause large amounts of stress and bring to surface many unusual feelings that can be hard to describe or understand. Somedays you will feel on top of the world and other days are a struggle just to build strength to face the day. Trauma can be this constant thing which you carry with you even if you’re having a good day. Your story creates this deep hole in your heart. Your sensitive to certain topics, sometimes your afraid to see people and other times you just want to get out of the house to keep your mind busy so you don’t need to face another moment of your pain. The flash backs constantly haunt you, date and clock watching occurs because you want to remember the seconds and minutes of when it all happened. It’s all you can think about even when you're not thinking about it, and if you're like me it is all you talk about or maybe you struggle to even utter the words of your trauma.

My journey to recovery was definitely one of the hardest things I have done to date. I have fallen down many times, there were many times when the light was the size of a ball point pen tip sitting amongst a hole of darkness and sorrow. I fought so hard with all of me, every cell in my body to get to a state of peace. Because I have this vision for my life, my vision is to be happy. My definition of happiness means not carrying any unnecessary weight around with me that my ego would like me to do. And I had done this for many years, going way back before this trauma without even knowing. The new found happiness I have, makes me feel confident in my own skin. I feel lighter, my thoughts are not consumed with sadness, I fill my life with the things that matter most to me, things that help me grow and because of this I am happy. I am happy even when I’m having a bad day. I am happy even when things go wrong in my life. I have no attachment to what happened, if I experience a life storm I don’t reflect upon what I have been through and say why me because I have made peace with the past. In fact I turned my “why me” into “why not me”. My trauma was a very significant event but it was my rebirth and awakening. I didn’t set out for it to be this way, it kind of just happened. While I was in the process of healing I realised that for me to be free of my suffering I needed to make complete peace with my trauma. I envision my life to be joyful, and it certainly wasn’t going to be joyful if I hung onto my pain, labels and beliefs that keep me suffering.