Moving Past the "Band-Aid" Approach

I have only recently understood that when I was young I had, as a whole, no ability to be mindfully aware. I only reacted. Generally, this meant that I switched internal states. Healing, for me, has been about finding ways to increase awareness of what's happening inside me. It's a painfully slow process as many of you can attest.

I was driven to be more aware by safety issues. When my dissociative coping broke down and I became symptomatic, the issues were about life and death. I've talked recently about that in Therapy as Life Support Versus Healing.

Part of the difficulty with increasing awareness is that there needs to be acceptance of your internal system. Acceptance is generally thought of as a good thing. I will explain why it is often a problem for me.

When there is a switch and I'm disoriented afterwards, this statistically increases my risk of self-harm. In my healing, I've come to know this. So, what I do often is what I now call my "band-aid" approach: I attempt to strictly maintain control at all costs. This directly leads to non-acceptance of inside parts.

That's a problem, because this sets up a conflict.

Until yesterday I had not actually appreciated that this approach was not sustainable, and not terribly practical. I now know I simply cannot fully maintain my safety unless I learn a more holistic approach.

I learned all this in an interesting way. As I sat in therapy on Tuesday I realized that I was not able to assess at all where I was at. My thoughts were racing. My head felt like it was going to explode. I was only focussed on keeping it together and everything else got pushed away. I was so not aware. That was too hard and it was not a situation I could force myself out of. I needed to find another way other than sheer willpower.

My therapist saw my difficulty and did guided relaxation with me. I slowly let down my guard and released my strict control.

One of the problems we trauma survivors have is that we have well established methods of regulating our internal states. Healing means learning new ways. Grounding, mindfulness, meditation, and self-soothing, are all ways to form inside trust and acceptance. Even this is extremely hard to do, and is not even enough. Beyond that there is collaboration and communication.

All of this can seem overwhelming. The challenges we face are every bit as difficult as those of a cancer or stroke survivor.

But we must not give up. We must have faith.