When I was in therapist school one of my profs said, "A lot of trauma needs 10 or 20 years before it's really ready to be worked through. Maybe longer." And at the time I was like: Oh Shit. I planned to be over my trauma and all better by the time I graduated!
Anyway, that was 10 or 20 years ago and jesus fuck, she was right.
A brief explanation:
One of the most popular theories of trauma says there are three steps.
Escape the trauma and find safety.
Process the trauma.
Consolidate the trauma.
Sometimes this can be a relatively quick process. If you get into a car accident while turning left in a busy city street, you might get trauma symptoms that cause feelings of fear and anxiety when you're driving your car, or travelling by car through a busy city.
"Finding safety" would mean learning to handle your anxiety and fearfulness by re-training your body to seek calm, even when reminded of the trauma. This might include things like breathing or muscle relaxation exercises that actually affect an anxious brain and help you stay centred, as well as slow exposure to situations that are stressful and traumatic so you learn to tolerate them again.
"Processing the trauma" means to look back at what happened that has given you significant psychological symptoms, and re-process those memories and the lessons you took from them so they are less damaging or hurtful. That might be revisiting your memories of the accident until they aren't so painful to think about, or it might be working to be more comfortable with driving again.
"Consolidating the trauma" means that when you've settled those memories, you take your new, healthier understanding of yourself forward into your life. That might make you a more cautious driver, or cause you to be more mindful and value every moment because you've seen how quickly your life can change. It is what you make of it.
When you try to do these steps out of order, that's more of a problem. If you want to dive straight into revisiting your memories of something that happened, but you have no defense against the panic attacks and nightmares that remembering causes you, you're not safe, not so far as your brain thinks. Your brain experiences raw memories of trauma as though it were still happening all around you. You can end up even more traumatized than before, so that even seeing a picture of a car makes you feel like you're back on that street waiting to turn left.
If a trauma is particularly old, complex, or strong, it can take a long, long time before you actually feel safe enough to go back into the memories that haunt you most. That's especially true if you're still in a situation that feels threatening, like if it's your job to drive around downtown. Or in other situations, if your abusive parent is still alive and in your life, or if you're still a member of the group or club you were abused in.
Even with our best therapies, like EMDR and DBT, it can still take years to reach that place of safety. Like my prof said, sometimes it's a decade. Sometimes more. I'm almost 40, and this week I finally felt safe enough to open up a file of memories that happened when I was 4. But until you reach that place, it's really hard to unpack the trauma and look at more complicated questions like, "Are the assumptions I made back when that happened accurate or useful?" or "Is it beneficial to me to keep being afraid of this kind of situation in the future?"
Also, about this process of finding safety, and how it can take so long. There's this bit from a Cheryl Strayed/Dear Sugar article that I have been living by ever since I discovered it maybe a decade ago, where she recounts having to give advice to a teenage girl at the school she works for, after they've learned that none of the government services that could get her out of her deeply shitty life have the budget or inclination to help her. It's brisk and a bit raw, but for me, it has been the permission I needed to fight like hell.
I told her that escaping the shit would be hard, but that if she wanted to not make her mother’s life her destiny, she had to be the one to make it happen. She had to do more than hold on. She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.
Just because I wasn't deconstructing the shit that happened to me when I was 4 for the past couple decades, it doesn't mean I wasn't working on my own healing. I did all the work that got me to here and now.
Also this bit from Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold:
You can't solve problems by running away from them, it was said, and like the good child she had once been, she had believed this. But it wasn't true. Some problems could only be solved by running away from them.
