#complex healing

[bones-and-lichen]

I deserve to be held. I deserve to be embraced. I deserve to be treated with kindness. And I deserve to be understood.

[bones-and-lichen]

Your inner child deserves to be loved even when it feels helpless, weak and not equipped to handle life.

We so often keep perpetuating the same kind of abuse we experienced in our childhood towards the parts of us we deem the weakest, most fragile.

But we can break that pattern.

[bones-and-lichen]

Signs you’re experiencing a emotional flashback

Your emotions elude you. You try to figure out how the situation at hand could’ve caused that much of an reaction in you. You don’t understand the logic behind it up until you go all the way back to memories of where the feeling first emerged. Usually it will trace back to a traumatic instance, and a small detail, wrong sentence or other sensory input was enough to trigger a flood of emotions.

You get that sense of impending doom, like smth will absolutely go wrong even though you have no rational explanation for it.

If you usually enjoy touch, you’re suddenly averse to it and the idea of it becomes uncomfortable.

You might suddenly feel the need for someone to comfort you even though you’re not sure for what, or what you’re even feeling.

You suddenly get the strong urge to isolate yourself and hide, flee the situation or social interaction and burry your head in the sand until it feels “safe” enough to come out again.

You feel the excessive need to daydream and to escape reality suddenly but you don’t really know why.

You might notice symptoms of dissociation in your body. Your hands feel unreal. You feel disconnected from yourself all of a sudden.

Your sense of time changes.

Your emotions feel like they don’t really belong to you all of a sudden and you feel a strong need to keep that seperation up.

Intense gut wrenching shame right after the emotional flashback hits. Even if you can’t identify the emotional flashback, you can definitely identify that sudden shame.

Feeling a spike in paranoia, like people are against you, suddenly reading ill intent into other people’s actions even if you rationally know they aren’t doing anything to warrant your suspicion.

[bones-and-lichen]

If you were exposed to prolonged abuse in childhood, you most likely got so used to feeling unsafe you dont even pick up on it yourself anymore. Theres a constant stressor looming over you, that youre not even conciously aware of anymore. It drags you down, it makes you chronically tired, it makes every day situations harder to manage.

The issue with the sort of unsafe childhood abuse survivors experience is also that its a complex type of unsafe, its not like the imminent threat you can identify and quickly run into safety from. Childhood abuse is complex and layered, its a slow burn, it exists in an axis of many problems interacting with one another.

The first important step is identifying what are the things actually making you feel unsafe. Its important to sit with that, to untangle it and to make it understandable and logical to your own brain. Break down the complexity of it into chunks.

Then from there on there are 3 possible ways to deal with feeling unsafe :

Taking action, making the situation youre experiencing safer for you.

Reframing the situation, so your perceiption of the situation changes and you feel safer.

Actively soothing your nervous system and working on your physical response to unsafety.

[bones-and-lichen]

Healing is ;

You giving yourself grace

Non-linear

Layered, like an onion

You doing the best according to what you know

Battling bad habits and finding healthier coping strategies

Processing emotions and traumatic memories

Healing isn’t :

Linear

Never having any setbacks

Instantly being able to ingrain new awareness into better behaviour

Capacity to just let go like the past doesn’t matter

A beating stick to chastise yourself with

Something performative to prove to others you’re handling everything so well

[bones-and-lichen]

trauma responses youre not a dick for and a 100% have a right to:

emotionally shutting down

avoiding physical touch

not replying when youre overwhelmed

putting your own needs first

needing control over your life

having strict boundaries

being hypervigilant and canceling with friends more frequently cuz of it

[bones-and-lichen]

take ur power back. doesnt matter how often it was taken, or how devastatingly it was taken. doesnt matter how deeply helpless or violated u felt. take ur power back. take it back in the way that feels right for you. make urself aware theres power just in being alive and having a body, in having a physical voice u can use to project ur opinions and feelings. that there is always going to be smth you can do that will feel restorative, meaningful and powerful. if u didnt have all this agency and power, there wouldnt have been anything for abusers to try to take to start w/. but no one can actually do that. someone can limit ur agency and power for a time. they can extend a lot of energy into doing that. and thats v real. you were helpless. powerless. trapped. but anything youve had to learn during that time, once youre outside this situation, can be unlearned. you can literally just take all that power back. its nothing touchable, tangible that can actually be permanently taken from u. theres not point of no return. theres no actual point in which youve been violated so badly you have to stay defeated. as soon as that constant control over you fades away, and you actually have space to breathe u can rebuild. does it suck and is it painful to have to? sure. do you have a right to be livid, angry, sad? of course. but its rlly never to late. for as long as youre alive youll have some form of power and agency. and its uniquely *yours*. it can stiffled, but never broken.

[bones-and-lichen]

you owe yourself to unlearn barricades you were raised with. Even if it's difficult or confusing. Often we aren't even aware of our own barricades or at what point a belief we adhere to like it's truth is limiting to our potential. But I believe we owe ourselves something more. Something better. Something worthwhile. Something to feel proud of. It's a glorious day every time anew the baffling realization of "oh wait, I have that capacity? That was possible .. all along?" Sets in for something else. A life to decorate and design how we want to. Something to be proud of.