Sitting on my meditation cushion across the new year, locked cosily away from all writing devices, ideas for blog posts flooded my mind at an actually absurd rate, bubbling up and over as I strained to focus on the incoming breath….the outgoing breath…the incoming breath…
I nudged them aside with varying degrees of success, and looked forward to the moment I could get started on the endless list of topics I’d suddenly found words for. It delighted me to feel the inspiration I’d yearned for all my life flowing so freely.
After 10 days of observing the impermanence of absolutely everything, and scanning myself from head to feet and feet to head, I was headed for home. I was rested and ready to give shape to the thoughts that had filled my head so temptingly in my pursuit of silence. And then…the world got a little bit more sharply insane than it already had been – and it completely threw me. All that anticipation, and now I couldn’t find it in me to make my way to the page.
How to process a moment of joy at birds on my windowsill while people were enduring so much violence on their own doorsteps and behind the wheels of their cars?
How to hold such huge world events alongside the hope and perseverance of day to day life?
My plans dried up. I stepped away and let the conflict make its way through my nervous system. At times I wondered when and how it would resolve, although not ‘if’; that was new, I was grateful for that. I waited to feel a space open up, hoping to write about the course and all the bits of beauty that had happened while I was there and since I’d left. I let it all marinade, occasionally trying to understand what the hold up was, mostly leaving it to its own devices. I knew it would unfold in its own time.
The evening it finally landed, I had read yet another thing that could never be unread, about yet another precious childhood that will never be repaired. It was awful, horrific, but I realised it wasn’t hitting me. It was easily the worst thing I’d ever taken into my brain and yet here I was, grimacing for a moment before scrolling past it and laughing at a bloopers video?
If you don’t already know, I shouldn’t have been able to read those words. I have CPTSD: there was a time I couldn’t see certain phrases without losing all sense of time, space, and security, often for days at a time. Yes, my life now is much more manageable and those words no longer have the hold over me they once did, but still – how was I absorbing these horrors? More to the point, how was I absorbing these horrors and still functioning? Where was my reaction?
Why was I not falling apart even a little?
It took a minute. As I ran through the previous weeks, checking in on patterns known and new, it dawned on me that my lack of reaction was a reaction. I have a certain type of silence that has always been loud, something to ignore at my own peril. It’s taken many falls for me to understand that it’s something to treat with caution. Trauma grows where hurt cannot be communicated: but how to communicate what can’t even be heard?
The pieces eased into place with a gentleness that I recognised from my last 4 years of healing: the signs had all been there. While I had technically moved, worked, met friends, and fed myself for the previous few weeks, there was a layer of myself that was standing stock still. Functionally frozen. My early diagnosis CPTSD pattern had been purely freeze, without the function: I equated moving and managing with health, with processing. I had no blueprint for the subtle difference that was taking place in this new landscape.
And yet, I couldn’t write. My dishes were never all done. My washing was never all put away. The physical indicators of my health and happiness, the clean lines of my countertops and the simple spaces of each room, places that my mind loved to stretch out into at the end of any long day, were all slowly disappearing under piles of unhappy clutter.
My brain, bombarded by information too appalling to accept, had once again started to shove it all into unobtrusive places.
But my body, my gorgeous, blessed, clever, wise body, had clocked the beginnings of the slippery slope and had already started warning me, leaving physical signs of what my mind couldn’t help but try to hide from itself.
This is CPTSD. Protection. Panic. Alarms going off in silence. But this is also recovery. Noticing the signs. Looking out for the tiny moments before they grow into huge ones. Paying attention when our bodies tell us what they need. Because they always tell us – always – if we can just make the space and find the courage to listen.
In the end, I realised the only thing I could write about was why I couldn’t write. Naturally, my eyes are rolling all the way to the back of my throat at the fucking irony in that. And yes, I have a bit of work to do now to pull out the piles of clutter and sit with what’s inside them, find a place in my heart where they can be held without holding the rest of me to ransom.
If you have anxiety, PTSD, CPTSD and/or you are also finding it hard to process the horrors, please know that a) you are having a normal reaction to a very abnormal set of circumstances and b) that doesn’t mean you should just bear it and make do. If any of the above resonates, please don’t try and push through. Instead, reach out, seek support, look for resources. It is up to us to become experts in our own wellbeing, but there are people waiting to help us get there. Look for the helpers. They make the wrongs feel a bit more right.
Fitter Inner 