Eyes Wide Open: Avoiding Re-Traumatization is about navigating the pitfalls that can hurt or re-traumatize you on your healing journey.
This installment addresses one of the essential traits of a true and effective healer. Each installment is published on a weekly basis, Wednesday or Thursday, as a standalone piece, and can be read in any order
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We talked about the importance of honoring the cadence of your healing, telling yourself the truth and facing your issues.
Today, I’d like to address the cadence of sharing that healing, your story, or any part of it, with others. To speak out, to give voice to your experiences is a powerful thing. But only when shared in the time that is right for you.
Losing agency
When you acquiesce to the pressure, no matter how subtly, to share your story, or any part of it, before you’re ready, you lose the empowerment that comes from taking the steps necessary to make a decision, to decide what feels right to you.
You lose the opportunity to strengthen your ability to discern.
You lose self-agency.
The road to empowerment is not made up of disempowering acts. Appeasing another person’s expectations is not honoring your truth.
Premature sharing at someone’s behest can impact the story, itself.
Expectations on when can affect the what.
The pressure to share can inform your story, have impact on it before it has a chance to “congeal”, or come together in a more solid form within you.
You can embrace conclusions too quickly or accept a trajectory that might have gone in a different direction had you given it more time.
I experienced this in the early part of my healing journey. The effect was devastating. It broke the already fragile trust I had in myself, took me years to recover.
It also made it more difficult (impossible) for me to seek counseling or guidance from others, even from trained and qualified individuals that I liked, for a very, very long time. Think decades. There were other factors at play, to be sure, but this experience was like an anchor for them.
Denial saviors
Denial saviors are especially egregious in pouncing on what they feel is the truth just on the tip of your tongue. They are harmful in both the cadence of your healing, and unfortunately, in the timing of your sharing.
Rather than let memories unfold into their full form, or ideas, and possibilities incubate, and reveal more of themselves to you, they rob you of the time needed for that.
If they don’t feel it’s fast enough, they treat your cadence, as if it were a dragon that must be slayed, before the truth slips into denial, and becomes irrevocably lost.
Be wary of anyone pressuring you to speak “the truth” now, as an antidote to you being in denial, when you may very well be in your power. Memories and insights, and the meaning you give them aren’t wrapped in neat little boxes you can dig out from under your bed.
They are nebulous glimpses that take time to come into focus, or in-your-face memories in technicolor detail, but demand to be held close to you until you’re ready to share it with others, if at all… ever.
When to share your truth with others
First, it’s not all or nothing. If you’re going to seek help with a practitioner, presumably, you’ll have to share something of yourself. Even then, you decide how much and when.
You decide your comfort level of when and what you will divulge, including to your practitioner.
When you are ready, and your environment feels safe, you feel respected, and the person or people in this space show themselves trustworthy, those are the green lights to look for.
You’re still the one who decides if you’re going to go through that intersection.
Tell your story for your own reasons that you need justify to no one but yourself.
There will be times when you are ready to tell your story, but you’re just not ready or willing to tell your story to this person in this situation at this time.
You may have good reason, whether you’re able to articulate that reason or not. Or there may be no reason, other than you just don’t want to.
Either way, readiness isn’t “you-have-to-ness.”
What if I am dragging my feet or I really am in denial?
Respect your hesitancy.
Denial isn’t always a bad thing. A part of you may know what’s coming up next, and is giving you time to get stronger, for space to open up, whatever.
Sometimes, your life, your reality makes it not practical to process your way through it.
It’s not your job to convince anyone of anything. It’s your job to pay close attention to what you’re telling yourself and make the best decisions you can from that.
It’s your practitioner’s job to help guide you through your process. Not save you from it.
If your practitioner feels frustrated, thinks you’re in denial, or not doing the work they think you should, they can tell you. It’s called feedback.
What you do with that is up to you. What they do with your decision is up to them. Hopefully, it will be done so professionally.
Some appropriate responses would be to wait for you to figure it out, or try a different approach, or offer you something you can work on now, or feel comfortable to talk about, and then come back to “this”, whatever “this” is, later.
They can let you face whatever the consequences arise from your choices, your action or inaction. And then guide you through that.
If they feel your relationship together is no longer serving you, or it takes too much out of then, they can bring it to a conclusion. They can recommend someone they feel may better serve your needs.
They can do a lot of things. What they can’t do is pressure, bully, intimidate, guilt or shame you into regurgitating your truths on demand.
If they do, there’s no greater evidence that you were right to limit their access to the most vulnerable parts of you.
When the pressure source is you
And one more thing. The person pressuring you to share before you’re ready can, also, be you. Be careful about you becoming your own harsh taskmaster.
This is a part of your healing, and if you’re with a good practitioner, they can help you disengage yourself from it, and guide you through processing whatever dynamics are in operation.
The thing is, if your practitioner or facilitator of healing also puts that pressure on you, then you’re double screwed. And you don’t need that.
Remember, this is your journey. It’s for you to walk. On your own legs. In your own time.
You got this.
QUESTION: Have you ever worked with someone in a healing capacity where you felt like you were “behind in class” or not “turning in your homework in a timely fashion”? Do you do this to yourself? Love to hear your experiences in the comments!
From my heart to yours,
Demian Elaine’ Yumei ~ Silent No More
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QUESTION: Have you ever worked with someone in a healing capacity where you felt like you were “behind in class” or not “turning in your homework in a timely fashion”? Do you do this to yourself? Love to hear your experiences in the comments!
The first example I think of is the one I wrote of in this post where I was so severely traumatized, by the way my "practitioner" directly impacted my memory with her rush "save" me from denial.
Because I stayed clear from working directly with a therapist or practitioner of any sort for much of my journey as a result of that, I can't think of any other instance right now. Except that I've witnessed those dynamics of being pressured to share in some larger forums, peer led online support groups, by moderators and administrators who invested too much of their ideas of what healing *should* look like into the space, and placed a lot of expectations on their members, including expecting to them divulge their personal traumas... or in a more recent case, forbidding it.
Yeah... that was just this past week, Facebook recommended a support group, and in their description they made it clear you were not allowed to talk about what happened to you, except maybe a short initial paragraph, and then after that, only the positive parts of healing .
How do you do that?
That's another form of control, isn't it? Now I'm intrigued, but I don't know if I can find that group again.
Bottom line, listen to yourself, share what you will share, or don't share. It's up to you. Any pressure in one direction or the other is a form of control. Not the best for your healing.