The Only Way Out is Through
When I first began Trauma Therapy, my therapist told me, “The only way out is through”. As in, the only way to heal was to go back and go through the feelings and emotions I’d neglected at the time. When I first heard it, I didn’t know what to think. My internal monologue was telling me that he couldn’t possibly be right, there must be other ways to heal from traumatic events. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m the kind of person who needs to fully understand something before I’ll accept it as truth. So, I did my research, trying to find any small fact that could prove him wrong. (Thankfully, he’s a patient man and has become used to this. I’ve tried to prove him wrong so many times, but he always ends up being right.) However, it turns out that searching “Is the only way out of trauma is to go through it” on Google isn’t overly helpful. (I’m kidding. I didn’t actually search that). But I was conflicted as to whether he was right or not. I continually kept searching, trying to find another way to deal with my pain, but with everything I tried, I realized I was just continuing to bury my pain, rather than heal from it. I came to the point where I was wondering if I had the strength to go through it… whether I wanted to… and whether it would be worth it. After beginning this journey, I can say that my therapist was right, once again. The only way out is through.
In all honesty, I’m glad he was right. Don’t get me wrong, walking through these traumatic memories is freaking hard. But I can finally say that I am seeing some progress from where I was when I started with therapy in November. I can finally recount a trauma from when I was 9 years old without going into full blown panic. I can tell the story of what happened, feel some distress, but not to the point where I feel the need to dissociate and push away the memory and associated feelings. That’s a pretty big deal. Sadly, I have many traumas that I need to recount and go through the same process with. But at least now I know that he was right- the only way through this hole of pain and panic I’ve been living in for years is to go back and allow myself to feel the emotions that I wasn’t able to feel and process when I was a kid.
I knew this process was going to be tough, but I never expected to cry this much. When I was abused as a child at school, if I cried or showed any sign of weakness, it made things worse for me. They’d hit harder or longer, gaining pleasure from my pain. I learned early on that crying resulted in more pain. I began to learn how to push down tears when I felt them. I came up with little tricks that would help me not cry – biting my bottom lip really hard, counting to 100 in my head – strange little things that when I was a child helped keep the tears away. My body was trying to protect me. It knew that if it cried, I’d get hurt further, so it tried to protect me by shutting that part of me down. After a while, I didn’t need my little tricks to keep the tears from streaming. They just wouldn’t come anymore.
Some people have asked me why my parents didn’t do anything to protect me. Let me set the record straight here and say that my parents are amazing. The reason they didn’t do anything was because I never told them what was happening at school. You see, home was my one safe place. It was the place I didn’t have to constantly watch over my shoulder, or listen carefully for oncoming footsteps of doom. It was the one place that I could finally relax and be a kid. When I got home from school, I didn’t want to go back and tell my mom what abuse I had endured that day, because that was bringing the unsafe into my safe place, so I pushed it down. I tried to pretend like it never happened. I pushed away the feelings and emotions and buried them so deep it’s taken me over 16 years to finally find them. My mom has been reading my blog posts and has called me crying, wishing she had known what was happening to me at school when I was a kid. Childhood Rebecca also wasn’t good at verbalizing what was happening in her head. I found it hard to tell my parents about what was happening. Looking back now, I realize I probably should have just written my mom a letter… But hindsight is 20/20.
You can probably see by now that if I buried my feelings and emotions at school and then did the same when I got home, I never really processed or went through the feelings resulting from the traumas. My body continued to use this survival strategy because it had kept me alive all these years. It was the neuropathway that my brain knew and would go down over and over, until recently.
Therapy has challenged me to not bury my emotions anymore, which is really tough, because it’s all I’ve known how to do for 25 years. However, burying my emotions is also what led me to my absolute breaking point. I know that I need to retrain my brain and develop a new neuropathway, but it is freaking hard and takes a looooong time. I’ve been in therapy since November and just finally feel like I can see a difference. It’s slow and painful. I’m finally going back to the times I was abused, talking about them, giving them a voice and feeling all the feels that I should have back then. I’m crying tears I should have cried 16 years ago.
I have to say that it is super uncomfortable. There have been days where I have cried for hours and hours and I’m not even sure why. When I think back to my childhood, my eyes well with tears. I grieve the loss of safety, trust and the loss of myself. I’m finally crying the tears that would have been a natural response to the trauma at that time… I’m just 16 years late to the party. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve called my mom or boyfriend lamenting, “I just can’t stop crying! I’ve been crying for hours and my eyes and face hurt but they just won’t stop!” Crying is so foreign to me I’ve actually googled “How to stop crying” and “Can you die from dehydration from crying too much?” It’s something I have done so rarely, I don’t know how to respond to it when it happens. Some days, I wish I could go back to old me who rarely cried because I’m tired of being so weepy. But when I have those thoughts, my therapists phrase runs through my head… “The only way out is through… The only way out is through…” If I want to make it through the pain and suffering that I’ve been living in for so long, I have to go back. I have to grieve. I have to cry. I have to feel confused, frustrated, abandoned, worthless, angry. I need to allow those feelings come to the surface so I can deal with them. They’re not going to go away if I just keep pushing them down. I’ve tried that for so long and I can tell you, it’s just made things worse. The only way out is through. Which means that swollen eyes and a red nose might just be my new look for the coming months. Because the tears just keep coming and as uncomfortable as they make me feel, I am grateful they’re coming. I can finally see that letting the tears come is healing. While I’ve still got a long way to go (and a lot more tears to cry), I feel like my heart that’s been shattered into a hundred million tiny pieces is slowly coming back together, one tiny piece (and five-thousand tears) at a time.
Below is a photo that my talented friend Melody drew for me during a bad spell a few months ago. Her and I got together for coffee and she too noticed just how much trauma had stolen from me. She went home and drew this picture and sent it to me, saying something along the lines of, “I know you feel you’re broken beyond repair, but you are still beautiful, despite the scars. You have a powerful story to tell and you will thrive again one day”.
This picture is one that I have clung to ever since she gave it to me at the end of March. I am journeying through. I am slowly picking up the pieces and trying to mend them and while I know I will never be the “same”, I will be stronger and a light will shine out through my cracks and scars. I will continue to cry and walk around with a face puffed up to heaven. The only way out is through. I can get through this. (I’m crying now as I type those words because I’m writing them not as a statement, but as a way to convince myself that I can). I may be broken and shattered, but that’s not the end of my story.
If you’re here in this space too, know that I don’t know all the answers. I don’t have it all figured out. I can make words sound good together, but you don’t see the broken, crying girl behind the screen when you read this. I’m just as broken, hurt and scared as you are. But, I do trust my therapist and he’s been right about pretty much everything so far, so I hope that you too can believe that we can make it through. Hang in there, sweet friends. You’re worth the fight.
Love,
Becca
Featured Image taken from Google – no Copyright Intended. “Shattered” drawn by Melody Leland, used with permission.
