Lost the battle

****Potential triggers****

Hi @Former-Member, what a hard time you are having. It feels like we are trapped between a rock and a hard place with the past being the rock and talking about it being the hard place. They (the professionals) want us to tell the story in some kind of chronological order - when I was 4 XX happened, when I was 8 XX did this - because they have been trained that getting it out makes you feel better. It has never been my experience that telliing it in this way is in any way, shape or form is useful to my feeling "better". (I am a survivor.)

I hear you have said very clearly you are losing the battle, to take that analogy and use it, if we are losing the battle we need to withdraw with our leaders (and that leader/general can be our inner self, the one who wants the best for us) and regroup and come up with a new strategy. It is pointless just throwing ourselves into the thick of the battle with no armour, an no good practitioner should expect you to lay yourself bare to the many headed/shapr toothed past without some very clear ways of keeping yourself safe, being able to keep yourself strong through it.

What I have found has worked the absolute best for me is to talk about my view of myself today (eg. this week, or last week, whenever recently, when I reacted to such and such an event with anxiety or anger etc) and using tools and information in regards how to be the best i can be 'now' - bit by bit parts of my story that I have never before told have come out in a safe way as part of these kinds of discussions without having to throw myself back into it and trigger post traumatic stress experience. And - the revelation of those parts of my story have been helpful in relation to what I mistakenly learned during those experiences, rather than the experiences themselves.

We all react to trauma with a certain amount of similarity - we all learn things from it in a way that is actually wrong (not wrong 'bad' just mistaken) as we are not equipped as kids (or even young adults) to come up with the perfect, right learning experience, we just muddle through and often we learn something totally bizarre - like - if we are 'just perfect ALL the time' nobody will ever do anything bad to us ever again. Or if we are angry all the time no one can get close enough to hurt us.

Can you speak to your pschologist and say something like... you know i don't want to trawl all over my xx history again, I want to find strengths and ways to be the best I can be today, if my past comes up - then it does, but can you help me be in the present, find some coping strategies for when xyz happens? Are you prepared to help me do that without looking at me as if I am not being 'compliant'?

I dunno - it just seems to me that feeling like you have lost the battle because you don't want to talk about your past is putting immense pressure on you and not helping. Maybe there are other ways to shift the mountain, with a teaspoon instead of a front end loader and come up with some great strategies to make you stronger and more resilient as you go along, before pushing your head back into the mud puddle and expecting you to feel great about that.