Continually pressing forward and trying new paths towards healing, I became aware that stress generally made everything worse. I took steps to manage my stress levels.
Meanwhile, none of the healthy things I was doing for my body were working because I wasn’t recognizing the source of my pain.
I had been treating my health like a series of checkmarks – meditate, check; don’t eat gluten, check; get acupuncture, check. I hadn’t yet learned that it didn’t work that way.
Healing and happiness are not cause and effect like that.
I never really thought that what was happening in my brain had much to do with how my body was functioning. The whole time I was burying myself in work and thinking my trauma was behind me, I was actually telling myself I couldn’t feel.
Not consciously, of course, but the effect was the same. I’d been repressing those feelings and memories for a lifetime.
Over and over, my doctor challenged me. She told me to stop telling myself that I couldn’t feel the effects of my trauma and instead tell myself that I didn’t want to feel them.
She told me I was ignoring, repressing, avoiding, doing everything I could to not feel it and it was having a huge impact on my body. As a child, it was a survival mechanism, but my body was keeping score.
My body hadn’t forgotten about it.
It took years, but she kept pointing me toward acknowledging that I had to experience the feelings I repressed to allow those feelings to dissipate and leave my body alone.
I needed to come to a place where I could feel my own broken heart. I needed to be able to recognize that those feelings weren’t gone because I’d burned a journal of pain out in the desert.
They were with me whether I chose to address them or not.
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