The New Normal
Life After Trauma
After trauma, life will never be the same. You’ll never look through life with the same lens as before. You just won’t. Things become tainted with the new reality you’re in. It saturates into you and drips off of you into a pool of congealed sludge at your feet.
Your job — and I’m sorry but yes, it’s hard work — is to open back up. There’s no learning how you just have to do it. You have to take a leap but it’s the ‘leap’ part that is the most terrifying.
This is where I’m struggling. I go into my therapy sessions each week looking forward to seeing my kind, patient, and gentle therapist, and more times than not, I leave frustrated that she can’t just “fix” me; that there are no concrete steps to take in the path forward. There is only “feeling”, and my logical brain has a hard time grasping this.
I think that there should be steps I can take toward getting over the trauma, pain, and grief that have welled up inside of me; this pain that I’ve walled in and that keeps me in a cage without a key.
But that’s not how this works. My therapist’s job is to sit with me as feelings come up while I talk and to help me move through them.
There is no “getting over” trauma. There is only the integration of it into your life and your reality, and the work comes from this…
