On Recovering from Trauma

A personal story of dealing with PTSD

I didn’t realize there was a National Trauma Survivors Day but I found out this year and it compelled me to share my own story in the hopes of maybe helping others in doing so.

My healing journey was catalyzed by my own suffering in my early 20s, which at the time I thought was all mine, perhaps due to some defect of being born with the brain and body that I had. I didn’t know the source but I somehow knew there was a cure, a way out. Then life led me on an unfolding journey of clues toward that sense of freedom.

What I didn’t realize is that what I was struggling with was the result of C-PTSD. The manifestations of OCD, anxiety, shyness, and feeling like I was somehow trapped inside of myself were not results of the way I was born. Instead they were the cumulative effects of trauma and a society that perpetuates systems of harm while upholding (some) traumatic responses as ideal ways of being.

Being the child who tended toward freeze response, taking in lots of information, people pleasing, and tracking, I was praised for my calm demeanor and “mature” personality. Meanwhile these behaviors are quite unnatural for living beings who are meant to move and emote and even be somewhat unpredictable. They don’t lend themselves toward freedom or creativity, instead creating people who don’t know themselves very well and rely on following the cues of others to get by.

As an adult I have seen other adults lauded for accumulating mass wealth, stepping on others to climb corporate ladders, not caring for others’ well-being, and just being plain out mean as a form of “comedy.” Then we wonder why we have presidents who display these behaviors as though the society didn’t create them, giving them awards the whole way.

These are a couple of the socially accepted forms of trauma response, as they help keep the status quo intact.

Luckily for me, there was something inside that was much stronger than all of this. I think it’s the energy of life. Maybe it was my ancestors or guides. Perhaps all of it.

I found my way into therapy and not too many months later someone exposed me to LSD. Both of these experiences then opened my mind to see beyond what I had previously been trapped in. There were other ways of being, and I was able to touch them immediately.

Now knowing that my reality was something that could be shaped by perception and experience, I started devouring what life had to offer including the healing modalities before me. I improved my diet, I started exercising more, I said yes to new experiences.

One of those new experiences was attending a yoga class with a friend. He had invited me to join him stating that this teacher was incredible and I would love it. I had no idea what I was getting myself into but I went along. And I am so glad that I did.

The teacher was a true yogi and brought all eight limbs of the lineage into the class, even though I didn’t know what any of that meant at the time. All I knew was I felt better after attending.

Then I remember after being in class for a few months consistently, that one day I felt as though my body and mind were coming back to each other. As though both of them had been operating on different tracks and now they were as one. It felt deeply healing. My mind opened and I found new ways of thinking and perceiving that I didn’t know were available to me.

What I didn’t know at the time and wouldn’t learn until seven years later is that science has shown that the practice of yoga has this effect of healing trauma, which is stored much more in the body than it is in the mind. What I also didn’t know but would learn much sooner is that the ancient yogis said this path was one which would bring mind-body-soul into alignment.

Eventually this path would lead me toward meditation which was another liberating practice. Every day I felt myself getting more free, more relaxed, more open to the depth of being that is offered to us in this human experience.

However, I wasn’t too many years into this path when a person would come into my life and try to completely wreck it.

I don’t need to go into the details of what happened or how but over the course of about four years a person I thought who had my best interest at heart was actually covertly undermining me which then turned into overt abuse. A particularly scary situation toward the end led me to calling my therapist after learning some disturbing information and her telling me I needed to find somewhere safe to sleep that night and get a restraining order as soon as I could.

And that would be the beginning of a journey I didn’t realize I was going to take in this lifetime. One that on many days after the fact I would have wished never happened to me.

In the following months I felt so lost, confused, sometimes drifting through a haze of depersonalization. Luckily, I was not alone, but instead held by so many loving friends and family members. I credit this as one of the reasons why I was able to make it through those dark days and not only survive but thrive.

Before all of this I was an incredibly confident person who knew exactly where she wanted to go and what she wanted to be. I had a strong will and the confidence to achieve anything I set my mind to. But all of a sudden the future seemed to be stolen from me and my sense of self was missing too.

There would be days where I just didn’t know if I would make it. I don’t know exactly what that means now but there was a sense that I might just disappear from this earth. I remember a friend telling me he wasn’t worried about me when I confided in him about my fear.

PTSD is a wild thing. If you haven’t experienced it yourself, I honestly hope you never have to. The symptoms I experienced from this acute trauma were not the ones that lend themselves well to societal structures. And my understanding of trauma from the outside and all the years I spent learning about it to help others, I was now using to help myself from the inside.

See, there were many days where I just couldn’t do anything. Lying in bed was the only activity available to me. Luckily enough for me I had the privilege of working for myself and staying with family at the time that I didn’t have to push myself to do anything besides rest. Rest that my body and mind so desperately needed to heal.

Doing nothing is not a societally productive trait but it is incredibly productive in terms of healing. Without periods of rest and relaxation, even in regular day-to-day life, we are setting ourselves up to incur illnesses of body, mind, and soul.

I couldn’t commit myself to anything, unless it was immediately present in front of me. Another trait not wonderfully accepted by our world, unless it’s the nihilistic kind that lends itself toward the pillaging of other people and the earth as if there actually was no tomorrow.

Instead this symptom manifested for me as the inability to feel that there was a future, even if that future was tomorrow and that meant I didn’t have the will or ability to commit to anything. On top of that, I didn’t know how I would feel on any given day and because of my deep relationship to healing I knew I had to let myself respond to the world as it came, not as I anticipated it being.

Society at large tends to want us to plan for many years into the future, but our human brains can’t even really comprehend this future. Out of fear and out of habit, we commit ourselves beyond what we can even know and we override our internal longings to abide by some set of unwritten rules. This inability to be responsive to our needs, the needs of others, and the needs of the planet leads us to unhealthy and even dangerous situations.

I wish I had been responsive to my gut feelings about this person. When everything on the surface seemed normal but my stomach would churn with warning, I should have listened. But we’re not taught to listen to our bodily sensations, mostly we are taught to ignore them. Meanwhile we live in a society that has normalized harm (although I see this changing) and it’s hard to point to what’s wrong when everyone else thinks it’s just fine.

The day I left the courthouse after being granted the restraining order I cried so hard. One of those cries that happens when we start to feel a little more safe, safe enough to soften, so all of the harm convulses through our shaking bodies and pours out through the hormones in our tears. This type of crying would happen unprompted many times in the coming months, as I would encounter a situation where I felt safe.

After I released that cry I went over to the nearest grocery store to grab something to eat and drink. Out of habit, and partly out of lack of money due to the great financial burden one has when trying to untangle their life from someone like this, I went to select a drink and almost grabbed the one that was maybe 30 cents cheaper.

But then I grabbed the one I actually preferred, which happened to be the most expensive and realized that I had another chance to live and I didn’t know how long it would last and I wanted to enjoy my life right now, immediately.

It was a simple act which would reverberate out into so many parts of my life and allow me to live more fully. I had already done so many unconventional things that I felt passionate about but something about the trauma had totally undone me from any self-protective ego-clinging that might prevent me from trying wildly new things.

Because of this mindset I traveled to India with only $2k left in my bank account. I went back to Brooklyn to be part of a movement that I had been supporting for almost a decade and needed as many of our bodies on the line. I moved to Mexico to see what it would be like to actually live in another country. When the time was up I just felt it out and then felt out where to go next. I no longer felt compelled to keep a lease or be committed to a place or things. I felt like I had already lost everything — my sense of self and any sense of the future — so I might as well try living by my gut, by my feelings and see what happens.

People ask me all the time, “Why did you move to New Orleans?” and I say, “Because of a vibe.”

And I’m not kidding. When I realized I did want to settle somewhere for a little while I felt into my body and asked her, where were you most happy last here in the US? She brought up images of New Orleans and so I started making my plans.

Some of the gifts of trauma, for me, was in freeing myself of rigid, narrow structures of being. I released myself from relying on the opinions of other people for what I should do. I started trusting my body to even deeper levels than before.

I let the universe guide me more than ever and let the world support me more than ever. I leaned on my loved ones in ways I couldn’t let myself when I was more caught up in this illusion of independence. I had to collapse onto them, I didn’t have a choice, and in doing so I found the beauty in love and community.

I am able to sit with people in their pain, in a way that I couldn’t have before. I have seen evil and know it exists. I don’t doubt people when they share in their pain because I understand how hard it is to actually say anything and even once the words are out it is doubtful most people will even believe you.

I am grateful to have already had a healing practice in place, to have placed myself in communities of healing, with people who knew how to nurture and hold me. I am grateful to have cultivated beautiful friendships that only deepened and strengthened through this dark time. I am grateful that I had set up a life where I was able to work for myself, allowing me the freedom to move in the ways my body needed to.

But I am not a person who thinks that we need to turn every situation into some sort of opportunity to learn. It does help me, personally, to move in that direction after I’m finished feeling all my hurt and anger and pain. Without that ability I would feel helpless and trapped once again, as I was in my youth.

However, there are days when I wish none of this happened to me. When the flashbacks come up and cause me to act out in unsavory ways toward myself or the ones that I love. Or when I sometimes see how far along it seems like everyone else is and that I’m so far behind due to the years I had to spend resting and dropping out of the race to heal myself.

Up until recently, when I would speak my whole mind would feel jumbled up and I could tell there were words coming out but the sounds I heard in my ears made no sense at all. I wondered if people even understood what I was saying most of the time.

Not to mention the brain fog and forgetting words, feeling them on the border of my mind, unable to push through to the other side. Again, not the most socially acceptable manifestations of trauma.

There are still days when I don’t know what will happen to me, where the future seems uncertain, but thanks to my practices I know that this is actually the truth. That a sense of certainty about how things will turn out is a form of self-preservation, denying the reality of the situation at hand which is more precarious than it has ever been.

Oddly enough, what having PTSD has done for me in many ways is removed the protective fallacies I lived with. It’s made it incredibly difficult to live in some ways — having to face grief head on and living in a world that demands I ignore what is going on within and without me. But I also have the gift of living more closely to the truth, and this is the only hope (along with love) for moving towards a healthier future.

We have to acknowledge and feel our grief. We have to slow down to ensure our future health and the health of the planet. We have to realize that we live in an interdependent world, even though relying on people in our youth may have proven unsafe.

We have to talk with each other about what is really going on within ourselves. We have to show up as much as we can for others. We have to be honest about our shortcomings so we can connect and collaborate more authentically. So that we can receive the support we so desperately need.

Although I have healed so much and cannot believe how far I have come since the day I escaped, I will likely live with this for the rest of my life in some way. Although I may grow to shrink the size of its impact and do the practices that release the remnants from my body, I can’t change what happened to me. It will live within me forever, sometimes coming up to haunt me in ways that I may not expect.

What this does, is release me from perfectionism. It cuts me loose from the idea that one day I may reach some sort of utopia within myself. That whatever heaven I search for is already here, right now. And if it isn’t beautiful, man, there’s nothing (to quote Ram Dass).

Meaning that, all we have is right here and right now. The past is no more and the future doesn’t exist. It never does. We can only ever know the present moment and if we aren’t making it the most healthy we can, then what are we even doing?

Because there is no over there, there’s no us and them, there’s no putting it off until we’re 10 pounds lighter/heavier or $100k richer or whatever the carrot is for you. There is no such thing as a means to an end. The means are the ends in and of themselves.

In the Bhagavad Gita they said you are not entitled to the fruits of your labor. I don’t take that to mean that you shouldn’t receive the fruit should you make it to that point, but instead what it means is that you show up every day in a way that feels meaningful and fulfilling and worth your time. These are the actions that lead to the sweetest fruit, and these are the actions that allow us to feel satisfied on the way to getting there.

It’s interesting because I hope that I am working toward a world without PTSD. One in which people are celebrated and awarded for their kindness instead of their exploitation. I do know that world is possible, and likely has already existed on this planet. The part that is fascinating to me though is that when the trauma isn’t so bad that it has completely ruptured a person, it becomes the door to freedom.

I would say that the Rumi quote could be turned around a bit to reflect, “The wound is where the light gets out.” Through our wounds, if we are ready, able, and willing to accept them, we can find the clues to a more benevolent world.