(Content Warning – this is more me naval gazing about my own poor mental health, mentions suicide)
The thing about the writing part of trauma informed therapy is that you end up going off into the things you need to examin to get past them. And mostly the stuff I’m trying to get through is old, old but just triggered recently. It’s not the stuff that ends up on this blog, though yeah I am writing here daily to keep in the habit, you might be surprised to know there’s a level of editing that happens in what ends up here. What I hate is how much my mind just pulls and pulls and pulls at things until it understands them and that means going over and over stuff in my head – writing it helps to get it out of my head but I need to draw it to the forefront first in order to do that. That means that there’s a lot of old stuff that is floating through my head and hasn’t been dealt with by three am. Which means nightmares.
I’m writing a lot lately about heartbreak so I guess it looks as if my trauma and mental break are all about the break up I had back in November. I suspect that were I to have been mentally healthy last year then those relationships would have gone entirely differently but I would still have had that break, probably sooner, had I not been in those relationships. Realistically the trigger for my mental break was seeing that suicide attempt, it’s just that I had people to lean on, and I really, really leant on them, way harder than I should have done in hindsight, so it got put off for a couple of weeks. It’s just a lot easier to write here about things that I can deal with, things that are hurting but are that weird mixture of normal hurt and that I have some kind of pathway to get through.
The nightmares are a horrific mixture of extreme violence and sweetness, and I wake up at three am, ok I was kinda happy to wake at 3:33am the other day, but that’s because I am ridiculous. I am working through the tougher stuff, it’s just taking longer and it’s harder to get through.