A few days ago, I saw this online:
“When you’ve experienced recurring trauma your nervous system learns to always keep you braced and prepared for more. It doesn’t understand when it’s over for good. All it knows is that it kept happening and it thinks it’s going to keep happening. This is the complex in complex trauma. It’s so hard to teach your nervous system that you’re actually safe now.”
This is exactly my experience.
And It is already a huge step to realize this is happening.
For the longest time, I didn’t even understand that I had been severely traumatized throughout my entire childhood (and beyond.) My constant hyper vigilance, fear of abandonment, social anxiety, and other symptoms were my normal. My traumata were my normal. I did not perceive them as traumata, even as they kept happening. For me, without being able to name this, the whole world seemed like a giant minefield I had to navigate with the utmost sensitivity so as not to set off one of the many hidden landmines. My traumata and trauma responses were my daily reality.
So, only when my entire life fell apart 5 years ago, did I slowly begin to realize that my normal wasn’t normal. Instead, I learned over time that I am a trauma survivor, suffering from c-PTSD, and that my entire nervous system is constantly lit up like a Christmas tree.
In many ways my nervous system is like an army squadron that survived the war, but the squadron is still somewhere in the middle of the jungle, on highest alert, because no one has told them yet the war is over.
After several years of therapy, more often than not I recognize what is happening, the jungle seems to lighten up and I can see paths leading out of it. But still, sometimes my nervous system takes over to rescue me from perceived threats (or real threats that remind it too closely of past traumata.)
Like the text I quoted in the beginning says, it’s a long road. It’s no easy task to calm a nervous system that has been conditioned by recurring trauma for decades to battle in the jungle on high alert to not be blown away by a stray land mine or ripped to shreds by proverbial tigers.