If we could just “let it go,” we would.

If we could “just let it go,” we would. 

If we could “just get over it,” we would. 

If could “just”…anything, we would. 

The fact that so many survivors struggle so much with their trauma responses means that we CAN’T “just” get over it. 

It doesn’t mean we’re “not trying hard enough.” 

It means that traumatic stress damages us in ways that we literally can’t overcome without specific skills, tools, philosophies, and support— this thing we call “trauma recovery.” 

So many survivors come to the trauma recovery paradigm as kind of a last resort. 

They feel like they’ve tried everything, and still trauma responses are kicking their ass. 

As it turns out, “trying everything” often amounts to doing what our culture often recommends trauma survives do— try, in various ways, to deny, disown, or ignore their trauma. 

Many survivors try to exercise it away. 

Many survivors try to starve it away. 

Some survivors try to f*ck it away. 

Many try to drink or drug it away. 

(I have lots of experience with those last two.)

All of which usually ends up where it has to end up— us, back at Square One, drowning in emotional and/or sensory flashbacks, wondering what we have to do to “get past it” like everybody tells us we “should.” 

One of the hardest things to accept about trauma recovery is that there s no bypass. 

There is no magic bullet.

Trauma recovery involves coping on the one hand, and processing on the other. 

Coping and processing may take lots of different forms for different people, but realistic, sustainable recovery always involves those two elements. 

In my experience, many will come along promising a bypass to the hard, often painful work of coping and processing— and those bypassing methods tend to be very seductive to survivors who tend to be burned out, tired, and hurt. 

We really want to believe there’s a way out of this without doing the work of getting through the day, one day at a time, and processing the thoughts, beliefs, memories and meanings associated with our trauma. 

But there’s not. 

There never has been. 

There’s the work of trauma recovery— and all the stuff we do to avoid the work of trauma recovery. 

Here’s the thing: we are not born knowing how to do this work. And if we grew up in the kind of families that infect complex trauma, we sure as hell weren’t taught how to do this work growing up. 

Nobody isn’t doing the work out of laziness or stubbornness. 

It is my experience that almost 100% of trauma survivors, when they are exposed to what recovery is and can be, catch on and do what they have to do to recover. 

That does not mean it is easy. And it is certainly not “quick.” 

If you are reading this, recovery IS for you. 

It is not too late. You are not “too old.” 

And you do not need a miraculous bypass. 

You are up to this challenge and this project. 

It all starts with breathe; blink; focus. One day at a time.