Keep Lookin' Out, Not Lookin' Down

Its funny where inspiration can come from to finally break the months long streak of not writing. Usually during an episode of Criminal Minds, the powerful quotes are usually at the start or end of the episode when they are attributed to the brilliant minds who spoke them. But during a recent binge, probably a bad idea with my trauma but it's one of those shows I've always enjoyed, a random moment dropped this one on me:

Maybe you've got to sit with the past before you can walk away from it.

I can tell you that just sitting with the past doesn't let you walk away from it. If you do a shit load of work while sitting with it, then do more work. And a little more. And then maybe you'll be done processing one small part of the traumas from the past. That has been the hardest part of the transition to retired life over the past 8 months. There has been a lot of consistent sitting, something that I haven't had to the same degree in the early years of my counselling work. Not to say that I wasn't getting help, more that what I was doing was kind of a window dressing, putting band-aids on the cuts that were visible to simply try and stop the bleeding without having the chance to mend the deeper wounds and cuts. 

December has been a rough month for the past years, fueled by shitty memories from shittier calls, years of anxiety and depression making the season even worse mentally because I could never feel any kind of joy or really anything else. Sitting with the past this year, being away from the job and away from the constant reminders of everything that happened in those years, gave me a chance to start working towards walking away from it. In Kelowna, we talked about the importance of baby steps, because healing is very similar, in that when you fall down you get up and keep going, you try again, you don't just lie down and give up. Which is a lot harder than it sounds, when each stumble, each fall, each step drains days worth of energy and makes you doubt the work that you're doing. Sitting through those sessions, digging into the worst corners of my mind, letting trauma after trauma come into the light so I could try to figure out what it was that let it burrow so deeply into my soul and my psyche. Sitting through experiences that I have never had before, like a trauma induced full body dissociation, which let me tell you is not as fun as it sounds. 

There has been a similar theme that has developed during these sessions, outside of realizing how deeply entrenched the trauma is within me, and that is sadness. But not the depressed, numb kind of sadness I am used to. A sadness that comes from years of not being allowed to feel or display emotion at the shittiest of calls. Sadness for the communities I worked in, for the members I attended calls with, for the other responders, for families who lost more than I did. Sadness has allowed me to feel like I have finished processing certain events, like something has been missing for years and that the walls around these traumas has been an inability to fully feel them. One of the hallmarks of first response work, at least as I came to notice and expect, is the belief that emotions shouldn't be felt at scenes, that they would interfere with the tasks at hand. But when those emotions are supressed, the scene isn't dealt with fully. There are times when sadness is natural and needs to be allowed to be present because in those moments you can still hold onto parts of your own humanity.

The lead up to these hardest of sessions, usually I do accelerated resolution therapy for the heaviest events because it gives me the chance to focus just on that event, to process it in a way that only has to make sense to me. But the lead up to these sessions is always a challenge. One of Shinedown's latest songs captures it beautifully "There's a hurricane and it's on the way, been sitting around this house for days, I'm in here waiting on the flood." Knowing the session is coming, knowing that during that session a wound is going to be ripped open and let to bleed, to know that whatever has been held back is going to come to light again, is daunting to say the least. The lead up hasn't gotten much easier as sessions have come and gone but at least I haven't had more panic attacks. Those sessions are draining in a way that I can't really describe, other than that they leave me tired to the core, taking energy from my bones and leaving me feeling like I have just done a back-to-back Murph, just completely spent. I can handle the tired, I can handle the ass kicked feeling, yet for some reason this week, recovery was even worse, pushing me toward the cliff's edge of anxiety and panic, just wave after wave of adrenaline dump and skin crawling discomfort. Days of discomfort and wishing that I could move on without having to to sit so heavily with the past. Days of not being able to focus for more than ten minutes at a time on school, days of trying to distract myself with anything but not being able to do it. 

It is on those days, hell, through this last week, that shows me just how far I have come. Sure, it hasn't been easy and it's really tested me, but it hasn't stopped me dead in my tracks like it would have in years gone by. Looking back, to see where I was when I started therapy four years ago, to when I was taken off the road almost three years ago, to going back to work, to prepping for retirement, to now being away from the job for almost a year, it feels surreal to be where I am now. Coming out of Kelowna there was hope for the future, a hope that waned when I went back to work, that waned further as I struggled to maintain the momentum that I had built. And now, over these last months, it feels like the momentum has come back. Even just a little bit. It's exhausting. It's fucking scary because I know how it feels to lose the momentum and how hard it is to get it to come back. I still don't know how long it will take to work through the years of shit left to work through. I don't know how many more panic attacks I have to fend off, how many more adrenaline dumps are going to leave me winded and exhausted to the core of my being, how many more days I'll struggle to get out of bed or find the energy to walk out the door to do life. But what I do know, is that momentum is a powerful force and once it builds it takes a lot to slow it back down. 

To close, I'll dip back into that same Shinedown song:

Keep lookin' out, not lookin' down, you won't find the answers in the ground

Where will we be twelve months from now?