I'll Drag These Memories Through the Dark Void

This one hits different. It was a just over a year ago that I moved out of the north back to the city, spending my last few days as a member of the RCMP unpacking moving boxes and trying to mentally prepare myself for what was to come. It sure as shit has not been an easy year. Getting into new routines, adjusting to being in a large center again surrounded by constant noise and constant busy. Adjusting to a new therapist and digging through years worth of traumas that could be addressed properly being away from the job. I didn't have to deal with residual stresses of spending time in the office, being in the environment that caused the traumas that needed to be addressed and healed. I did the work. I addressed trauma after trauma, had panic attacks, lost sleep from old nightmares, and it felt like there was tangible progress being made. Unfortunately, it also meant that there was going to be a time where I had to deal with more than visceral trauma. 

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you" - Friedrich Nietzche

I felt like a monster for a long time, all the worst parts of everything that I dealt with started to grab into each and every part of myself. The abyss, the void, the nothingness, places that I had stared into, fallen into, fought so hard to get myself out of. Places where there was nothing but hopelessness and that the only way I thought I could get out of was to die. In four plus years of going through the therapeutic process I had slowly found my way up and out of the dark, or at least so I thought I had. I dealt with panic attacks before hard sessions because I was worried that I was going to tumble back down and even now I have doubts that I would be able to pull myself out again. Unfortunately, there comes a time when venturing into the void, revisiting the abyss, becomes a necessary task. There are monsters in the abyss that cannot be ignored. The monsters that have integrated themselves into the fabric of my life, that have bound themselves to parts of me. I have come to see that there will be no way to move forward without trying to take the light into the abyss. And it scares the ever living shit out of me.

"Stab the body, it bleeds and then it heals. Injure your heart and the wound lasts a life time." When I first saw this quote, the first thing that came to mind was that it solely was meant to address the kind of injury that can arise during a relationship. But as I have progressed through treatment lately I came to realize that the heart is but one part of what makes you whole. When the injury to the heart is more of an injury to the whole, caused by damage to morals, it hurts more than anything I have had to deal with yet. I would gratefully challenge myself to undertake working through hundreds of visceral traumas, recalling sights, smells, sounds, things that are easy to identify and understand how and why they have the impact that they do on daily life. When looking back, the memories that pop up in nightmares, that cause the flashbacks, those ones I can make sense of. I can rationalize with my brain and pick apart the moments that did the damage. The moments that burned into my brain and won't let go. But I can, and have, worked on enough of them that I know how to deal with them now. I have made sense of these moments and uncovered why they hurt me the way they did. It's these other moments, the ones that don't have a hard start and finish, or that aren't easily linked to the things I saw during my 12 years, that are the ones that did more injury than I could imagine. The ones that are in the dark void, that I have find in the dark, that I have to address and fight with, to drag them through the hell that they created. The title of the post, I'll drag these memories through the dark void, comes from a song of the same title, written by Asking Alexandria.

When I first started therapy, going on four years ago now, I never knew that it would be this long before I was done the visceral work. It didn't help that I was still working when I started, and the anxieties around the job were never able to be lessened. I was still burned out, I was a wreck of PTSD, anxiety, depression, suicidality, and all the physical issues that I had too. I couldn't eat properly. I didn't sleep more than a few hours at a time because I couldn't, and when I did manage to sleep it was a barrage of nightmares that woke me right back up. And as I have done the work in therapy, I have been able to make sense of why I was the way I was. Or so I thought was the case, until I delved into EMDR. I had been made aware of moral injuries during my time at Diversified and even talked about them during my last few months of work before retirement when I was going to area detachments to talk about mental health care and things to watch for. Yet, I really didn't have a true grasp of how deeply a moral injury can impact a person. It wasn't something I was considering as part of my trauma healing because it wasn't a direct cause of PTSD and it didn't seem that connected to what was causing me issues. The old saying, ignorance is bliss, sure applies to moral injuries and I wish I could have remained ignorant. Sure, life wasn't truly blissful during this past year after retirement, but it seemed to be getting a little bit easier. Weekly therapy was doing its job, I was working on the big ones and they were getting to be less impactful for me. Then the list of stuck points came out again. That lovely list of things that were big issues that I knew I needed to work on. That fucking list.

When I look back to last year, the first couple times that I did ART, accelerate resolution therapy, it damn near killed me. The panic attacks, the brain melting drain that happened, the sense of doom that accompanied each session because I knew it was going to suck, came to be okay. I knew what to expect and knew that I was going to work through some shit. The sessions didn't get easier, but they felt more productive. I could pinpoint where the traumas started and ended, I could do the work and leave those sessions feeling drained but lighter. A quick trip to dollarama for sugary or salty snacks, depending on how much work I did, then a sense of relief because I knew that the event was predominantly done. I came to expect some nightmares, some tough thoughts, a couple of days with less energy but the rebounds got quicker and I felt like I was accomplishing things. I could talk about the events and not feel the anxiety and panic start to swell. I've come to be able to feel when my adrenaline system is starting to fire. I can identify tension and pain based on where it is in my body and with some lacrosse ball work or an hour with my TENS, the knots release and I feel better. The sessions between the hard work weren't easy by any means, but they helped process what had come up during ART and provided a sense of direction to therapy work, letting me guide the healing to which ever event was next. There was never a sense of pressure, just a sense of slow plodding progress, but moving forward was moving forward. I started feeling like it was tangible successes, like all the pain and the shit was worth dredging up. My journaling wasn't as negative all the time. I could go about life without as much weight on my shoulders. Yet when I sat and started trying to figure out what to add to my story sleeve, nothing felt right. There was a block in place, which I thought would simply let go as I wrote more, walked more, crafted here and there, did more work at school. 

Doing the work has been enough in the past. It has opened doors into parts of my mind that were closed off. It's let me build a little bit of forward momentum and let me feel things again, something that I could never take for granted now. Peering into the void over the past year, that has been the fear that has gripped me, that if I was to fall back into the darkness I would be back to feeling nothing again. And if I was to have to deal with that again I don't know if I would be able to fight my way out. Yet as I have learned over the past months, the void is home to things that cannot be avoided. They have to be dragged through the dark and brought to the light so they can be worked on. Letting them stay in the dark isn't a feasible option because if they do, I'm not really healing. I would be just avoiding, something that I got really skilled at in the years of letting my PTSD get worse. Joys of working with a skilled counselor, she won't let me avoid the darkness. She knows there are demons in there that need to be found, fought with, accepted, and given space to do what they need to do. Which unfortunately means I get to feel all the shit that comes along with them. And they have been letting me have it lately. When the injury isn't just a trauma but damage to the very fibres of my being, the morals and values that make me who I am, and they get damaged, holy fuck does it ever hurt. A pain like nothing I have felt before, and I have felt some shit over the past three years since I really started working on myself. There's no adrenaline buzz coming to help when these memories get dredged up. There's no easily defined start and finish, there's just fucking pain. The kind of pain that sits behind your eyes and makes you wonder when the tears are going to come. The kind of pain that wakes you up at night, not because of a visceral nightmare, but because of an ache that permeates through every part of you. Tension that won't release. Exhaustion that is different than what I'm used to. Just seemingly endless shit.

This hasn't been an easy one to write. It's felt scrambled, mirroring my life lately. Focus and concentration have eluded me. I've sat and stared at the wall, on the edge of tears, trying to make sense of how things got so convoluted. I've looked at myself in the mirror and felt hatred and disgust welling up in ways that haven't happened in a long time. I've been overwhelmed by shame and guilt. This is reality. This is healing. It fucking sucks and it fucking hurts.