Choose Your Suffering

The past months have not been easy ones, digging deep into moral injuries and sanctuary traumas that have been underlying so many of the issues that developed over the years of my policing career. I never really knew how those events that seemed so minor would have such lasting impacts because truth be told, up until my time in Kelowna I didn't even know what a moral injury was. Sanctuary trauma didn't make sense because I had no idea of what the concept was or how it would come to develop. Working on these events has been worse than the visceral trauma work because those major events have an easily identified beginning, middle, and end. Twelve plus years of traumas were not by any means easy to work through, but with each one that I worked through the impact of the session seemed to lessen. Sure, it would knock me on my ass for a day or two, kick up some shitty nightmares but then I could work my way back into the routine of life. I would trade one or two days of pain for weeks of calm because it has been so many years without any kind of calmness. To say that I couldn't remember a time when life was calm is a harsh reality check but as the heavy traumas got processed I started to feel like there was a means to an end. Like the hours of shit that I continued to put myself through were working because I could go places without a sense of panic, or I could have weeks of decent sleeps and not fight myself to go to bed or drag myself into the world again. 

Then after almost a year of weekly appointments, the big traumas were seemingly done. I could sit and remember those events and not feel the overwhelming dread that was a hallmark of those memories. It was a weird moment, to sit with these memories and feel them as a human being. I could feel all the things that I wasn't able to, or allowed to in the moments when they had happened because my job was to be a fucking robot. To see all these fucked up things and just deal with it. Taking time to attach real emotions to emotional events is healing in a way that is difficult to quantify or explain because it is such an intense process. To look at an event that happened 12 years ago and sit with it. To play it out, to let it run in my mind and let the moments have their time, to see what needed to be seen and processed. To feel human in those moments, even many years after the fact, was unnerving, overwhelming, intense, and eventually freeing. I can feel the adrenaline system firing now, I can tell when it's just adrenaline tingles versus deep anxiety tingles that preclude a panic attack, I know when the blackness is creeping in and what is causing it, and how I can handle those moments. The more time I spent working through those moments, the better I got at letting myself feel the emotions that I couldn't feel for so many years before. And wouldn't you know it, the more you can feel in the safety of therapy, the more you can feel and process normally outside of therapy too, which then makes being a stable parent easier. Which then helps everything else feel more balanced because then the moments can be enjoyed. When things were getting out of balance I felt that I was able to recover them, to keep myself within my window of tolerance. Look at me, remembering shit that I've been exposed to for three years. It's almost like hundreds of hours of therapy are paying off...

But these last weeks, months, have really been testing everything. My last time writing was the concern about feeling like backsliding, or being stuck, but I'm starting to see that its not stuck, its not backsliding, its a new level of trauma that has been unlocked that has to be worked on now. And God damn does it fucking suck. The first time I sat down to try and get some direction of where to take the healing process with some EMDR I could actually feel the anxiety ramping up but without any adrenaline alongside it. It was truly terrifying sitting and feeling it building because once it seemed to peak there was no crash. If anything I felt comfortable, like I was coming back home in a fucked up way. The comfortable feeling quickly went away when I started to realize just how fucked up I was for so long. The hardest part of that feeling was that there was no means of tempering it down because it didn't have a peak like the adrenaline fueled anxiety did. It was like the house was on fire again, like it had been slowly smouldering behind the walls in the insulation, waiting for its opportunity to find a small pinhole that allowed the oxygen in and let it get bigger. Once that oxygen gets to it, there's really no slowing that fucker down. Sitting there, feeling the flames start to grow was a sobering look at how my life was for so many years. How the fuck did I survive a house that was burned to the ground for so long? It really is no wonder that I was literally in survival mode for so long that I had no iron left in my blood, that I would go into the black so fast and so hard that I was biting holes in my lower lip, that I couldn't handle the thought of another day going through what I was going through. One of the hardest parts looking back is seeing how everything was burning down around me and I knew it was happening, yet I still just kept putting the girls and Kristen through hell. The calmest place I could find was on shift driving from call to call, it was madness waiting for each call to come in, then the adrenaline would hit and push me over the edge and I would crash down after in a self-hating mess. So now as I am working through these deeply seated traumas, the ones that don't seem to have an easy beginning, middle, and even end, it has been a lot harder to process because these wounds are not ones that can be addressed easily. Feeling these old anxieties, feeling the stress guts flare up, fighting myself to sleep and wake up normally, almost crippling tension, feeling the fire flaring up again is terrifying. I know that I have the skills to keep the house from burning to the ground, but I also know how much work this is going to be. Feeling the old symptoms, being quick to anger, quick to want to shut down, quick to have to find places to hide away from the world, are unpleasant reminders of how bad things used to be and how I spent my days trying to live. And it wasn't really living at all.

As I sit here now, four years removed from starting therapy for the first time, three and a half years from working my last regular shift, just over a year since I pulled the pin and walked away from the job that was responsible for fucking me up so much, and looking back it is insane to see how far I have come. It is in these moments, when I stop for a little bit and take stock of where things are, that I cannot really believe how much work I have done. Going through fathers day last week, spending time being able to feel the love from my girls and enjoying those moments reminds me of how far things have come in the best kind of way. One of the things I have done through the past few years has been to collect quotes, to try and force myself to slow down and appreciate the moments because once they are gone they are gone. It's not an easy thing to do when you spend so many years trying to avoid all the moments.

One of the recent quotes I found that really explains the struggles with depression and anxiety

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality - Seneca

Choosing how to suffer becomes even more paramount as I have learned. I can live in my head and suffer, or I can drag the pain out, let it make me suffer then let it have its place without giving it last power. It's not an easy process and it takes significant work. It's taking advantage of little moments. It's being present. It's self care. It's trying to be consistent but also not feeling bad about having to take days for myself. I've learned that routines can be really helpful. Like sleeping on a real schedule. And going to get snacks after every therapy session. And doing things for myself that bring peace. Like beading, or paint by numbers. Or wandering the library with the girls to find books for all of us to read. And rewatching old shows and movies because they keep the anxiety down. 

Suffering is inevitable. How you suffer, as I have learned, is not pre-determined.