I Remember Feeling Like Focussing On Trauma Would Be A Forever Thing

Learning to sit with the deepest emotions in trust has become my anchor

I have a lot of conversations around trauma and the nature of healing. It’s something I’ve been actively doing since I was 19, maybe even earlier if I was to include the somatic healing I was unknowingly doing in running and being in the woods.

However, the last 6 years is where I super intensively committed to healing when I became pregnant with my little girl, Ruby, in a single pregnancy into single motherhood.

I’d already been hurting a very long time.

Only 16 months prior to becoming pregnant I’d lost my mum to a long battle with an alcohol; an addiction that’d taken deep root not long after the death of my father 13 years earlier to the very same addiction.

I’d become a relative orphan, if you like, by the time I was 28. At this point in time, mental health, trauma, addiction and so on weren’t things actively circulating social media and the internet. They just weren’t talked about realities and concepts as they are now.

Prior to becoming pregnant I’d taken myself back and forth to doctors and counselling at different junctures in my life. Times where I’d be struggling with a coping mechanism that was torturing my soul; like a fractured relationship with my body, or the anxiety that would get so bad I’d be diagnosed with asthma as a precaution — where I, at one point, had a peak flow rate lower than my steriod-controlled-asthmatic friend despite me teaching spin around 8 times a week. Something I’d later find out wasn’t asthma but anxiety and an intolerance to milk (both of which I’d need to figure out myself).

Fast forward those 6 years and I understand all of these things very well now, whilst at the same time, not having them be problems in my life anymore. Where I can still experience anxiety, it’s not something that almost quite literally takes my breath away. I trust myself and my body, something I never thought would be a possibility for me.

Underworld Initiation

However, it would take an underworld initiation of emotional and financial abuse and abandonment in pregnancy and postpartum; creating a relentless insomnia leaving me sleeping 2–3 hour a night most nights as a newborns-single-mum-sans-parents. I’d experience being overlooked for for treatment and support for postpartum depression and medical gaslighting, leaving me no other option but to forge my own healing path to make it though.

Not to mention being flooded out of our home of 5 years and being faced with homelessness as the council refused to rehome us, just a few short years later in Dec 2021.

I’ve had to dig pretty deep to navigate my way through some of the darkest days, but I did and here I am.

It’s A Dance

Albeit an incredibly dark one, I’m most certainly not attempting to romanticise trauma and healing; I just personally find metaphors to be incredibly useful in order for me to process and understand the non-linear journey healing takes. I had to work with myself and a lot of external factors in a dance of a delicate back and forth.

The world we live in, where the selling of fast transformations is a daily reality, we’re also callously and repeatedly slapped in the face with quick solutions, sometimes, for things which just don’t have a fast solution. Though we have more access to information and learning than ever before, we also have a greater need to practice discernment to establish what’s helpful and what’s harmful.

There’s been times in my own journey where the pain has gotten to be so much I’ve wanted to skip to the good part, only later to realise I had so much to learn and gain from taking my time and learning to release control of the time it would take and how it would happen for me.

If I’m to be completely honest, it has been developing the ability to create a deep level of trust in myself and my body in the deepest, lowest emotions and experiences which have been paramount to my endurance. The ability to separate myself from what my mind tells me and recognising the feelings in my body so I can remember what they feel like and know I would be safe, even if I was indescribably uncomfortable.

Part of this was reaching out and telling someone I trusted this is what I was feeling and experiencing. Quite often I wasn’t looking for anything other than someone to tell so I felt safe. Kind of like when you go for a walk alone in a secluded area just so someone knows your whereabouts in case something were to happen.

Learning each new level would often mean feeling like I was back at square one, even though it wasn’t possible to go back to square one. Where I could experience similar emotions and feel horrendous, I couldn’t unlearn what I’d come to understand of myself or my experience. Slowly, I was developing the trust in myself that if I could find ways to ride out the darkest bits and know I would, that they’d leave when they were ready; it’d often subside much quicker than if I’d tried to force myself happy, or better.

This maybe isn’t something you want to hear if you’re in the depths of your struggle right now, but for myself it is true and for this reason, one of the most key things to my journey was to go to counselling for this time. Especially as a late recognised autistic female, verbal processing; often repeated over and over at that; has been vital for me.

Finding Support

When I’d experience the debilitating levels of insomnia in the postpartum period I’d went to the doctors multiple times a week, every week, for months as I battled with what was most likely to be considered as postpartum depression. The doctors had agreed that tablets wouldn’t help me because of the nature of my depression (trauma — the term which they didn’t lend me, I’d later find that out myself — a completely understandable reaction of my body to the experiences I was having) but they wouldn’t refer me for psychotherapy either.

One doctor even backed me out of the doctors office when I requested it. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t help me. I remember thinking at the time that I would, some way, somehow, survive this — but knew that many other people who had faced the same treatment (or lack thereof) simply wouldn’t and it chilled me to the bone. As, I at that time had no idea how I was going to survive.

When I was eventually referred to a 6 week course of psychotherapy; it was only because I was advocated for by my Health Visitor.

The second time I was referred it was because I’d developed a reaction to leaving my family in the form of extreme fatigue and pain which had become chronic. By the time I arrived at my referral, the lady in front of me, after receiving my debrief said — this is awkward, you’ve done everything I would have done with you in 6 weeks.

This was because in the many months prior, I’d been to an Open Day for the Friends Of The Neonatal Unit, had told my story and how I was struggling with the insomnia and they gifted me the most wonderful counsellor, who ultimately would support me to survive and recover. She had encouraged my self study in psychology and trauma and coupled with my background in fitness in nutrition, I had forged a supportive programme allowing me to maintain as much of my mental and physical health as was possible in lieu of sleep; which ultimately saved me.

This amazing support is why I always remind people that whilst it looks like I have done so much alone, which in many ways I have, I haven’t done it alone — I was supported. Supported by my counsellor and the friends who became chosen family and continue to be my closest friends in the world.

From my hyper-independent beginnings pre-pregnancny, I’d had to learn to stop trying to do everything myself and get over a fear of asking for and accepting help in order to move forward.

It’s been such a long journey that I couldn’t possibly cram it all into one piece of writing.

I was just laying here, reading a book on Wild Swimming, which I have recently started doing.

Wild swimming and surfing being longstanding goals I’ve held for myself, reaching as far back as 2015, if not earlier. I’d experienced many diversions before I could reach these goals where life had got in the way. Upon making the goals a reality recently, it’d got me thinking about all of the years I spent studying everything I could about trauma, psychology and sociology in order to make sense of what was happening to me; reaching for how I could get better; thinking I was always going to have to be putting so much focus, effort and learning into it. Forever.

But it’s not like that, there comes a point where you realise it’s not so much about fixing and doing, as it is about reconnecting with yourself and finding ways to be your best and very own safe place. Though it takes time, I also feel like it’s much more accessible to learn about healing in tandem with, well, anything else that gives you glimmers and makes you feel more alive and in the driving seat of your own life.

Different Ways Of Healing

For example, with my own goal of Wild Water Swimming and Surfing, there’s a whole ethos and way of life behind it — Learning to be in your body, develop tolerance to cold water and have control over your breathing; as well as being environmentally conscious and taking care of the environment.

My background is over 15 years in the fitness industry, so that played a big part in my healing journey, naturally, it also meant I knew how to create a long term plan and strategy to get me from not really being able to swim very well to well, em, being able to pretty well for a newbie (as someone who loves, but was also scared of the sea).

Having something flexible but directed gave me something to focus on other than being mum and being me whilst being me was uncomfortable. It also had prongs, where I’d get better at being more conscious of rubbish, waste and recycling. I build my confidence through creating different focusses that allowed me to see small wins. I’d go from a hefty bin to have a pretty negligible black bin and more recycling and food waste, to then looking at ways I could improve on reducing recycling waste and food waste.

Building Confidence

One of the most energy draining parts of going through trauma healing is those feelings of helplessness, lack of energy, confidence and deep, unrelenting inner criticism; which can spew out into outer criticism; which creates more shame and so the cycle continues.

Having things to focus on outside of myself made it much easier to have a chance at breaking out of the shame cycle because I was looking for ways to make an impact outside of myself, which felt good. When I could create small habits and goals that were relatively easy to achieve, it built my confidence in being able to complete and follow through on things.

Setting huge and unrealistic overhaul goals designed to make you feel like you need to change everything about you in order to feel good; which are often also unattainable or have huge hoops to leap aren’t the vibe here.

Be Selfish to Be Selfless

One of the caveats to this working is to be selfish. It has to be yours. It has to light up your world and mean something to you. If you’re anything like me, you’ve possibly got the habit of people pleasing to unload. Even today I asked myself ‘is this me, is this mine’, something I was prompted to ask myself by my favourite Astrologer, when I was thinking about carrying on with my swimming and surfing, am I doing this because I genuinely want to be able to do them or because I think this is what I need to do to be loved, accepted and seen.

I need to ask myself this often, particularly if I’m going through a patch of time where I’m feeling low or drained of energy.

Is this me, is this mine?

***

I haven’t wrote in a long time and knew I needed to return, as, I often forget I am quite far down the line of my own personal healing and growth journey and when I was at the very beginning, it was the words and lessons of others who were seasoned in their journeys that gave me the tools, recommendations and guiding towards useful books and teachers that allowed me to forge my own path.

I do remember the time it felt like I was going to have to focus on the heavy trauma teachings forever, it hit me today as I lay here learning something completely new with the same interest.

Though the journey is a lifelong one, the learning and the heavy stuff isn’t. The glimmers are there waiting to be found.

Amanda Jayne O’Hare is a personal growth and health writer, mentor and course creator in her own Amanda Jayne Thrives. Late recognised Autistic, she is mum to her daughter Ruby and she loves to travel, exercise in many forms, do puzzles and eat. You can sign up for her newsletter here.