So you think to yourself how much more ? How much longer ? Your brain doesn’t work properly because you’re tired, and you’re wired from the anxiety caused by the nightmare. Your trauma response is to freeze, your brain shuts down, you can’t think. You want to be creative, to write, to feel, but your system just shuts down . So you have to work to get it up and running again. Call Rape Crisis, contact your therapist. Do the work yourself, the stuff you know works. And you’re so tired. You feel useless because you thought you were through the worst of it and then the nightmares started again. It doesn’t matter that you know why, or that you are moving forward and getting rid of more stuff stored in your system, which needs to reveal itself. The monotony and relentless nature of the dreams start to make you feel like giving up. Inside you in that place where you normally feel joy, wonder and playfulness grows a feeling of being crushed, and you start to think about suicide, you need the dreams to stop. You want the pain to stop. You are aware that all this trauma is too much for you , but you have no choice to deal with it, because you were spared and survived what you were not supposed to. You love life, you have a daughter you adore and you’re not going to do the job for those bastards who did this to you. You have zero control over your dream life, and if you trust as you have before, you know these dreams come to bring you the truth , which always sets you free. But this is no consolation when the dreams you are having are beyond any horror film imaginable. You cannot share them with anyone except a professional who is trained, who knows about the kind of abuse that happens in organised child abuse. You do not want to traumatise anyone and sharing the nature of these dreams would do just that. So you have to reach out to talk to someone who can help, and really you are just too exhausted to do that. Besides you have no words. You feel choked by the whole experience, as we know this kind of trauma is beyond words. But you have to push yourself to do this, because if you don’t you will stay in the trauma response for longer. Sharing will bring tears and crying is release, so absolutely necessary. Despite the tiredness the best thing to do is go running, always. Running is a kind of mastery over the body that was so powerless. It is a meditation with yourself, a commune within which heals. Your rage is fired up when you move forward with sweat and speed, you feel connected again. You feel powerful, in yourself, in your body. Come on you tell yourself as you run faster, the faster the better. Your aim is to get grounded again and after the run you will be closer to that state. You huddle within yourself to tell yourself you are safe, the dreams leave you with fear and dread and you are not used to being back here. It’s old territory now, so it feels really uncomfortable. Not like you at all. You feel boring, you are bored this keeps happening which is not being kind to yourself. Telling yourself you are boring creates shame, a feeling of being less than and that’s definitely not where you live anymore. But the combination of tiredness and anxiety wear you down to feeling like this. You bring in self talk to help, parenting yourself with loving words and actions. The main block in all of this is fear. Fear you will go to sleep tonight and have another nightmare. But fear is not the place you live anymore, so somehow you have to turn it and come back to trust. That’s what you have to do. Trust, hope and love. That place where you live now. The nightmares make you revisit the old stuff, the old horror. That’s ok you can climb out, you do and you will. For those of us who live with Complex PTSD we have to work hard to stay alive sometimes, really hard. But in the good times life feels like flying. You know how wonderful the flying is, you’ve had a lot of days flying. You will have a lot more days, living the freedom you worked so hard for. It’s ok. Keep it in the day. You got this, you always do. In the end the relationship you have created with yourself will sustain you through the pain of the dreams. You trust this relationship, it works, so there is hope after all. You have all those years of experience of surviving and thriving through the tough times in this relationship with yourself, so count on that. It is your proven source of power. Hold on to this, you will not let yourself down.
This is how we talk to ourselves, this is how we deal, this is how we live with the suffering. This is how we come through.
