Numbness: When you are not feeling things. It’s generally obvious to you that you are not feeling things.
Repression: When you aren’t feeling things and have no idea that you aren’t feeling things. Your brain is creating an invisible trashfire backlog of emotions for you to sort through as soon as you’re healthy enough to do it.
Suppression: Feeling things and put them aside temporarily as you recognise that now isn’t a good time to process them. You fully intend to return to them, and you do.
Compartmentalising: Creating boundaries around the different parts of your life to lessen the effects of one area of your life on another.
Chunking: Taking small parts of something and dealing with the manageable parts instead of the large, unmanageable whole.
Avoidance: When you blank something out with no intention of getting back to it later, because it’s more than you’re able to handle emotionally.
Derealisation: Feeling like your surroundings aren’t real or are distorted. Feeling emotionally disconnected from the things around you.
Depersonalisation: Feeling like your body isn’t real, or like you aren’t existing in it — as if you’ve been numbed, or are a robot.
The hard part: Knowing the difference between these things, applying the helpful ones and unlearning the unhelpful ones.
Daniel says that trauma is a loss of reference points, which is a very neat and quick way to say that trust in what were previously very solid things — your identity, view on authority figures, feelings of comfort and warmth in a home, feeling safe around others — the list goes on — is destroyed. This is why grounding is such a commonly used therapeutic practice — when you’ve lost things you believed were fundamental to the world around you, it’s easy to feel like nothing can be trusted, making reality feel like more of a construct than usual. Turns out this is a very stressul experience, so you ground yourself by counting five things you see, four things you hear, three things you can touch and two things you smell. This gives you smaller, more concrete and immediate things to believe in, which works in the short term. In the medium to long term though, missing those identity markers starts to chafe real fast, so here’s the next thing to remember: no matter how dead or absent you might feel, you are still there and evident through your sickness — in the ways you seek comfort, show anger, cycle patience and love, how you apologise and crave understanding. Sure, your behaviours now might be mostly symptoms, and your symptoms are likely textbook, but the ways you express them are you. The scraps of you-ness are there, and you can look for them and collect them until you start feeling more like a person again — and it is okay if the self you feel after all of this is different from the self you were before.
When people talk about recovery, they talk about “rebuilding” — repairing health, identity, desires, etc. For something to be rebuilt, it has to be broken first. This seems like a pretty insulting idea, because typically the idea of “brokenness” comes with the assumption of dysfunction, that something is wrong with you.
Nothing is wrong with you. Everything you’re expressing — all of the new fears, paranoias, behaviours, coping mechanisms (both healthy and unhealthy) — are completely appropriate responses to what has been done to you. Logical, even.
You prefer the idea of “teleportation” over “rebuilding”.
Teleportation: The process of breaking down matter before reassembling it in a new place.
This is a nice idea — breaking down without the stigma of being broken, being in a new place when recovery is complete. As far as you know, teleportation means dying and creating a new self, and this seems like the most accurate analogy for recovery you’ve found.
Here are your favourite things about Christina, in no particular order.
When you say that you’re afraid she’s going to judge you, she knows when to stay quiet, when to say fun things like “Girl, I’m your therapist. I’m always judging you,” or logical things like, “Judging you helps me know how to treat you. Judgement is not an intrinsically bad thing.” She watches you, of course, and she takes notes and asks you to pause, clarify, elaborate; all without feeling clinical.
She sends worksheets and readings, but she laughs and jokes too. She doesn’t make you feel like therapy is an inherently sad thing. When you cry in front of her, she doesn’t look pitying. She looks directly at you and nods. Sometimes she swears in front of you. When your illness is being particularly sneaky, she says, “Ooh, your brain is being a real asshole to you right now.” Even though you’ve cried in quite a few sessions, you’ve also laughed in every single one. Your meetings are couched within a greater plan of recovery, and she doesn’t just ask about obvious traumas. She asks about things you don’t directly bring up — your family, friends, childhood, sleep, habits, hobbies — and in doing so, helps you understand your whole life and not just the bad parts. She makes you believe there is a life outside your bad parts. No matter how weird or tangled your questions, she has an answer that makes sense. No matter how shameful you think you or your feelings are, she assures you that you’re normal, you aren’t a clinical abnormality, are not beyond help.
For a long time, you have felt that you are treading water by yourself. Sometimes your head dips under and sometimes you have stamina, but it’s always, always tiring, and the risk of drowning is constant.
The therapists before Christina felt like an energy drink or a short rest — something that allowed you to keep treading for another week.
Christina, however, feels like you can finally build a raft.
From the safety of this raft, you could find land, if you wanted to. You could build a boat and explore, enjoying the water and never be afraid of drowning again.
