17/04/2024
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/iyRtxmn6da7uAMZ9/?
How beautifully written and put, there is unfortunately no time scale for pain,trauma and grief. However therapy’s can help clean up the wound and start to heal, or open it up to sew it up so it’s feels a little safer/more comfortable. I will sit with you, whilst together we remove the sting from the area. X
(I wrote this a number of years ago and long time followers of the page may have already seen it previously but it’s one of my favourite posts and one I feel deserves sharing again)
A question therapists can get asked often is ‘how long will it take (to heal)? And we (the therapists) are often left to explain that we can’t ethically say, we don’t actually know.
Each client is individual, each story is individual, each response to each event in each clients life is individual. We are not linear, life isn’t clear, and none of us know. What may feel better after a couple of sessions for one person may take many sessions with another. It just is. And that is the therapeutic journey. And I’m sorry the answer isn’t clearer.
But then I was thinking about the idea of healing. Do we really ever heal or do we just stop hurting?
If our emotional memory was akin to our physical memory then like our bodies we maybe carry scars, even if we are no longer in pain.
For me the death of my final living and much loved grandparent hit me like a badly broken limb may feel to our body. My cries were loud and frighteningly primal. Now the ache in my heart matches the occasional deep ache I feel in the ankle I once broke. Functioning as it should but the memory is there and aches when it rains. I’m not sure that will change and that’s okay.
The overwhelming heartbreak I experienced when my first obsession dumped me at the tender age of 18 felt like I required a heart bypass at the time. Now (and for many many years) there is no feeling. It is long ago truly healed. Not even a rogue eyelash smarting my eye kind of parallel. Maybe if someone looked closely they may find a beautifully healed scar on my body with his name on but it’s nowhere I can see or feel.
The trauma of my first birth felt like I had experienced a car crash for just over a year. Now I remember the birth with warm neutrality. I know there is a pin or a plate in my emotional body holding the formally broken pieces together. It’s there but it gives me no pain. It doesn’t even itch even though the scar is emotionally proud in its rightful place on the body of my memories.
The bitterness of lost friendships years ago are a selection of healed papercuts. God they hurt deeply with such a sting at the time but now...no pain, just knowledge they occurred. Look at the small faint scars....
The loss of two pregnancies are carried with me everyday like a bruised bone or a previously torn ligament. The emotional ache is there and a couple of times a year it hurts more and tears spill. These memories have reached a plateau and will never feel utterly terrible again but will never fully heal to numbness or nothing. I carry those occasionally weeping but not infected scars and that’s okay.
And if we deny the uncomfortable, hurtful or traumatic experiences what happens? More often than not these suppressed emotions will present as physical pain or discomfort anyway. The suppressed anger may present as an aching liver or a tense jaw, the suppressed heartache as heartburn that no amount of gaviscon will ease other than superficially, the denied shame as menstrual difficulties, the denied guilt as shoulder tension.....that’s why it can be good to talk....our bodies reveal our emotions like scrapbooks of our personal history.
So as our physical body collects knicks, bruises, scars, tumours, growths and wounds so does our emotional ‘body’ too. We will never heal to levels of perfect smooth nothingness like our baby skin. We are too far into our experiences to go back. We are the result of our battles, our traumas, our losses.
Know that some of our emotional wounds will heal brilliantly though and we will be utterly fine and function beautifully but a scar or a pin to secure the formally broken parts will remain to remind us of the experience.
How long the healed scar will take to appear though I can’t say as I am not in your skin. How long the pin will take to integrate I cannot say.
But I will sit with you and help you clean and dress your wounds....that’s all I can promise to try and do.
Lori x
