Have you ever asked for help healing?

Where did you even start? We start with awareness, every single time. And every single time awareness has the power to stop us in our tracks.

I’ve asked for help to heal physically, and been told that my symptoms are not urgent enough, and that I must wait… then when the help arrives my needs are too complex and that the wait must continue to wait in a longer line for a more specialized specialist. This made me more aware of my needs and more aware that they were not being met.

I’ve asked for help to heal emotionally, but am blocked by my lack of emotional intelligence and my conditioned trauma responses, making my emotional needs complex, and therefore I was unable to find a suitable, and affordable solution in a timely manner. This process made me very aware of my inadequacies when I no longer had the coping skills

That left me with this sense of abandonment, I was sick but told to wait. But waiting with abandonment trauma and compounding symptoms came to a stress point within me that said…

“I have to figure out what I CAN do right now”

What don’t I know?

What am I missing?

What do I need to let go of to make space for healing?

What areas or experiences in my life did my circumstances alter/ drastically differ from the spectrum of normal?

What did those different experiences give me that I utilize as part of my skill set today?

Are those skills still healthy and helping me achieve goals?

Have you ever had to defend what is best for you and your body from a position of vulnerability and awareness with the real risk of supports that you rely on for survival being removed?

This has been my life for 3 years since I began asking for help.

Along the way I have asked and answered these questions for myself, found what I CAN do now, what I was “missing”. I did all of that deep work to bring me to where I am in my healing journey today.

This has been a battle FOR my life, and it has touched every layer, and utilized every survival skill I own.

What I would like from those who are fortunate enough to not experience the need to heal… is to be kinder to those who choose it. It is a confusing place to be when you have no choice but to access support that abuses you in the most traumatic of ways. The systems, supports and relationships we access are not trauma informed in the beginning stages of our healing- because in the beginning we aren’t asking the right questions, because we are often not aware of the depth of the issues we are facing; or why we are facing them.

Advocating for yourself is currently noted as deviant, selfish, and the public are doing an excellent job of highlighting how society treats people who advocate for themselves in ways that help them hold their personal values when it is outside of their version of “normal”.

Having integrity for yourself is punished, openly and often these days. People are being discriminated against openly for private medical decisions. Although it is more prominent and noticeable as we watch the events of the world support this nonsense of segregation and discrimination it is just highlighting what anyone accessing care has to endure.

People like to target people who are healing with all kinds of abusive behaviours or even just intentionally insensitive ones. They go as far as emotional and verbal abuse in simple conversation by refusing to come away from their own fixed mindset about your choices, that they have not taken the time to understand. The emotional landscape of support is riddled with people who are very loud about their fixed mindset, especially around emotionally sensitive topics that often contribute to re-traumatization in your process of healing.

They will try to sabotage your success with judgement, and for the first few stages of your healing they may even nearly succeed if you aren’t fully aware of your mindset.

In the beginning it is so easy to slip backwards, and with practice over time, you slip less and try to fall forward…. but it sucks in the beginning.

It’s easy to spiral a bit when someone disintegrates your growth; and is ignorant to your values, for a moment you are snapped back into a trauma response cycle. With practice you know that authenticity is where you are trying to grow and learn from. Part of growth is becoming aware that your triggers will likely always be there for you as you continue to grow, so learning how to embrace your authentic whole perfectly imperfect self will help the process.

Flaw finding has always been a way to hold people in shame for themselves, their urges, or any other thing someone gets ridiculed for in society now. Being aware of yourself helps you understand and manage your own perceived inadequacies, because we all have them.

Even though there will be criticism, don’t fear it enough to let it stop you from making the best choice for you; move forward with your authentic self. Turn that fear into the cue for you to stand taller in your authenticity and love for yourself and your journey. This is the work.

Face the fear. Practice that. Practice choosing healing no matter what, until your instinct in fear is to practice growth. That is the path to post traumatic growth my friends, and that is what I am here for.

Choosing to find healing means choosing to be aware of your so called flaws, to learn from them, choosing to grow, and ultimately choosing to become aware of all of the ways that you have contributed to your current state.

Awareness is a hard thing to practice, and the first dive into awareness can be devastating to those who are silently, secretly, battling the long term side affects of coping in a life with unresolved trauma like I was.

Awareness is a prickly bitch for everyone at first… but can quickly turn into a spiral pattern for those of us who already have those programs installed in our brains.

Awareness that you are living in a full blown trauma response cycle doesn’t exactly bring about feelings of safety.

This is where we most often get lost in some sort of emotional spiral. We become aware- then we need to change our 3.5 decades or so of neurological processing in 24-36 hours or we have somehow failed at existing.

Oh… that’s just me… lol??

I spiralled HARD when I became fully self aware of how I was doing the whole self -fulfilling prophecy thing on my life; and not in the good way. Realizing that you have been living textbook trauma responses as an underlying program; and that was why my body was screaming at me to heal was a hard thing to come to terms with. Facing the consequences of your own actions, and making changes for better results is the goal. Knowing that growth is the goal settles the need to “win” and moves forward with the goal of understanding and fulfilling your own needs.

Then once you are in the already vulnerable position of asking for help you are asked to dig even deeper for answers to problems you just became aware of. It is a double down for awareness, and it feels like a giant slap in the face.

The awareness that your need for help is real and exists for you to safely navigate the present.

That is a challenging line for people to walk, made more complex by pre existing traumatic experiences that play a part in emotional development.

For me, this happened very quickly when I discovered the trauma link. The observation of my felt experiences led me to trauma, every single time.

Then I came to the realization that my brain bee-lines for trauma responses… every single time.

Whoah.

Wait.

What…. Holy shit that ALL needs to go was my initial reaction.

How do I get trauma out of every part of my life as quickly as possible without causing any further harm to my very bomb-like central nervous system. I was finding that I was coping-out in the areas that I valued the most.

As I tootled along collecting information, knowledge and hard lessons to gather wisdom

I became the observer of my own behaviours and I practiced it for a painfully long time to heal the trauma connections as they surfaced.

I noticed the trauma link all over my life.

I felt like I had little fires of trauma response fuelled emotional processing in very important pockets of my life. Some areas felt like those little fires had turned into hectares of energy being burned… when you do the forensics beneath those fires you find that the truth about your emotional processing is embedded by your earlier experiences and whether your whole body needs were met, mine seldom were.

For people who’ve repeatedly experienced not having their needs met; it often turns into not understanding how to meet our own needs.

And, of course it does.

When we learn that our needs can’t or won’t be met we learn how to cope-out with our unmet needs remaining unmet, or we find things to replace the “need” like emotional eating disorders, addictions and cognitive thought processing patterns like ocd.

We cope-out of feeling feelings; when the only way to heal is through allowing space to understand the unmet need within yourself, then taking even more time, energy and space to move through “ I don’t know, I can’t” and answer as though you can… maybe just not yet.

Resist the urge to cope and replace it with a curiosity for leaning more into the realm of self-discovery.

I asked for help a hundred times before I came to the realization that I was the one I was searching for. That I am the one that I needed to understand, and love first to make the changes I dreamed of become the life I am living. Now as a practice, I check in with myself first, meet my own needs and then ask for help falling forward.

-B.💋