If you had asked me three years ago...hell, even a year ago, what my end goal to therapy and process was, I would have told you that I wanted to be healed. I wanted to be over my abuse. This had been my end goal since I started therapy in 2008. You see, I had assumed that going to therapy (or counseling, if you will) was like going to the doctor for treatment: that after I had done the right number of session and went through the right process, I would be healed. I would be "over it."
This kind of mindset led to a lot of frustration. I would find myself being triggered in various situations, then punishing myself for my reactions and feelings. That mindset seems so foreign to me now, but back then it was the status quo. I believed that this is how other survivors were and that I wasn't doing enough to make myself "get over" my abuse. I was convinced that if I just took the right steps: read the right book, listened to the right therapists, wrote the right words, that I would become healed and I would finally be like "normal" people. That is, I would be like those who had never been abused.
But that's not what happened. Wounds of the mind are not as easy to heal as wounds of the body. Bodily wounds have a process: clean the wound, bandage it, and wait. Sometimes you change the dressing, but the healing comes naturally. The body does what it needs to. But the mind doesn't heal like the body. You don't just dress it and wait. Instead, the mind builds mechanisms in order to protect itself. It's like being burned by hot metal. After being burned, you're more aware of how hot the metal and take extra precautions. You may jerk your hand back prematurely, wary of your ability to handle the stove or the toaster.
That's what the mind does. It takes the circumstances of the abuse and applies it to any similar situation. Hence being triggered. My husband's hair falls like my brother's: trigger. I feel the same pleasure my body used to feel: trigger. An authority figure puts me in the same power dynamics of my childhood: trigger. The task then becomes, for me, how to undo those defenses and coping with the situation, rather than letting my mental defenses do their job--something I'm still working on. Because, if I submit to my triggers, it just reinforces all the power my abuse has lorded over me.
