Responding to Trauma

In my recovery, had I attended the nine-week Peer-to-Peer course, I feel things would've been different, because, "If you name it, you can claim it," and I would've had words and terms to describe what I'd been going through all along.  The Stages of Emotional Response to Trauma are a natural part of the healing process, and you can be in any of the three stages at any time, depending on what you're going through in your life then and how vivid the memory of the trauma is.  When I first got sick, the very symptoms of the illness other people had rubbed me the wrong way because I didn't want to admit I had the same illness.  The denial led to a failed drug holiday.

Adapting to our new reality takes time, and it may not be a natural response; however, if we decide to adapt, rather than expect or want things to continue as they were before, we actually liberate ourselves to have a better life.  Here comes the next stage of emotional response to trauma, where we start to go from reacting to what happened to us by processing it, to proactively dealing with it.

2.  Learning to Cope:

    Anger/Guilt/Resentment

    Recognition

    Grief

We are angry that we got sick; we feel guilty we got sick; we resent that we got sick.  Our self-esteem takes a nosedive.  This is the tendency to internalize the stigma, because most of us who are newly diagnosed and have just gotten out of the hospital aren't aware we have peers who've been in our shoes and traveled this rocky road, often successfully.  Things are kept "hush-hush" as we go back out into the world and interact with people who don't have mental illnesses.

There is a power in a union; NAMI and MHA are advocacy forces to join with in fighting the stigma, as you evolve in your own recovery and find your voice.

Recognition sets in when reality flashes before our eyes and we realize we'll have to manage our condition for the rest of our lives.  Yet medication isn't everything.  It's the foundation, true, for a stable recovery, yet there is so much more to life than popping pills: relationships, for one.

As we learn to cope, grief replaces the rest of our feeling functions.  We get stuck in "what was" instead of "what can be."  When I was diagnosed, I pined for the cheerful, gregarious self; the person who dared to become a disc jockey because she loved music and wanted to express herself.  I went back to the on-air studio for one sad summer, and gave it up because it was too painful to bear the truth: my life had changed, and I had to move on.

Each of us is the expert in our own recovery, and that is why I urge you to write SharePosts talking about your coping techniques or how you healed and what you learned along the way.  As we learn to cope, and indeed, become experts, we enter the third and last stage of emotional response to trauma.