The Art of Rolling With The Punches

A Persepective On Everyday Living While Healing Form Trauma

We never really know what we’re capable of until we’re in the situation. Sometimes it’s great to still be surprised with yourself, but if you’re someone living with high anxiety there is nothing worse than the unknown.

Everyones individual experiences with life seems to depend a lot on how they cope with it. No one’s existence is a walk in the park. There is no one on this planet that has escaped suffering of some kind. So the difference between a mentally healthy person and a mentally less healthy one depends a lot on coping skills.

What Are Coping Skills?

Coping skills refer to various ways that people deal with serious emotions or situations. They are also the things we do to keep our emotiones regulated and cope with everyday life before our emotions get to be overwhelming because we put our feelings aside. While coping skills come in many different shapes and sizes, not all of them are healthy.

Sometimes addiction can begin as a coping skill by using substances to deal with overwhelming emotions. However, since the substances don’t lead to any real sort of resolution to a problem, things just keep compounding while the substance use keeps increasing. The same things happens with any kind of addiction from video games to gambling.

Coping Starts With Self Care

While it can be difficult to deal with stressful siatuations, especially with an underlying mental illness, taking care of our own needs can help us prepare. I know it seems like common sense to eat when you feel hungry, but when you have been taught that your needs are not as important as someone else’s, your needs are wrong, or taking care of yourself is being selfish, you have to put concious effort into caring for yourself and retraining those thoughts.

I have found that focusing on taking care of myself by getting enough sleep, eating well and not skipping meals, excercising, ect. many of the situation that I would find extremely stressful are only moderate stressful. We need food and sleep in order to feel secure and able to stand up to the world. Only by filling our own basic needs (at the minimum) will we be able to really care for those closest to us.

Setting Healthy Boundaries Is Self Care

Regardless of what kind of relationship it is important to set healthy boundaires. This is as simple as saying “no” when a coworker asks if you can take on more work, or your boss asks you to come in on a day off. Many of us that have CPTSD or a related disorder have trouble with feelings of guilt and the possiblity of conflict. If setting your boundaires in a healthy way causes conflict, then it is the environment you are in and not your boundaires. This is why there is a lot of talk about going “no contact” when people are healing for abusive relationships.

A typical healthy person will hear a persons request for boundaires to be respected and back off. Meanwhile, an unhealthy person will hear this request and attempt to convince the requestor that they are being unreasonable. When that doesn’t work, shame. If that doesn’t work, insults. Sometimes it can escalate to violence.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the typical way things go down, and sometimes people need to learn to understand their own boundaires before they can learn to understand yours. We pick up bad behaviors of those around us before we understand how abusive they are and how much pain we’re in so it is not so easy to just cut toxic relationships out of our lives. Sometimes relationships can change and get better, but always make your safety the number one priority.

Often we do not recognize that the same things happen in the workplace as well, and abusive bosses can do just as much damage as an abusive romantic partner. Since we are dependent on our bosses for financial security, and often continuing our careers, they have leverage over us. It is illegal to manipulate people financially, but that doesn’t mean that toxic bosses don’t do it every day. If a person wants to leave a job because their boss tends to scream at them, but they can’t because they need money that’s financial abuse. The boss doing the screaming knows they have power overtheir employees, and they know they can abuse their employee’s because of that power. That is also workplace harrassment, and it should be reported to the D.O.L., or applicable agency.

Trusting Your Judgement

A lot of healing from childhood trauma is learning to trust your own judgement again. All of the emotional invalidation, all of the gaslighting, the witholding of affection as punishment, and many other bad behaviors all contribute to a full grown person feeling like they cannot trust their own feelings or make their own decisions. We are not just healing from times that we felt unsafe, but also desperately searching for ways to undo years of brainwashing that prevents us from choosing and keeping healthy partners, employment, and so many other things. It is because of this that part of learning to adapt also means learning to start trusting your instincts; maybe for the first time.

If you can’t trust yourself you will never feel secure anywhere. Part of our security is being able to trust that we will react how we need to in the right moments and not freeze or run from conflict, or be weighted down by indecision. It takes a long time of healing to finaly get to the place where you can love and trust yoruself again so if you aren’t in this place yet don’t guilt yourself over it; this is all part of the process.

Regaining trust and love in yourself is also tied to taking back your personal sovereignty. Personal sovereignty is a personal ability to have the final say in what they do with themselves. It is a persons power to say they don’t like pink and will not wear it. It is the power to say that you do not want to work in a job that makes you unhappy and then not working there. It is deciding not to live with people that do not respect you and removing yourself from there. After years and years of people pleasing personal sovereignty is falling in love with the word “No”.

In Conclusion

It may be harder for those recovering from trauma to live happy and productive lives, but it is possible for us to do so at least to some extent. We have to be more mindful on taking care of ourselves because unlike “normal” people, we actually forget to do things like eat and bathe. Often we were not taught healthy coping habits while growing up, and we were taught that our needs are needs are invalid or not as important as anothers. A common tendency for people suffering from childhood neglect is to skip regular doctors check ups. Why? Because we didn’t get regular check ups while we were children so it isn’t part of our routine as adults. For reasons like this, we have to be more concious of self care almost like someone who doesn’t feel pain has to be more careful of hurting themselves.

We never know what we are capable of until we are in a situation, and while this idea is terrifying for those with an anxiety disorder, it is a bandaid that has to be pulled off. Perhaps it needs to be done with care, and slowly over time, but change is a neccesary part of life.