When you have experienced a profoundly difficult event, perhaps an accident, or discovering your partner has been unfaithful. Though it looks to the world like you have recovered and are your normal self, you may remain deeply shaken.
A profound shock can make you feel like life is falling apart. Faced with this you have to find some means of holding yourself together, otherwise you feel you might go crazy or be in danger of further injury. Sometimes you can live with that with out further trouble. But on other occasions the injury flares up unexpectedly and it is as though you go through the shock of it all again.
How do you look after yourself when things like this happen? Perhaps the best you can do is to try to look after your injury, keep the wound clean, as it were, and give it the chance to mend and heal.
But what does healing mean when there has been a traumatic injury? What level of recovery is possible or to be expected?
I don’t think there are predictable answers to those questions. The fact is that it is down to each of us to find the best way of responding that we can. To my mind we are more likely to recover (whatever that means) by staying in touch with the truth of our experience, in this case that we have suffered something terrible and have been injured. The fact is that an event has happened, it cannot be undone, but it may be possible to find a way to live with it. Perhaps even to live well with it.
Sometimes, alone, the demons come out, the doubts, the memories of upsets and injustices torment us. Knowing that you have an injury is healthy if hard, but trying to pretend that there is no injury when there is, puts you at risk of injuring yourself further.
