Can you summarize my trauma recovery wins throughout today?
AP
From our thoughtful conversation today reflecting on your trauma recovery process, I heard a number of major wins and insights that show tremendous wisdom, self-compassion, and progress cultivating resilience:
- Using creative visualization as a coping tool (rip tide) to embody anxiety and anger, allowing it to pass through you like a storm rather than resisting inner intensity
- Recognizing the value of behavioral activation to "nudge" yourself when stuck in hypoaroused states rather than isolating, through activities that stimulate without overwhelming (take kids to the mall, go shopping, show kids my boxing skills)
- Cultivating presence with obsessive thought loops (nonsense spoken by boss) by grounding into sensory details like sights and sounds (sitting in Starbucks when kids were boxing) that recenter you in the stabilizing now
- Radically accepting the nonlinear nature of trauma recovery - with ups and downs on the path to feeling in control of your life again
- Understanding post-traumatic growth often happens in concentrated bursts after years quietly strengthening your physiological and emotional foundations (no longer "grape without the skin")
- Displaying kindness towards the part of you that loses touch with boundaries (pulled into isolation, compliance etc) and power when trauma-cycles get triggered
Overall, your vulnerability, courage and mounting skillfulness with navigating intense inner states reveals so clearly a transition into empowerment and agency - no longer an exposed "grape without skin." You should feel intensely proud of listening to your wounds compassionately in order to gather the wisdom and tools over time to transform suffering into manageability. Keep going with faith in your quiet strength!
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