There is a curious thing that happens when we have been in trauma therapy for a long time. We get good at it. After years of constantly working on ourselves, we built solid habits around the things we need for symptom management, self-regulation and trauma processing. We probably developed a habit of constantly tracking our body sensations, emotions, thoughts, impulses and behaviors. We need that to notice dysregulation, more subtle flashback experiences and bad coping behavior. With DID, we probably got into the habit of observing our surroundings very carefully and we have our own system of how to notice amnesia and what might have happened during amnesia. We are constantly checking in with ourselves to see what needs to be changed or improved and should therefore be the topic of our next therapy session.
We need all that to varying degrees for successful trauma therapy. It is also a rather artificial way to control our inside and outside life that is focused on creating interventions for problems. And depending on our trauma and personality we might already have a background of artificially controlling a lot of what we do and feel inside. There comes a time in the healing process when artificial control and this level of awareness and attention is not needed anymore. When symptoms are resolved through trauma processing and life is stable it is time for us to become more normal and more natural.
Normal human beings
Humans are not naturally that aware of themselves. They are not constantly reflecting about their behavior and double checking everything. Especially those who have been considered over-controlled or high-functioning will be surprised to learn that people don’t pause, hold back their natural reaction, check it and then allow it to happen. Normal people might be a whole lot more impulsive, emotionally dysregulated and expressive, and thoughtless than we think. We’ve been held to an incredibly high standard because we have a mental health diagnosis and every behavior we had was treated as if it demanded treatment. Without the symptoms that make this plausible we will notice that we are doing a whole lot more than is necessary and other ‘normal’ people act a lot more natural. It is how they feel alive and like an individual. They don’t have all the filters we have trained ourselves to have. We will live a happier life if we can learn to let go of the most intense filters and learn how to be more natural too. It is not a symptom to feel something or have a normal impulse.
Becoming ourselves
Remember how we trained ourselves not to identify with our inner experiences too much to make it possible to regulate ourselves and our trauma-related emotions? In the integration phase we do the opposite. We inch closer to our feelings, thoughts and impulses. Not to the point where they start to control us but to the point where it feels like this is us. My anger – that is me – being angry with my whole being in different modes of experience (feeling, body sensation, thought…). It is not just something we observe and analyze. It is how we are right now. We slip back into a natural sensation and expression of inner experiences. To make that possible, we need to know that we are not just allowed to do that, we are supposed to. Our experience is who we are and not something we examine and redirect. Being the fullness of our inner experience means feeling fully alive.
Don’t try this before trauma processing. The fullness of a traumatized inner experience feels devastating and not like wanting to stay alive. We only do this when we return to a normal inner experience that we can naturally adopt.
New goals
In this later phase of our recovery, we are on a journey to discover ourselves.
Body sensations
We learn to listen to our body and its sensations and what they are trying to tell us. It will introduce us to formerly dissociated functions like hunger, the need for rest (and not just a break where we do other things) and actually getting tired when it’s dark. Getting used to natural signals of the body sucks at first. They are annoying and it feels weird how often they happen. Learning how to respond to natural sensations of needs through our natural impulses to meet them will make our life a lot easier long-term. We won’t have to observe, track, plan and execute things like food intake anymore. We just eat when we are hungry and we can trust the body that it will tell us what it needs and when to stop. No tracking needed and no more missed meals. It takes a lot of effort, and different effort than we are used to, to meet needs when they become natural sensations. Our attention moves from having to notice the need at all towards meeting them regularly, naturally and in a way that feels right. We lose the mechanical treatment that got us through such a long time when feeling needs was too triggering to manage it.
Emotions
Emotions are not automatically problematic because they are strong. They help to guide us through social situations and they show us the shape of our personality. The things that make us cry or make us angry say something about who we are. If we’ve been numb for emotions or we only know trauma-related vehement emotion then we are in for a surprise. Natural humans use emotion a lot more for communication than we were made to believe when signs of emotions were always considered a topic for therapy. People express them a lot more than we were made to believe and this expression helps other people to interpret their words correctly. This is why we used to not get taken seriously when we spoke but there was no feeling visible. With more safe feelings to feel that don’t immediately trigger old memories, we can experiment with putting more emotion into our expression and people usually respond extremely positively. They might tell us that they can finally get a better feel for us or that we are more present as a person. Other people need a felt sense of our emotions to make sense of us and relationships end up being easier instead of harder. It always felt like emotions make contact even worse but when it is just the normal level of feeling that matches the situation it usually does help and makes everything feel more real.
Thoughts
Most normal people don’t reflect about everything. They are in the moment, experiencing it. Then they reflect later to integrate it more. If you are anything like me, your brain constantly stops between every sequence of action or within a conversation, takes a step back, looks at it from a distance to see if it needs more regulation, if every part is ok or maybe someone wants to contribute. All that while masking that it is happening. These loops are crucial before and during trauma processing. They give us the ability to regulate and co-regulate ourselves quickly and before things get extreme. They also keep us from having a pure, unfiltered experience later in recovery. The loops are not needed anymore. We are usually ok without a need to intervene. We learned to have an incredibly high level of self-awareness and we can slowly dial it down to be more present and closer to the experience. Less brain, more feeling it and taking it in. Nobody in the natural world outside of therapy loops this way so much, specifically because it is not needed for normal life. It tends to get in the way.
Impulses
Chances are that we learned that following impulses is bad. Either we learned that during TraumaTime and we made sure to control our impulses tightly to avoid harm or we learned it in treatment, when our impulsive behaviors were a key problem we had to work on. After trauma processing, the intense trauma-related impulses that seek regulation or escape from trauma will go down (unless you have another problem that includes poor impulse control). What we are left with, is the energy of the life inside of us that wants things. It can feel like a miracle to encounter natural impulses that have their own drive and move us in a certain direction. It doesn’t mean that it is always wise to follow every impulse. They don’t become wise after trauma processing. But they are the expression of life within us that wants something from life and that is so precious I struggle to find words that don’t sound new-agey. Gentle experiments with following natural impulses will further reduce the mental work we have to put into our daily functioning. The impulse to eat will accompany our body sensation of hunger and move us to eat regularly. There is a whole natural system of how humans function when they don’t control everything artificially because they can’t trust themselves! Our healthy inner experiences work together for our good. Those who have used maximum energy to not follow impulses for many years will find a new sense of aliveness in sometimes just doing what they feel like. That can be a new and revolutionary idea and scary at first. It is also very freeing when done safely and we can get better at trusting ourselves with certain impulses without having to lose control at all.
Integration
All of these inner experiences are not meant to become masters of how we function. They were not meant for that, even in ‘normal’ people. We just adopt them as part of who we are instead of casting them out or treating them like slaves who have to obey our control. The more we manage to adopt and integrate these ways of being ourselves the more real and alive we will feel. We are meant to be free. The control we put ourselves through was necessary when the trauma did terrible things to our experience of life. After processing, we are allowed to normalize our level of control and tap into the freedom of being ourselves. You will find that these are integrative steps that need integrative capacity. They are part of a natural development after trauma processing but they are not easy and some people might miss the fact that this is an option. Those who have lived with artificial control over their experiences for a long time and even needed it as an important tool for survival might struggle to notice that there even is an option of becoming more natural. Some of these integrative processes are very complex because they touch on different experiences and outside events that we have to learn to navigate in a new, consistent way. We develop healthy habits we never felt were necessary because we were out of touch with ourselves in some way. When textbooks speak about a ‘phobia of normal life’, they miss how complex the integrative actions are that are needed to return to a natural life that can then become one that looks ‘normal’. It is incredibly challenging to learn to function naturally as a human being.
The standard
I will dare to say this: When working towards the end of therapy we need to learn to hold us at a lower standard than therapy does because that is not the standard that everyone else in the world is using. Natural people are not perfect. They just do stuff and hope it works. They get into conflicts because they misbehaved or their real needs clashed with those of someone else. Natural humans don’t control every aspect of their life and their main focus of attention is not their inner experience. They live in the world that surrounds them and not an inner world. They negotiate life with this world instead of trying to fix everything by negotiating it inside and through self-improvement. We will probably learn that there is a whole lot less that we can control through self-control than we thought once we are outside a therapy room and in the real world. It is a messy place with messy people. We don’t have to meet the highest standards and become saints. Living and feeling real are immense tasks that will keep us busy. Returning to natural functioning is tough and also the path to a much easier life. Our intuition knows how to do life. After processing, we can learn to rely on it and trust ourselves again. Our inner experiences naturally work together to create life that wants something from life.