Notes from Four Months of Healing: A List (Manageable for Me, Skimmable for You)

Recovery is 5% capacity, 100% honesty. These are my field notes from the trenches of cPTSD work.

It’s been about four months since I realized my entire life has been one long cope.

I wrote earlier about titration and cPTSD healing in a more eloquent way, but this—this is the honest version of where I am now. Sorry, 8 subscribers for the email blast.

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Some heads-ups for anyone curious about trauma recovery:

1. You will feel your brain healing. Your ears ring, your mind rewires itself, and you’re exhausted all the time. Rest more than you think you need.

2. It gets ugly before it gets better. Old coping mechanisms come back swinging. Ego death feels like being torn apart and trying to stitch yourself back together with glass in your hands.

3. Constant mirror work: Is this survival, or is this authenticity?

4. Memories resurface and start to stitch together. This is both painful and beautiful. You will start appreciating mementos more and stop avoiding them as much.

5. Talking endlessly about the past hasn’t helped me. EMDR can release trapped energy, but sparingly. The focus is the present and the future. For the first time, I feel hope.

6. You’ll be shocked at what you endured—and how hard you fought to keep harmful connections alive.

7. Gentleness is everything. You’ll start feeling your own feelings, not just everyone else’s.

8. As you love yourself, you will lose people.

9. But you’ll also gain people who love the real you.

10. Set realistic expectations. You may only manage 5–10% of what you used to. Healing is long game, not sprint.

11. The knot of anxiety loosens. Confidence returns in strange new places.

12. Read Jung on empaths, archetypes, and the alchemist’s journey. Many with cPTSD are “super empaths.” Boundaries are survival, because we are literally walking superheroes. Psychic. And many want to possess this gift.

13. Read Yung Pueblo’s Trilogy. Your slow, healing brain will thank you.

14. Love yourself. Hard. Louder than you ever have.

15. Eat more than you think you need—your brain is rebuilding.

16. Expect anger early. Rage is earned. You have survived what no one should have. For an incredible amount of time. Find an outlet. Then grief, sadness, and acceptance will follow.

17. NARM builds the scaffolding to live in the present.

18. IFS introduces you to the parts of you that once protected you. In one session, I met my soul—it told me my purpose was to be of service and love. To myself, to my art, to the world. I was a healer, and I didn’t know it.

19. EMDR can re-process specific traumatic memories and ease flashbacks/nightmares. But sparingly, please. Those walls exist for a reason.

20. Eventually, you will love yourself so fucking hard it feels like rebellion. Because no one whose life has been one long cope should end up this resilient, this beautiful.

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Most importantly:

If you’ve made it to the doors of cPTSD therapy…if you’re willing to spend thousands of dollars and walk through the worst pain of your life, it’s probably because the alternative became unbearable. You probably endured a life event that stripped you to the studs.

The avoidance probably stopped working: the drugs, the trauma bonds, the perfectionism, the survivalism. Change became the lesser evil.

Find an outlet. Find a community. Isolation is lethal here.

For me, spirituality cracked open. I began prioritizing friendships, community, connection—things I used to put last. Something bigger than me kept tugging at my gut, and I finally listened. Without that, I don’t know where I’d be. Probably not here.

I’m still hypervigilant and anxious some days. But not all days. And the progress in four months is staggering. I know not everyone’s journey looks like this, and mine is still uphill.

But for the first time, I’m not just surviving. I’m fucking excited to live.