Feeling The Future

So, the title is slightly misleading. I am writing about feelings and the future though.

Feelings were a big part of my early recovery and progression into a life of wellness. The future is something I've always had anxiety about so I'm going to try and paint a picture starting with this:

Trauma

Something I learned about trauma, while digging through my swirled-up brain place, during my early recovery therapy sessions was this: Trauma happens. It comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes and it's a little, if not a lot, different for each and every one of us. The thing about trauma is that it becomes a big life-devouring monster when we choose not to feel the feelings trauma causes and repress them. We have the ability to do this so we can emotionally function through the incident of trauma itself. But, if we don't take a moment to pause and feel how these incidents make us feel when we reach a point of safety these feelings just sit in that box we pack them away in. They fester and rot and create tremenderous issues in our minds and lives in general. This is where the cliche but ever-true saying comes in:

"We have to feel it to heal it." —Susan David

Basically, to heal and move on from the traumatic things we've pushed down from our pasts we have to take time to let those feelings out. This is very rarely something that feels good. It can feel like a whole-ass nightmare sometimes and you probably aren't going to work through all those feelings the first time you let some of these things to the surface. This makes me remember what someone told me "Living in the past breeds regrets and worrying about the future cultivates anxiety". Those are words full of immense amounts of wisdom. But that thought is missing something crucial, possibly on purpose as to not get people overwhelmed in there present state of mind, but it's something we can't forget.

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And that something is goals. You can't completely shuck off the future like a redheaded stepchild. You'll get overly careless and lose any sort of balance it takes to progress in this life of wellness we're chasing. YOLO is a NONO (at least to an extreme).

However, there is the potential to over-fixate on your goals for the future and drop into that anxiety spaghetti brain we had at the beginning of this publication. We combat that with planning. My analogy here is a ladder. If the steps are too far apart you can't climb it, but if there are smaller steps along the same-sized ladder...it becomes achievable to climb. Our plans and goals have to reflect this. When I was so unhealthy in early recovery that I couldn't walk, everyone wanted to tell me to walk for exercise or go to the gym...I could barely make it to my mailbox. These seemingly simple tasks were steps too far apart on my ladder.

I started doing exercises I could do sitting on the edge of my bed and within a month I was able to walk a mile. See the reflection of what I'm saying there?

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Now this blog has been slightly longer than I wanted but I feel like I got out the points I was trying to make. For me, and many others, true healing didn't happen until we let our trauma walls down and let ourselves feel the blocked-up emotions and you're going to start spinning your wheels if you're void of goals or plan them out poorly.

As always, if you have any questions about anything I've shared here today you can stop into the 217 Recovery Center on Eighth Street in Traverse City or click HERE to see my page. There are ways to contact me there. I hope to hear from you.

Until next time.