The Art of Rolling With The Punches and Post-Traumatic Growth

A Perspective on Post-Traumatic Growth and Everyday Living While Healing From Trauma

We never really know what we’re capable of until we’re in the situation. Sometimes it’s great to still be surprised by yourself, but if you’re someone living with high anxiety, there is nothing worse than the unknown.

Everyones individual experiences with life seem to depend a lot on how they cope with it. No one’s existence is a walk in the park. No one on this planet has escaped suffering of some kind. So the difference between a mentally healthy person and a mentally less healthy one depends a lot on coping skills.

What Are Coping Skills?

Coping skills refer to various ways that people deal with serious emotions or situations. They are also the things we do to keep our emotions regulated and cope with everyday life before our emotions get to be overwhelming, because we put our feelings aside. While coping skills come in many different shapes and sizes, not all of them are healthy.

Sometimes addiction can begin as a coping skill by using substances to deal with overwhelming emotions. However, since the substances don’t lead to any real sort of resolution to a problem, things just keep compounding while the substance use keeps increasing. The same things happen with any kind of addiction, from video games to gambling.

Coping Starts With Self-Care

While it can be difficult to deal with stressful situations, especially with an underlying mental illness, taking care of our own needs can help us prepare. I know it seems like common sense to eat when you feel hungry, but when you have been taught that your needs are not as important as someone else’s, your needs are wrong, or that taking care of yourself is being selfish, you have to put conscious effort into caring for yourself and retraining those thoughts.

I have found that focusing on taking care of myself by getting enough sleep, eating well, and not skipping meals, exercising, ect. Many of the situations that I would find extremely stressful are only moderately stressful. We need food and sleep to feel secure and able to stand up to the world. Only by filling our own basic needs (at the minimum) will we be able to really care for those closest to us.

Setting Healthy Boundaries Is Self-Care

Regardless of what kind of relationship it is important to set healthy boundaries. This is as simple as saying “no” when a coworker asks if you can take on more work, or your boss asks you to come in on a day off. Many of us who have CPTSD or a related disorder have trouble with feelings of guilt and the possibility of conflict. If setting your boundaries in a healthy way causes conflict, then it is the environment you are in and not your boundaries. This is why there is a lot of talk about going “no contact” when people are healing from abusive relationships.

A typical healthy person will hear a person's request for boundaries to be respected and back off. Meanwhile, an unhealthy person will hear this request and attempt to convince the requester that they are being unreasonable. When that doesn’t work, shame. If that doesn’t work, insults. Sometimes it can escalate to violence.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the typical way things go down, and sometimes people need to learn to understand their own boundaries before they can learn to understand yours. We pick up bad behaviors of those around us before we understand how abusive they are and how much pain we’re in, so it is not so easy to just cut toxic relationships out of our lives. Sometimes relationships can change and get better, but always make your safety the number one priority.

Often, we do not recognize that the same things happen in the workplace as well, and abusive bosses can do just as much damage as an abusive romantic partner. Since we are dependent on our bosses for financial security and often continuing our careers, they have leverage over us. It is illegal to manipulate people financially, but that doesn’t mean that toxic bosses don’t do it every day. If a person wants to leave a job because their boss tends to scream at them, but they can’t because they need money, that’s financial abuse. The boss doing the screaming knows they have power overtheir employees, and they know they can abuse their employees because of that power. That is also workplace harassment, and it should be reported to the D.O.L. or applicable agency.

Trusting Your Judgement

A lot of healing from childhood trauma is learning to trust your own judgement again. All of the emotional invalidation, all of the gaslighting, the withholding of affection as punishment, and many other bad behaviors all contribute to a full-grown person feeling like they cannot trust their own feelings or make their own decisions. We are not just healing from times that we felt unsafe, but also desperately searching for ways to undo years of brainwashing that prevent us from choosing and keeping healthy partners, employment, and so many other things. It is because of this that part of learning to adapt also means learning to start trusting your instincts, maybe for the first time.

If you can’t trust yourself, you will never feel secure anywhere. Part of our security is being able to trust that we will react how we need to in the right moments and not freeze or run from conflict, or be weighed down by indecision. It takes a long time of healing to finally get to the place where you can love and trust yourself again, so if you aren’t in this place yet, don’t guilt yourself over it; this is all part of the process.

Regaining trust and love in yourself is also tied to taking back your personal sovereignty. Personal sovereignty is the personal ability to have the final say in what they do with themselves. It is a person's power to say they don’t like pink and will not wear it. It is the power to say that you do not want to work in a job that makes you unhappy and then not work there. It is deciding not to live with people who do not respect you and removing yourself from there. After years and years of people pleasing, personal sovereignty is falling in love with the word “No”.

In Conclusion

It may be harder for those recovering from trauma to live happy and productive lives, but it is possible for us to do so at least to some extent. We have to be more mindful of taking care of ourselves because, unlike “normal” people, we actually forget to do things like eat and bathe. Often, we were not taught healthy coping habits while growing up, and we were taught that our needs are invalid or not as important as others'. A common tendency for people suffering from childhood neglect is to skip regular doctors check ups. Why? Because we didn’t get regular check-ups while we were children, it isn’t part of our routine as adults. For reasons like this, we have to be more conscious of self-care, almost like someone who doesn’t feel pain has to be more careful of hurting themselves.

We never know what we are capable of until we are in a situation, and while this idea is terrifying for those with an anxiety disorder, it is a band-aid that has to be pulled off. Perhaps it needs to be done with care and slowly over time, but change is a necessary part of life.

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The Diary Of A Flopping Fish and any posts or articles published on Diaryofafloppingfish.com are not reviewed by a therapist or medical or mental health professional. Resources are cited, and opinion is opinion. No advice or opinions in any articles replace professional advice from a doctor, therapist, or any other kind of health professional. The author is not a licensed professional of any kind.