PTSD Coach Online suggests journaling about your problems as a way of coping with them. Seems pretty lame on the surface. I know what my problems are, why would writing about them make a difference? But, in the name of trying everything, I went ahead and took 20 minutes out of my life to write about the most pressing issues I’m dealing with.
You see, I’m struggling to make sense out of a senseless event. One single trauma that has burned me to the bone. I know I won’t fully recover from it, but I have to learn to live with it or it’s going to kill me.
Much to my surprise, I found I did learn something from writing about the traumatic event. I was able to get a better, I believe more realistic, perspective on what happened seeing it on paper in front of me, and I was able to better evaluate my feelings. Maybe that’s not moving mountains, but it is a start to understanding the size of my problems and, perhaps, how to view them in a different light.
Sometimes opening the wound is the only way to get a clear picture of how deep it is and why it won’t heal. When we stop running and face our issues, we start to recognize how much of the problem isn’t just the initial trauma we experienced, but how we allow it to grow and fester in our minds. I don’t know if I will come out on the other side of my problems whole and healed, but I’m sleeping better and I’m not as stressed out as I was. That’s something good.