Balance of Attention and Care

Healing Trauma VS Recovery and Rest VS Mothering

Healing is not a task to be taken lightly. Rewiring your own brain and dissecting your parts can leave you utterly exhausted. Mothering can also do this. Recovery time is needed after “doing the hard work” but what happens when you are a mom and that is also exhausting? What happens if you are a Stay at home mom who, by all cultural standards should be a gleaming beauty of patience, grace and selflessness?

Reality hits and it doesn’t work. And you try to make it work. But it still isn’t quite working because you have been trying to heal your trauma, break cycles, and parent your children according to all the things you have learned, all at the same time. The problem here is the lack of energy. There is nothing left to give if you spend all your free time digging into the sore spots to then heal the wounds.

Sleep and rest and major self care IS part of the balance when you are healing trauma. I have to take care of all my parts. The child parts that have been triggered are front and center. They need to be held as long as they need because they were not held for decades. They need to be held to heal.

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Over the weekend I got very social. I felt good in the beginning energy wise but as I started to get tired I was much more easy to trigger. I had just barely overextended myself but the fact is, I exposed my triggers and I gave my experience room to breathe in the face of other people. This very real trigger opened my heart to feel all the hurt, rejection, misunderstandings from my past in addition to the new stories I was spinning in my head. Truly feeling the hurt that has kept me a small island for over 15 years, I was able to see where the hurt has been coming from and how my body reactions are purely reactionary to any female friends of two or more.

I cried, I held myself. I had flashbacks of panic attacks I forgot about. I spoke my truth to my husband. I slept. I allowed time and silence. I am still allowing time and processing but there is something different. A calm. An openness. An opening to real connection.

Healing takes time and energy. The practice of healing in real time is not an easy pill to take or a book you read and then poof you are better. It is countless books and therapy sessions. It is making friends with your body and truly meeting yourself for the first time. It is confusing and gut wrenchingly awful. It is facing your triggers and allowing your body to feel it. It brings pain to your body but you begin feel the beauty in feeling the pain and growing exponentially from it. It is full body exhausting to heal but it is better than full body resisting. Resisting continues the suffering.

I am going against the cultural norm. I am a stay a home mom who has care for her kids two days a week so she can rest, paint and write. So she can heal. I am unapologetic about this time because this time will save my life and help to make my daughters lives much fuller because of it. I know I am privileged and lucky to have the means to do this. I recognize that but I also recognize I cannot help anyone if I haven’t helped myself first.

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This world is full of hurt. If we heal our own hurts, we can help to heal others. But the trick is, it starts with you. No one will give it to you or fix it for you. The journey is individual but ultimately serves our family healing and ripples out endlessly to our collective healing. That is a pilgrimage I am willing to take. A norm I am willing to break. If I am one voice of many, then all moms are in need of more support, care, and understanding in order to do this work.

With kindness,

Rae