My Challenge of Writing While Processing Trauma

I haven’t been writing much as of late. This is because EMDR therapy has been more effective, which means trauma is getting healed at a faster rate than any time before. This change happened because I started to actively work on reducing the stress response between sessions, and I believe that this lowered baseline stress makes it so that my body is ready to process more deeply rooted trauma than before. I’m incredibly happy that this has happened since my life has improved a great deal. I’m now much more stable with respect to my relationships, happier and more optimistic about life, and able to complete my work without too much difficulty. If you’re wondering what I changed, I decided to start spending 20 minutes in the morning and evening doing deep diaphragmatic breathing. I’m also working through a workbook on mind-body bridging for anxiety that has helped me control anxiety to a much greater extent. These two changes alongside taking antidepressants have produced a significant change in my quality of life, and as a result, this is the happiest I’ve ever been. 

The flipside to these changes and the more intense EMDR processing is that my sense of self seems to be shifting more rapidly. In particular, trauma has held back aspects of my personality for so long, and now that the trauma is being removed, I’m able to fully be “myself”. In this change, I also find that the topics that interest me change rapidly. What is a groundbreaking idea to me one week becomes something completely obvious within a few days. So what’s ended up happening over the past month is that I’ll start a new essay, make some progress on it, and then the next week comes by and the previous essay seems completely inconsequential and not worth putting out. In fact, this essay you’re reading right now seems like the only piece of writing I can justify releasing at this point in my life just because of how rapidly my mind is changing.

I believe that this will end within a few months, and the significant bulk of my PTSD will have been processed by that point. I’m curious to see who I’ll be then. This whole processing task isn’t changing who I fundamentally am, it’s more revealing who I fundamentally am. My childhood and the trauma that colored it sealed away these aspects of my soul, and I’m not reconnecting with them. All of the best parts of myself, such as my kindness, curiosity, and mental strength have been amplified an the more negative traits such as neuroticism and perfectionism decrease because these weren’t traits that were innately me. In this reconnection with my soul, my views on morality, humanity, and relationships change. What results is an identity that is changing too rapidly to be able to put out any longform content on the nature of the human mind, which is fundamentally what I’m interested in writing about. So I suppose this essay will have to do for now and explain my relative truancy in posting on Unstandard Deviations. It’s not that I don’t want to write, but moreso that I have too much to write about and the ideas just keep getting sexier and more interesting (in my opinion). This will slow down soon - don’t worry. In the meantime, I’ll likely end up writing more self-help type material on trauma recovery.

Much love, thanks for reading.