It's like anything new,
@Mallaky - there are times when its going to be smooth, even good, and times when its going to be a struggle. I think it's really valuable for people to know that they aren't 'supposed' to just feel better on a kind of consistent, easy path.
I like the cleaning out the closet analogy. You know, when you have a closet that has become full of all the piled up things going back years? And when it's just sitting behind the closed door, you can kind of forget its there. But it starts to bug you. And so you decide to tackle cleaning out the closet.
In order to do that, the first thing is, it all needs to come out. This makes a really, really huge mess. You wish you had never decided to do this in the first place. You are tempted to just re-organize it slightly and shove it all back in there.
But if you go at it, and really open every box, and shred the things that need shredding, and clean off the nice things worth keeping, and do it right - at the end of the process, you'll have a much better closet.
It won't stay perfect forever. I mean, it's a closet. Things go in it.
Our brains are just the same (to me). Therapy, in general, is like cleaning out the closet.
Trauma therapy - sometimes you open a box and discover that a spider laid eggs in there, and that's where all the spiders have been coming from - sorry for the spider analogy - that actually happened to me once, and it really reminds me of what trauma work can be like. So, you freak out, throw that box across the room, run out of your apartment, and decide you will never go home again. But, eventually, you calm down, get back in there, and keep cleaning - this time, with gloves on.
A closet might take a weekend, week, month. Trauma therapy takes months, years. This is why there's so much emphasis on learning coping and grounding skills - you basically need a whole other closet for the contents of the closet you are cleaning out, so you have somewhere to put the work in progress and you won't be living in the middle of it constantly.
And if you've ever seen a picture of the inside of a hoarder's home - that is a good completion of the analogy, because if you don't clean out your closet, eventually your entire house will become your closet. Things spill out of it, more things get shoved into corners, you become so afraid to touch it that you teach yourself how to be blind to it, and just ignore people when they tell you that you are now living inside a health hazard.
I want to keep working on cleaning out my closet so that I don't actually die inside a house piled to the ceiling with stacks and stacks of the past. I don't want that to be my mind. And so, even when it is really, really hard - I show up to therapy, or get out the DBT book, or push myself to just keep moving through it all. And I'm not special. It's just what we all do.
