i don't need it to be slow and careful
It can feel that way.
But slow and steady is the approach most often used by trauma therapists because the alternative doesn’t lead to function or recovery, it leads to falling off the psychological cliff.
For example, not currently ‘dealing with it’ is causing this:
like rapid heart beat, shaking and acting weird i guess
and this:
feeling so stressed out by every little thing
Your body’s stress/arousal level is already beyond what you can cope with and remain functional. Leading not just to the psychological issue of not coping, but the physical fallout of not coping (tremor, elevated HR, dysregulated behaviour, dysregulated emotions). Not only is your brain not coping, the rest of your body’s key organs, like your heart, are no longer coping either.
Attempts at a ‘quick fix’ don’t tend to turn the volume down on those issues. It turns it up.
That’s when people have breakdowns, and end up in hospital.
The 2 big priorities for the early stages of recovery from that kind of trauma and it’s fallout are:
1) learning coping strategies (learning how to deal with that level of stress arousal in functional ways that you can sustain) and
2) emptying out your stress cup so that your brain and body have more resources available to cope with what’s going on both internally and externally. Which is most often best achieved by attending to basic physiological needs (good sleep, good nutrition, good relaxation, good social connections, good exercise).
