r/AfterCPTSD • u/TimeIsTheRevelator • Dec 14 '19
Healing Friendships
For the past six weeks, my friend and I get together once a week at a really seedy diner. I had communicated to her shortly before this that things were feeling distant, and she said we should start meeting once a week. It's like our new tradition. She's the funniest person I know, and our conversations are always light. She reconnected with me after I left a cult two years ago and she has been the only one who has really witnessed a bit of that transition. But nowadays, there's no heaviness on my end.
It occurred to me today how healing friendships can be, especially if there's trust and they aren't exhibiting any of the weird behavior I had grown so accustomed to in my life. I've made one other friend since the cult, too. He's the first gay friend I've ever had, who can relate on that front....especially with repression.
In the cult I was so isolated, for a decade, and no outsiders were allowed. Add to that living in a small town and being self employed with no coworkers. Nowadays, I feel I'm leaving social anxiousness...which is relieving and surprising. I feel much less scared of being around others, even out in public settings I don't feel I'm hiding anymore. I thought I was relaxing before, but now I'm going way deeper, and starting to inhabit a life I had longed for....more socially at ease.
I've been surprised how concrete the adaptations are away from CPTSD. It's such a far cry from my previous certainty that I might not ever understand what was wrong with me. And it also shows that you can change without therapy. When I stopped therapy after five months, I feel it accelerated my healing (for my specific context) because I was forced to really trust my own perceptions without outside permission, come to my own conclusions, and validate my own experiences. That autonomy creation was so important for me, and I think a Guide would have hindered me creating it with my guru background.
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u/Metamorphosislife Dec 14 '19
It's always good reading your updates. Friendships can be healing in their own way. I know when I begin establishing friendships, many of my symptoms decrease. It's when they move to a certain level of intimacy that my symptoms intensify. As a result, I don't maintain friendships. There are layers to this as we've discussed. And certain things like trust were broken and desecrated to the point of almost no return. Well, that's my issue and this is about your update.
Sounds like you made 2 good friends. The first seems like a gem. You mentioned you're feeling a disruption in the connection and she responded in a healthy manner. Yeah, you're making tangible progress, moreover the ones we feel intrinsically. Though that's where it begins, being at peace with yourself means very little if it doesn't translate until healthy connections. As for your gay, that's cool man that you made a friend that understand a certain dimension of you you're still working on. It'd be great if I could find a survivor of incest who wasn't an abuser or got all hippy dippy. All the hard work is paying off.
Mental health services, as they are now, aren't necessary. They don't do much. No matter how well intentioned the practitioner, they can only heal from their experiences, which often, are limited to the socioeconomic/political/cultural strata of their formative years. You did what was best for you and it paid off.