Aiming for recovery, but finding that you never have the conditions to make progress?

Let’s talk about what it takes for a brain to heal. The basic mediums of life that most of us are unable to access in our traumatized society. 

---

Transcript / Blog Version:

Yalright, Fuckers! We’re back and ready to attack. This conversation, not in general. Today, we’re talking about… what it really takes to recover a brain after a long bout of trauma upset. Maybe your functionality has seemingly failed. Maybe your life has become defined by all-encompassing limitation. Maybe you’re feeling like a bundle of personalities and memories, jumbled up and raging for control.

Or maybe your symptoms are just getting really uncomfortable, and you’d like a bit of goddamn peace from all the tomshittery.

Regardless, here are the resources we absolutely need, in order to work through our brains full of upset.

Remember our conversation on stabilization, processing, and reintegration? Can’t do any of that without the resources of… time, space, and energy. You know, the things that life doesn’t really deliver us or allow us to have on a regular basis to deal with our own shit. Hence, we can’t get a fucking handle on our heads and end up flailing through existence with an increasingly distressed and depleted system, instead.

Uhhh… more commentary on this failing capitalist world… they keep us down by keeping our brains a mess. Mental health is the new wealth – with physical health closely walking alongside it. It’s not a coincidence, it keeps us serving them.

Anyways. I bring this up, because once you start understanding brains, you start understanding how they cannot possibly function correctly in the structures that most of us have to pony up to.

Whether those are jobs, relationship obligations, childcare obstacles, the endless drone of bureaucratic tasks to sustain an adult life, or even our “civic and social duty” of engaging with things like social media and news outlets… none of it is good for a brain. None of it allows us to accomplish what we really need to accomplish on the inside; having time to process what we’ve seen, let alone to do it intentionally.

This goes for our old trauma events, clearly. Here we are, trying to pull things up from the bottom of our personal oceans so we can get a better look and place those events in some sort of ordered understanding of self. Meanwhile, you know, the emails don’t stop rolling in, the responsibilities only multiply, the notifications don’t stop pinging, the bad news keeps aflowin into your psyche, whatever the fuck is going on in your social sphere these past two years. And the same can be said for modern day events.

Rapid change requires time for a brain to understand it. Even traveling for a weekend requires restabilization, processing, and reintegration. But we never get what we need to sew those details into our autobiographical recall.

Because we never get… time, space, or excess energy for ourselves to do this difficult mental landscaping. It has to be said; it’s life versus brain operations out there. Let alone when those brain operations are rooted in t-word events that require even more effort.

So, let’s run down the list.

You need TIME.

Time to yourself. Time without triggerings. Time that isn’t constrained by looming obligations. Time to do absolutely motherfucking nothing.

We can’t process things unless we have time to do so. And that doesn’t mean, “in between dropping off the kids and arriving at the grocery store,” or, “for five minutes at the end of your lunch break.”

Brains work on figuring things out in their own time – we can’t force the lightbulb moments to come about in these fleeting moments. A lot of our processing is happening as a background function, because we never let it be a forefront function. AND, we have to note that it can take time – plain old time – to be able to let things like triggerings and nervous systems upsets die down. Can’t process memories that are still “too new,” can’t make sense of situations that you’re still actively dealing with. You need time.

This is also where SPACE also comes into the mix.

You need space from your past to see it in the present. I think we’ve all been “in it” and attempted to process the events, only to find that clarity couldn’t be obtained until 6 to 24 months later, minimum. The stimulation events happening each day were too choking, too immersive, until you get space from everything.

Think of it this way, you can’t really have perspective unless you have space. You certainly can’t have broad, outcome-relevant, well-informed ones. Consider it in drawing or viewing any object. If you’re nose to nose to the item, there is no perspective. In order to form better perspectives, you need space from the happenings that you’re examining AND a safe, secure, stable (read: not fearful) place to do so.

Which means, you also need space, literal, physical space, to yourself. To feel safe. To be removed from upset. To actually USE your TIME, rather than get fearful and disassociate for another period of the week. To just unwind, without fear of interruption or chaos. You need a safe space.

And then, in order to do anything positive with your time and space, you also need… ENERGY.

If you’re totally exhausted while you have free time and safe space, it still won’t do a single thing for you. It’s like having a factory and plenty of time before your first production deadline, but no power to fuel the machines inside.

Your higher level integrative brain functions? Such as, I don’t know, retrieving and reprocessing a memory while synthesizing a full lifetime of information and trying to do mental acrobatics to engage and re-imagine the outlook for your future time orientation. Yeah, pretty resource-costly for your brain. Not something you can just “squeeze in” when you’re totally zonked after a day full of other exhausting ventures.

And that’s why so many of us feel like we can’t get a grip on our trauma brains.

Thoughts and emotions require time, space, and energy to emerge, to be noticed and named, and to process them for context and meaning. You can’t think your way through a massive issue in 5 minutes, nor can you experience and let go of all the feels that are associated. But that’s what a lot of us find ourselves working with.

Processing memories in conjunction with the new perspectives that you’ve been forming in life – a more complete sense of self and awareness of your own autobiographical events – is the way to resolve old issues and lay them to rest with better cognitive programs taking their place… but none of this can take place without giving our brains the conditions they need to safely and accurately do so.

Honoring past experiences without over-identifying with them or losing yourself to a trigger-fest that de-grounds you from the present moment isn’t an easy task. It takes concentration, dedication, and room to accomplish, as you have to stabilize yourself repeatedly to continue getting your mental hands dirty.

And therefore, there is no trauma recovery until there is the opportunity to give yourself time, space, and energy to sort out your brain.

So, what’s a Fucker to do? Well, we can’t all quit our jobs and abandon our families, so we don’t usually have too many choices.

Essentially, we can say cut out what you realistically can – like, that toxic friendship that can go… maybe it’s time. That career that takes up 24/7 of your thinking power? Maybe it’s time for something less intense, even if it’s temporary. Find an alternative until things feel firmer in your newly linked up brain cells.

And secondly, when we can’t clip that part of life, we can work on placing very firm boundaries in those areas. “No, I work from the hours of 9-5, if you contact me outside that time I can’t get back to you right away.” “No, I’m not on-call for emotional support every time something goes wrong, we can set up a designated window when we talk through things like that each week.” “No, I’m not interested in hearing the news and every other upsetting life update first thing in the morning – that’s my time for my own processing – we can discuss it at X, Y, or Z time.”

And then hold those boundaries strong. Create the time, space, and energy that you need in your life, however you can. And see it as being non-negotiable. This isn’t you being SELFISH, this is you, getting yourself healed, so you can operate better in every area afterwards. Honestly, the least selfish thing you can do.

But also, let’s point out that the word “self-ish” is a funny one. And if you are taking time to be “like your self,” I don’t see a single thing wrong with it. Especially in the context of trauma treatment and our poor, recovering, senses of self. Yah, Fucker, be your damn self. And don’t let anyone guilt you for having the “audacity” to care about your own brain (and therefore entire life) for a change.

But that’s just my two cents.

At the end of the day, if you’re trying to justify making changes in life that amount to more recovery resources for your think-box, just take some time to consider how brains evolved… in animals that spent half of their lives looking for food and the other half just chilling in between ventures. And consider how you have to operate YOUR brain, instead. Continually stimulated. Always worried about something. Always busy, obsessed with the idea of “productivity.” Always thinking ahead to your next responsibility and preparing ahead of time.

We’ve removed the key aspects of life that allow our systems to properly function. Because we’ve essentially removed the key aspects of life in our modern day society. There’s no time, space, or energy available to us – what we have to offer (the mediums of biology and existence, themselves) are only available to our paycheck overlords. Leaving our poor, run-ragged, brains with nothing for themselves.

And then we proclaim “my head doesn’t work right, what’s wrong with it? And how do I fix it the fastest, with the least amount of personal change, and the minimum effort possible, since that’s all I have available to muster?”

Well, we give our systems what they need to do their jobs. And, unfortunately, that comes in direct opposition in most of our cases with allll of our physical human jobs. And all the limiting structures we’ve had to join to survive.

The good news being… you do have time. As in, if these conditions aren’t things you can realistically produce for yourself right NOW, you still have the power to make a plan and start making changes so they’re available to you LATER. Trauma recovery is about taking STEPS, not sprinting to a final destination. Each step enables and informs the direction of the next move, and therefore every single one matters.

So, maybe you CAN’T heal in this particular job or relationship. You CAN’T get the time, space, and excess energy in those spaces right now.

But, you CAN start figuring out what WILL work for you. Knowing what hasn’t been cutting it is great information – it gets you closer and closer to what DOES work for you. And you start backwards-planning from there. Mapping out each step you can take, and reminding yourself that it’s for the ultimate reason – reward might be delayed, but there’s nothing greater than the final result of having a well-working brain.

And THAT will bring you every other reward in the world, when you can finally put your full effort into being who you’re meant to be.

So. Let’s get our time, space, and energy back. It’s the only way for a brain to get back up to normal operating standards. And from there, you have the power to do anything you want. Especially when the name of the game is “notice, understand, accept, and recalibrate your past lifetime of trauma-derived programs.”

Or, what we’ll be talking about next, when we meet up again to discuss the existence recreation pathway of Inner work, outer work, and life reintegration.

But until we see each other again, Motherfucker…

Hail your self.

Hail your time, space, and energy – the mediums of life.

Hail Archie, who forced me to have increased time, space, and energy for both of us, rather than shotgunning it all into work efforts.

And cheers, y’all.

Take back your own life, alright? We’re all doing it together.

Byeee.