A square on the calendar

After a major trauma, an ever-expanding collection of discarded calendar pages can sometimes feel like a small achievement to savor. It allows you to quantify how far you’ve come since your life disintegrated before your very eyes. It provides an opportunity to look at the progress you’ve made and set a plan of attack for any remaining challenges you face. Of course, it can also be your undoing.

If you look back at my trauma posts from the past eight months or so, time is a major character. From Twenty months to Before and after to Milk carton best by dates, I’ve got something going on with Father Time and it’s not always a healthy relationship. As a PTSD survivor, I can assure you that he can be something of a bastard when he hits below the belt, triggering my symptoms and shoving me down the rabbit hole so that I have no choice but to claw my way back up to the surface one brutal inch at a time.

Yet, like me, you may have other squares on the calendar that have nothing to do with the trauma itself, but still mean something – shadowy remnants of that former life of yours, reminders of something – or someone – from your past. Those days may not knock you off your feet, but they can still sting.

Today is one of those days for me.

I’m not crying. I’m not angry. I’m not afraid. But I am a little sad. Today is a special day for one of my favorite people, but we’re no longer able to talk because of what happened. And I have no choice, it has to be ok.

Sometimes when trauma strikes, people you love can’t accept what happened – they can’t give you the support you need to recover. This is especially true if someone they care about is the reason the trauma happened in the first place. If I’ve learned anything in the past couple of years, it’s that people don’t want to believe that a person they love can do a monumentally bad thing. They will go to any lengths to convince themselves that the horrible thing didn’t really happen. And while that is heartbreaking for those of us on the receiving end of the trauma, it’s also something we have no choice but to deal with so that we can move on with our lives as we flip from one calendar month to another.

Disagreeing about whether or not a traumatic event actually occurred drastically alters or, in many cases, destroys a relationship. You should not give up the truth in order to maintain their acceptance. This does not mean that your love for that person disappears and, while it may not ease your pain, it may be possible to comprehend that the person you love is simply unable to process the truth because it is too terrible to bear. Sometimes, no matter how devastating, it’s necessary to let a relationship die so that you may live.

Today’s photos are from last weekend’s Water Lantern Festival at Green Lake in Seattle. I expected to have a good time, but never imagined it would be so touching. While it was ridiculously crowded and rather disorganized, we had an amazing evening and hope to experience it again next year.

Check out my book! It’s the first workbook to use Behavioral Activation to tackle symptoms of PTSD. Drop your questions in my comments.