Living With Trauma 9

It's all about the small steps. I don't expect that anyone living with trauma and high anxiety should be able to simply walk back into the same situation that wrecked their lives while hoping for a different outcome. Einstein's law of insanity, anyone? Life is already pretty intense even when we're just coping with the everyday. And if you are already traumatized, highly sensitive and prone to clinical anxiety then so much the more will you want to protect yourself. This chaotic and disruptive world isn't kind to the already vulnerable and people whose lives have been crushed and wounded by misfortune, brutality or mental illness need special protection and special stability in their surroundings if they are going to move forward in recovery. I knew I was going off the deep end of the pool when, hardly recovered from PTSD, I decided not only to fly down to Costa Rica, alone, but to spend three of my four weeks there in a rather unsafe city, the capital, San Jose. I had to conquer the fear of flying I had acquired since the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City, while also doing something about my fear of large and unsafe cities, given what happened to me when I was robbed at knifepoint in Amsterdam in 1991 and the fear that ended up hobbling me. I actually did okay. The plane didn't blow up or crash, no one bothered me much in San Jose, except for a few young idiots looking for trouble whom I knew to sidestep. Since then, I have been travelling almost annually. And I have never known I would enjoy such a full and complete recovery, None of this would have happened for me had I not taken those risks. I think that no matter how small the small steps that are taken towards recovery and risk, it still has to be accepted that the process is not going to be easy, or comfortable. This, I believe to be key to recovery. Accepting the unforeseen, the surprises and the difficulties. Embracing them, even. Indeed, I don't think that anyone has ever really recovered much from anything without actually choosing to take on some degree of risk. In my work with people suffering from mental illness I often come across this barrier of fear that interferes with their process towards recovery. Often this fear seems legitimate because it is rooted in very deep anxiety. There is also a tendency, I have noticed, with people who have lived much of their lives in the mental health system to become over-dependent on the supports that are there, and they end up becoming infantilized and incapable of functioning as independent adults. Their food is bought for them, their meals are cooked for them, they have safe and secure housing with recreational and activity groups, they have professional friends, like me, available for helping them get out into the community and ease the boredom. Their fear of risk, pain and failure is reinforced by the support systems that they depend on and getting them to move forward is going to be a difficult, onerous and thankless task. In many cases, if the supports were to be suddenly taken away from them I think most of them would perish. They would end up on the street and likely wouldn't survive very long. The Darwinist survival of the fittest mentality is still very strong and still the dominant ethos in our culture. If the weak are going to continue to fall through the cracks and die, or at least die slowly then this places on us a huge onus to re-examine, review and deal effectively with the huge monster of competitiveness and selfishness that has engulfed our way of thinking, because this whole mentality of winners and losers is what eventually is going to make losers of us all. At what price to the soul should the winner take all?