Letting our intuition create the timeline
Raise your hand if one of your coping mechanisms you developed in your childhood was to overachieve in an attempt to have control in a world where you had far too little of it.
Now raise your hand if said perfectionism has been showing up in your healing. It could look like trying to read all the books, trying all the healing tools all at once, and do all the confronting of the darkness within our minds as fast as possible. Does this sound familiar to you?
I ask this not out of judgment, but because this is me. I was always praised for being such a good student and for quickly rising to leadership ranks of anything I got involved in. Some of my overachievement was personality driven ( I’m a double Aries) but a lot of the perfectionism was fueled from a much darker place.
My perfectionism was rooted in a very damaged and often abusive relationship that I had within myself. I never worried about letting anyone down, or what people thought of me. My mom and loving stepfather, both incredible achievers themselves, always encouraged me to have a healthy perspective on things and not push myself too hard. If only their approval was what I cared about, I would have been in a much better position.
Instead, I had to answer to the dark cruel voices in my head that sounded an awful lot like my own. They’d tell me I hadn’t done enough and that I should be ashamed of myself. They told me if I couldn’t control the outcomes of things like academic tests then I couldn’t control anything.
My toxic overachieving was rooted in my CSA
I understand precisely why I had such cruel and abusive voices punishing me inside my own mind.
My father, my abuser, raised me from the moment I was born to believe that he was the ultimate victim and that his happiness and his will to live depended on me. From the earliest memories of my life I was parentified by him (meaning that the role of parent/child was reversed and I was expected to take care of him and not the other way around.)
I found the guilt of causing him unhappiness suffocating and so I tried to do everything I could to fix him. He caused me to have such an inappropriate and abusive sense of responsibility for him. I saw no way out of that responsibility so I just had to keep trying, which mostly meant agreeing to be around him when every fiber of my being said to cut off contact.
When I would, on occasion, try to push back he would cry. In public. I was 10 years old.
And so what does a 10-year-old do watching their father, a grown man, weep in public because they expressed their feelings and tried to establish boundaries?
I learned to hate myself for hating him. I learned to blame myself for everything that wasn’t my fault, just as he taught me to do. I learned to punish myself and I often did that by pushing myself to achieve too much too fast.
How my overachieving tendencies have shown up in my healing from CSA
I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy unlearning my self-punishing patterns and trying to learn how to cultivate self-compassion. It’s a tricky business and I still try to overachieve at healing.
I understand why me and so many other survivors push our healing processes beyond their natural pace. It’s a completely logical reaction for someone to say, “I want to feel better as soon as possible, so let me do all the hard things all at once so I can be better fast.”
Some of the ways my overachieving has shown up in my healing over the years:
- Ignoring my inner intuition and forcing myself to “sit with” my trauma. Instead of allowing it to come up naturally, I’d sit and listen to sad songs and try to force myself to remember things
- Pushing through really triggering books (Hello, the Body Keeps the Score!) even though my nervous system says I’m not okay, because I think if I can just power through then I’ll be better soon
- Listening to the details of other survivors’ stories of abuse, and not having any boundaries around caring for myself while doing so because I think I should be able to handle it by now
- I have, more times than I can actually count, asked my therapist to give me a gold star for being the perfect client and trying to apply every single thing I’ve ever learned in our sessions all at once
Healing requires us to keep our perfectionism in check
In all my years of working on healing from my CSA here’s what I’ve learned: To me, healing means that we listen to our intuition and our body’s innate wisdom and we let that guide us through our lives.
When we experience CSA we also almost always experience the adults around us explicitly or implicitly saying to us, “Don’t trust whatever your body is telling you that you’re feeling. Instead, use your mind to override your intuition telling you that something is wrong. This way you stay quiet and do not ‘cause any trouble’.”
My healing has been about learning to quiet that logical part of my brain that was formed and brainwashed by the abuse. I practice tapping into my intuition and inner wisdom that has been there this whole time just waiting for a safe time to come on out.
Perfectionism and overachieving live in that logical part of our minds. Healing lives in our bones, in our gut, in our bodies. We have to allow our intuition to set the pace for us, even if we think it’s too slow.
So if my intuition says, “This book is making me feel like absolute garbagio and I really want to stop,” then I stop and do not continue reading the book.
Perfectionism tells us the lie that there is a right and wrong way to be. But there is no right or wrong way to survive CSA and work on healing from it. We all need different things, and our healing needs will change and evolve with us.
Perfectionism tells us the lie that life’s efforts have a clear beginning, middle and end and it is all within our control. Healing will always be nonlinear. And instead of allowing the perfectionism to tell us are to blame for our triggers or trauma setbacks, we can tap into deep wells of self-compassion for how hard it is to live with trauma.
There are countless ways to heal. Let’s allow of our intuition to lead the way. If you’re struggling to know how to tap into that intuition don’t worry! I wrote an entire book on the topic!
What happened when I told people to not read Healing Honestly if it didn’t feel right
Some of the first words I typed when sitting down to start Healing Honestly: The Messy and Magnificent Path to Overcoming Self-Blame and Self-Shame were words of encouragement for the reader to not rush through the book. The final words of the book’s introduction are:
For my fellow overachievers: you do not get a prize for powering through! There is no gold star for reading the whole book quickly! Anything involving our healing takes time: as much as we may desire it, there is no fast-forward button for our healing. So I encourage you to move at the pace your mind and body tell you is aligned with your safety and well-being. Also, I promise my jokes are funnier if you take your time.
Now that it’s been nearly two years since Healing Honestly was published I am receiving the emails and DMs that I dreamed of. I’m getting messages that say, “I’ve had this book on my shelf for an entire year and was just waiting until it felt right to open it,” and, “I read a couple chapters, put the book down, and then six months laters read a few more that felt right for my life.” Amazing. The readers themselves are self-directing what’s best for their own healing as they read the book about healing. It’s the fucking coolest.
I waited over 10 years to try EMDR and I’m really glad I did
This idea of giving ourselves time to take new steps in our healing feels particularly relevant to me right now. Yesterday my trauma therapist and I agreed that next week we will do our first EMDR session together.
I’ve been interested in EMDR for years. I’ve heard so much from all of you about varying experiences with EMDR, mostly positive, but plenty that were difficult and painful too. I have been curious and felt like I should try it since all these cool kids are doing it.
But instead I listened to my inner intuition that had said I’ll know when the time is right and until then just let it lie. And I’m so glad I did.
Yesterday the idea of EMDR felt radically different than it has in the past. When my therapist mentioned it I immediately knew I was with the right therapist, that we had the right memory to work on, and that I am in a safe and stable place in my life to be able to handle the hard moments if they arise.
I’ve been working on my healing for 16 years. I’ve been hearing about EMDR for at least 10 of those years. And I’m so proud of myself for allowing things to unfold as fast or slow as it felt right in my body. It’s pretty cool what happens when we start listening to those bodies of ours.
Intuition will tell us how slow to go that’s good thing
While I know healing can be so frustrating and feel like it’s taking forever, it’s actually a good thing that it can take as much time as it does. I believe the human brain isn’t designed to actually take in the reality of our own CSA all at once. Our brains need time to come to our truth, piece by piece, and then retreat back from that truth to allow us to recover and continue living our adult lives.
Here comes a very imperfect metaphor:
It makes me kind of think of how massage therapy works. If have a big knot of a muscle, we don’t go to it immediately and directly with full force. If we do that, our nervous system gets the signal that we are under attack and everything tenses up even more. We can end up even further away from our muscles feeling safe to release, let go and heal.
Instead, a good massage therapist will help bring our whole body into a state of safety and relaxation, then, and only then will they gently start to invite the tense and painful muscle to begin releasing. They do not immediately go into deeper tissue, but a good massage therapist will actually listen to the muscle tissue itself, and allow for the tissue to soften from their touch and then have it dictate how deep to go. We don’t get to decide how quickly the tissue will find safety and be able to relax and therefore we do not get to determine the speed at which we get to deeper layers of muscle.
We have to take our time with our healing to allow our brains and bodies space to adjust to the full weight of our abuse. We pick up a piece of our abuse, we look at it, we process it, and then we put it back down and keep living our lives. And we do that repeatedly on and off for years. It’s how we are able to be full people with big lives while also trying to heal from a past that we never should’ve had to endure.
So, go forth and by go forth I mean take it easy! Move slow. Be the turtle. I trust you and I know your intuition know’s what’s best.
