Post Estrangement: the reality of healing

You don't just wake up each morning feeling better. 

You wake up each morning and you make a choice "today I will work on _________".  (Fill in the blank). 

I wish I could tell you that you just one day wake up with your old zest for life back and feel the exuberant joy.  It is not so simple.

Each day I choose to read things that inspire changes  and force me to work on the way that I look at life in spite of the grief I still feel. 

I was thinking yesterday, the grief never goes away, you just get a whole lot better at managing it and controlling how much of your life it takes over by it. 

I think that this message from "Your Life After Trauma" by Michelle Rosenthal really helped me:  

"The intention in recovery is less to excise the past than to integrate it, folding it into yourself and your brain so that it becomes a small part of the larger you."

Yes I do believe that is true, the event of my trauma is estrangement.  It does not go away.  It is a part of who I am.  But I do have a choice.  The event can become my life, or I can choose to make the event become a small part of who I am.

Always it comes down to making a choice of what to do and how to do it. 

That sometimes is really hard to do!  There are days when you want to just go with the flood of emotions and curl up and give up.  Those are the days when I call on my inner warrior and I fight back for my life.  Those are the days when I use my anger against what was done to me and what was taken from me to fuel my warrior into action. 

I just don't want to give anyone a false illusion that healing just spontaneously happens.  It is a step by step, day by day, choice by choice journey.

Renate Dundys Marrello 

2015 - 04 - 08 

My Reflections on Life Page