It would take a miracle…

It would take a miracle…

How often have you said or thought that about your healing?

I used to think it, on average, about ten times a day. My history, my misery, my PTSD reactions, my mood, were getting in the way of my day (again…), and it would take a miracle to change it. And some days, I thought even a miracle might not be enough.

Ironically, I turned out to be right. Healing does take a miracle. In fact, it takes a lot of miracles.

We need to find a therapist who knows up from down when it comes to DID, or one who is willing to learn with us – really learn, since the skills required for effective treatment of DID cross numerous areas of specialization and demand a number of different approaches – and that takes a miracle. Too many trauma therapists think they’re competent to treat DID when they aren’t, and in those cases, we’re lucky if we come out of it no worse off than we started. The bad or merely incompetent therapists outnumber the good ones, and the good ones tend to figure out relatively quickly that treating DID is a thankless and unprofitable path and move to a different focus, so it’s a miracle when we find a therapist who knows what they’re doing, or who is willing to actively learn what they need to know, and who is really willing to work with us.

Our therapist needs to have a strong enough sense of their own self and their own competence to withstand the many challenges a DID client can present – from anger and hostility to manipulation to sexual coercion to intense neediness to outright attack – even when our switches are whipsawing from one extreme to the other – without getting pulled to pieces in the middle of it all.

At the same time, they need to be human enough to admit when they’ve reached the limit of what they can safely or reasonably help us do, and have the good sense to seek their own support or consultation or supervision for the areas where their ignorance might present a serious danger. (This definitely includes mind control issues. )

It is hard to find strength and humility in the same person, and it’s really stretching the odds to hope that the therapist we’ve found will be one of those rarities – so it might seem like it would require enough of a miracle just to have all those things come together for us… but finding the right therapist is really the least of the miracles we need for healing. We also need to create our own internal miracle – and that’s a much harder miracle to come by.

We, who have been hurt beyond hurt, who have no reason to trust anyone or have faith in anything or believe that anything will ever be different than it ever has been… we whose hope has been burnt out by years of extreme yet pointless suffering at the hands of other human beings for whom we are merely objects to train as needed… we need to find some vestige of hope to grow on, and enough faith to push us forward, and enough trust to let someone else into our worlds.

We need to do things differently instead of sticking with the familiar comfort of “what gets us through”… we need to be able to stick with the work of healing when it gets difficult instead of just falling back into apathy and giving up… we need to begin the actual work of healing at all, instead of wasting all our therapy time on everyday issues and whatever few system members are least threatening to work with. We need to face the hardest aspects of our history… the things that were done to us, the things we did to others, the ways that our sickness has damaged the people we least want to hurt, the ways that our history has stunted the lives we might otherwise have had, what we’ve missed out on and what we’ve lost forever… and then we have to find a reason to go on and build the best life we can have, despite all that.

When it comes right down to it, we can have the best therapist in the world and still throw that miracle away because we can’t find the miracle within ourselves to truly heal from the devastating and all-encompassing abuse we have suffered.

So, some people settle for building a life without the miracle. They do just enough work to reach a tolerable point of existence, and then they settle there and live as well as they can around their disorder. Therapy is used to maintain functionality, without significantly challenging the current state of affairs, and these people just do the best they can with where they are.

This is a perfectly viable option. It’s not healing, but it is surviving within a reasonable facsimile of a life. And it lifts the burden of having to face any of our past horrors, and makes that a purely voluntary exercise, periodically engaged in for a variety of reasons, with little to no actual benefit in terms of healing – because healing has already been dismissed as impossible. This is the easier option, insofar as we don’t have to face history any more than it takes to function around it in our current day.

The cost is, that it’s static. We can maintain where we are indefinitely, but we will never really get better. We will never really be free of any of the symptoms or difficulties or issues presented by a mostly untreated dissociative system. We will continue to suffer with depression, anxiety and panic, eating disorders, self-injury, suicidal feelings and thoughts and urges and plans, we may still lose some time, we will still have flashbacks and periodic problems with unprocessed memories causing problems in functioning… none of the things we experienced at the beginning of therapy will ever be fully resolved by therapy, because we are not fully engaged in therapy. We’re really just trying to maintain the status quo.

In a cost-benefit analysis, there are many people who are going to find this arrangement tolerable enough to live with, especially compared to the alternative – and many people do make this choice. There are actually a number of reasons I think this can end up being true, but certainly one of the reasons is, that the cost of trying to genuinely heal is too high, whereas the cost of staying in more or less the same place seems negligible.

After all, what are we really giving up, to stay in the same place, but some things we’ve never had anyway? That hardly even feels like a loss.

So, part of the miracle required for genuine healing, is to believe it’s ever worth the work it takes, even when it really isn’t necessary.

We can live forever in a maintenance daze, battling the same old issues but never really going anywhere, just getting along from each day to the next, until our days run out.

Sometimes, that’s enough. Sometimes, it isn’t enough – but it takes a miracle to believe that there is anything more, that we can achieve more, that we deserve more, that we can have more, and then to actually do it.

Another part of the miracle is taking the chance for healing when it comes to us. We might not feel ready. We might not be ready. But miracles can’t be counted on to come around again just because we weren’t ready to go along for the ride the first time around. If we let them go by, they could very well be gone forever. So – part of the miracle is knowing that a miraculous opportunity is being presented to us, to see it for what it is and to realize what it could mean for us, if we could make the leap out to catch it – and part of the miracle is jumping, committing ourselves, throwing ourselves into what we can make of that opportunity, whether we’re ready or not.

Healing takes a huge miracle.

This, from a confirmed atheist who finds their own use of the word “miracle” in any context to be highly questionable, not to mention hokey.

Hokey, but true – I can find no other word to accurately encompass what was required, as a lifetime member of a group who brainwashed and programmed my mind from the earliest years to the present day to believe and think and be their possession and their slave, to find the faith and hope that healing required. It took a miracle.

But it was a miracle I made myself – and that’s the beauty of it, and the trap.

We make it happen for ourselves, or we don’t. If we’re sitting around “waiting for the miracle to happen” – we’ll be waiting forever. Making a miracle, benefitting from a miracle, is an active process, not a passive one.

We have to use our own efforts to find what we need in the world – and every day that we settle for less, or waste our time with ineffective (or outright damaging) therapists, or squander the therapy resources we have on trifles, is a day lost.

And we need our own courage, to face what really needs to be faced, and to allow ourselves the hope for something better.

When the damage is so extensive, it truly does take a miracle to find hope and faith, in ourselves or in life.

But miracles do happen, if we make them happen.

“I have found in life that if you want a miracle you first need to do whatever it is you can do – if that’s to plant, then plant; if it is to read, then read; if it is to change, then change; if it is to study, then study; if it is to work, then work; whatever you have to do. And then you will be well on your way of doing the labor that works miracles.” ~ Jim Rohn, entrepreneur and author