Healing is a forward journey

At some stages of the healing journey, particularly the early stages, it can be really helpful to find a sense of community among others who share the same struggles as you. It can be validating to hear that others experience things that are similar to your experiences, and it can be a great thing to have encouragement from people who really understand how even the ordinary things can be that much harder when you’re working around a diagnosis.

But it is to our own benefit to remember that the survivor community is only the first stop on our healing journey. It is not the end point, and there does come a point at which it stops being a help to us in any way.

The survivor community is a stagnant place – and as a member of that community, you will never really be challenged to choose healing over stagnation. You might get a few small challenges along the way if you exhibit some extreme of defeatist thinking, but very rarely will anyone even try to push you to look at yourself honestly, or ask you the really hard questions about your behaviors or your beliefs, or whether what you’re doing really supports your stated intention of healing.

And the reason this happens so rarely is, that the community will leap to the defense of anyone who is thus challenged, responding with outrage to the suggestion that anything a survivor does might be wrong or bad, or that a survivor’s responses might be skewed by their own trauma-created perceptions and therefore not accurate to the situation at hand.

In the survivor community, it is the person who issues the challenge who ends up being wrong. It doesn’t matter how appropriate or necessary or correct the challenge is – the community will band together against anyone who dares to suggest that anything another survivor does is anything less than perfectly acceptable.

The survivor community will actively defend your right to be sick with its last dying breath, and they will defend your right to be sick with equal fervor, whether you’ve been “working on healing” for a month or for a decade. They will defend a survivor’s right to be unchallenged in whatever sick thing they’re doing, to a degree that is sickening – but then, it is actually reasonable to expect a sick response from a sick community. The thing is, to not forget that the people in the survivor community are sick, and many of them have every intention of staying that way.

So what if you’re one of the rare few who actually hopes to move beyond being a card-carrying member of the dysfunctional brigade?

Then you’re going to have to think for yourself, and you’re going to have to find the necessary drive and incentive within yourself.

Your “friends” won’t be able to help you – they’re much more likely to want to keep you right there where they are, and it can feel like disloyalty to even think of outgrowing them.

But if they were really friends, wouldn’t they support you even if you were further along than they? Wouldn’t they respect you for accomplishing what they also hope to accomplish? Wouldn’t they want you to succeed, and then take encouragement from your progress and your success, as evidence that they can do it too?

Do you ever ask yourself why so few survivors offer this kind of leadership to each other?

Your friends may very well not support you or encourage you. But that doesn’t make you wrong for wanting more for yourself than they want, for themselves or for you. Regardless of what your “friends” are doing, it should not stand in the way of your own journey away from sickness and toward health.

And the “community leaders” won’t be able to help your healing either, because in case you haven’t noticed, they aren’t doing much healing themselves. We can’t look to them to show us where we can go or how to get there, because they’re not going anywhere.

The survivor community offers a cocooning protection for those who are just learning to recognize their dissociation, or just getting to know their dissociative systems – and in the earliest stages of healing, we really can benefit from the safety and nurturing of that cocoon – but a caterpillar who stays in the cocoon too long will smother and die in there.

We have to be ready and willing to leave our cocoon behind too, or we too will smother and die.

It may mean leaving behind the “friends” and “leaders” who have no real desire to accomplish what you’re striving for, and who won’t support you in doing it because it only highlights the fact that they’re not doing it.

It may feel selfish and disloyal, and you may be accused of being these things and more and worse in the process.

But despite this, you need to think for yourself and listen to yourself, ahead of anyone else, and you need to do what’s right for your healing even if nobody else is doing it.

Part of being healthier is understanding and respecting your own needs and finding ways to meet them even when that means not doing what other people are doing, or not doing what other people want you to do – and even when you care about the people who are telling you to do something different. Compromise should never mean self-abandonment for either side – and if your friends really care about you, then your health should be just as important to them as it is to you.

So when you begin to feel a need to move away from sickness and sick people and sick behaviors and people telling each other how okay it is to be sick – or if you ever heal enough to feel that need – don’t squash it out of a misguided sense of loyalty to, or an over-developed identity in, the survivor community.

If you’ve progressed far enough to feel like you’re ready to move on, then the community has offered you everything it has to give. Get out while the getting’s good! And take anyone who will come with you – but don’t let anyone hold you back.

Healing is a forward journey – so keep on moving.