I have been out of the abusive situation for over a year now. Earlier this year I started to 'thaw out.' It was intense.

I want the overly intense emotions to stop, I want the paranoia switch to stop flipping...I want ALL the weird symptoms to stop flipping at will because of some obscure trigger.

I just want to be normal.

I just want to live a normal life.

I want to be able to trust again.

I want to be able to love someone and for someone to love me.

well, you have started on the journey of healing. I don't mean to sound corny... but you are admitting not only to yourself but to all of us that you want (perhaps even deserve? Smile!) such wonderful and important things for yourself.

BUT, at the same time, be careful. We easily can torture ourselves with the things that we want or feel that we should have. You have to go through the shitty times...and it's hard and deep and dark, but it doesn't have to stay that way (I am saying this to both of us). There is NO SUCH THING AS NORMAL. Society dupes us into believing that we should be "normal" but it doesn't exist. Strive for healthy. What's healthy for your life. We each have different needs, and it's important to strive to meet our different and unique needs. To trust again, this needs to begin with yourself. What an important set of baby steps on this path! With so many layers. We are worth building what is ours to have... And love, similar to trust. I am still figuring out what it means to love myself. It's not this gushy happy sunshiny thing. It's a series of decisions we make everyday to not undermine ourselves, to give ourselves chances to be, to not know all the answers or any of them at times = it's about permission to breath and for that to be enough at times. It's so hard, but so worth it. We need to be our own greatest gift...

well said nov silence. Angel it is hard and now we are in a new kind of normal. Every day it (normal) changes for me. So I never really have been able to settle anywhere. I too just want it back the way it was before. but it's not there. I always hang on to what I have heard is that this hard work will pay off and we may find our lives better than they were before.

Thinking and relating to your words.
Patty

So how do we do it? How do we trust, how do we stop from being triggered? It seems like I get over one trigger, just to be triggered by something else.

Angel, you are a brave, brave soul & I'm proud of you. I wish I could be as brave. I wish you the best on your journey towards healing.

Angel, what your experiencing is nothing out of the normal bounds of PTSD, absolutely and perfectly normal for uncontrolled PTSD. So then, the question your asking really, is how does one become "normal" again. Well, we have beaten the "what is normal" discussion to death here before, so just search and you will find, however; normal is unique to you, and not a society blanket or peer group that you may think it is.

What you need to know, is that you will never be the same as you ever where, and that you must expect, though you can be better than you are, likely you will know more about yourself than you ever have. You must face your fear, you must face your trauma, you must not fear it. Fear is what causes PTSD to thrive, to fear is to feed PTSD. To feed PTSD is to invoke all the symptoms. To hit your fear directly, to hit it as fast as possible, is to see a dramatic increase in sickness initially, to then taper off over the following months to a much lower level than you live daily. The more you work on you, the less symptoms will be within your life. Symptoms are a side effect of your trauma, and the only way to remove the symptoms is to heal your trauma.