Does anyone else feel like you are constantly relearning the same lessons? Here is an example of what I mean…
When I was the early stages of healing, I got into doing yoga. The first few times I did it, I couldn’t get over how “sore” I was afterward. I came to realize that my muscles had not relaxed in decades, so the “soreness” I was feeling was actually what it feels like when my shoulder muscles are not all bunched up in tension. Yoga became a part of my daily routine for a long time, and it really helped me get through the flashback phase of healing.
Unfortunately, life happened, and I fell out of doing yoga. I have recently “rediscovered” doing yoga again, and I find myself in the same place although not quite as drastic. Sure enough, my shoulder muscles felt “sore” again as they learned how to relax. I am gradually moving past the same limitations I have already pushed past. Things are going smoother and faster this time, but a part of me is annoyed at having to “relearn” the same lesson. Can anyone else relate?
I go through this frequently along my healing journey. I will embrace a new behavior that is positive in my life. Then, something will trigger me, and I will “forget” about this wonderful new tool. Then, a year or so later, I will “rediscover” the same thing that I already learned before. If I could just hold onto what I learned the first time around, maybe things wouldn’t have to be so hard in between.
So, why I can’t I just learn a new tool and embrace it for life? Why do I ebb and flow as I learn, “forget,” and then relearn the same lesson? Any ideas?
Photo credit: Faith Allen
Yes YES YES!!!!!!!!!!!
There is a saying.. something like “the trick is remembering to remember”… or something. Anyway, many times it tricky and redundant. But if you think about it, learning is a redundant process, and can be frustrating one too!
Enjoy the yoga and good job remembering.
Peace,
mia
I experience this, too. I believe it’s like when muscles hold a broken bone as close to the desired place as possible, but muscles have “memory”, so even after the bone heals, there are times the muscles try to pull the bone back over to where it “used to be”, where there was no pain.
For me, coping with my past is a lot like that. I’ve coped this way for so long that even when I learn a new, wonderful coping method, I tend to fall back on what’s “comfortable” and known, rather on something that I’m still having to struggle with as I learn it. It’s a known fact that when someone panicks, they often look to what they already know, not what they’ve just learned. I guess that’s what happens with me.
I do the same thing. For me, I have to keep reminding myself that healing is not linear. My therapist tells me that I often take three step forward and two steps back, but it is good that the primary direction is forward. With the ebb and flow, I often either make myself “bad,” or tell myself this is part of the healing process and it takes time to learn new behavior especially because I am not used to caring for myself.
I do the same thing (even with yoga!) and I’m not actually healing from any traumas. I know how much better I feel if I do yoga regularly, spend time in the sun each lunchtime, meditate before going to sleep, etc., and yet all this kind of stuff will fall from my habits in these circular schedules of “do the right thing, feel better. get lazy. do the wrong thing, feel worse. remember I hate feeling worse. do the right thing, feel better … ad infinitum!” (so far anyway. Maybe one day I’ll actually learn for good!)
Yep, this sounds familiar. I think of learning these lessons as a spiral. Each time you come back to it and relearn it, you’re learning it a deeper level. Not all spirals are downward spirals, fortunately!
I also think that it’s hard to hold on to your current knowledge when you’re thrown back into a triggered state. The motivation and self-understanding you need to do yoga (or anything else) in a non-triggered state is very different than the motivation and self-understanding that works in a triggered state.
I’ve got some big stuff coming up, and one of my goals is to figure out how to eat well and workout when I’m triggered. My back up plan is to get back on the horse more quickly than I have in the past if (when) I’m unable to maintain my good habits.
This happens to me all the time, much to my chagrin. I am almost certain this is intimately tied to dissociation. Which makes me feel better about it. Because I don’t think we ever forget these things we learn to help us. I like to think we postpone them for another time.
Faith
As always we learn ways to cope and this improves some things around us and then we get busy.
Forget what actually enabled us to achieve this business was the tool we had been taught to cope and ground.
Then bang back again wondering why. I think we all do it. Nothing will stop us either doing it again. whatever we promise to our self.
anon
This is such a frequent problem for me that I have surrendered to accepting it as part of my “system”. I’ve come to see it as part of my dissociative coping. Certain of my ego states are more linked to and familar with specific health and wellness (or unhealth and unwellness) practices. It used to frustrate my therapists to no end that I would be on the road to great new habits and then just suddenly drop off and “forget” everything that I had learned and practiced, going back to old ways, food choices and exercise included. It can be so tiresome and sometimes discouraging to see that this circular pattern continues no matter what. Hang in there and be gentle with yourself!
I am inclined to agree with Paul and do think that its related to the dissociation. I don’t have an answer, but accepting that it is part of my dissociative system, I am more able to forgive myself for inconsistency even if others around me are not as forgiving or nonjudgemental.
As for muscles, any physical trainer will tell you that muscles will remember, and that they “forget” if not trained intensely, consistently and at length to encode the movement pattern within it. Its all bio-chemical.
I agree with others that this seems to be a dissociation and probably particularly multiple thing. To cycle through positive and negative coping behaviors, depending on whose around and what’s going on. To cycle back to more negative ones under stress or triggering. I’ve been realizing, though, that as someone whose been dealing with this for over ten years- I actually *have* got a lot of things I regularly do or know how to do- I just get *used* to them to the point where I don’t think about them. Then I read something by someone still struggling somewhere that’s no longer so hard for me, or I talk to my roommate whose only been diagnosed two and a half years, and I realize hey, I do know something. So I think when we *do* grasp it and it’s become “routine” it’s so- normal that we don’t think of it any more, if that makes sense?
Btw, where did you learn yoga? I’ve wanted to do that for ages, but I’m scared to take a class esp. due to body image stuff. (And we’re poor.)
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