12 Rules f rom’ Moving on After Trauma’ Scott (2024)
- Begin building a bridge between yourself now and the person you were before the trauma. Start by doing a little of what you did before. Constucting gradually as wide a ranging an investment portfolio as you can manage.
- Expected that building the bridge, like all forms of construction, will be steps forward and one backwards. It will need daily commitment.
- Don’t block the memories of the trauma, the harder you push them away the more they spring back.
- Put the traumatic memories in their place by questioning their relevance to today’s plans.
- Don’t get hooked by what could have happened. That is just a horror video which spoils today, with dark imaginings.
- Expect that the traumatic memory will knock at the door of your mind daily. But it is only asking about its’ relevance to today. Calmly answer this visitor.
- Go by what you would bet £5 on happening today, not by how vivid the traumatic memory is and how upsetting you find it.
- Remember that guilt is about deliberately doing something wrong. Trauma related guilt is bogus, it arises from either believing you should have looked into your crystal ball before the trauma or that you actually had the time to have done something differently. Feeling guilty and being guilty are not the same.
- Refuse to see flashbacks/nightmares as credible forecasts of what is going to happen today. Being constantly on the edge of your seat is about the past not the future.
- Give people the time of day. Expect to feel disconnected from others as you are looking at your world through war-zone glasses. Try on the pre-trauma glasses, they are more reliable. The view through them is based on a lifetimes experience rather than on a single drama.
- Refuse to take your alarm going off as evidence of danger- it’s just a ‘dodgy alarm’. Tripped easily by anything not exactly as you would want it, reminders or any unusual but not abnormal bodily sensation/s.
- Refuse to look at yourself and your personal world through the window of the trauma. Don’t make the trauma, pain or disability central.