How to Heal When Life Feels Like the Environment That Harmed You

There's a popular saying among therapy and self-help circles: "You can't heal in the same environment that hurt you." It's a rallying cry for those of us hurting to encourage us to "go no contact" with the toxic family or friends, divorce the abusive or neglectful spouse, find the new job.

But what happens when you do those things, only to find things don't get better?

Friends remain distant, or you lose them altogether and can't seem to make new ones. The new managers still focus on results. Money remains tight.

No one sees you. No one cares that you escaped. There's almost an unspoken expectation that now that you're out, you should be better.

Except you're not. You find yourself questioning every new person and environment. What are they hiding? When will their true colors come out? You find yourself shrinking, once more trying not to be noticed (a flight / freeze / fawn response) or else, becoming combative and challenging (the fight response you weren't allowed before).

You give people chances. They let you down. It's harder for you to give them the benefit of the doubt in their own flaws and life stresses. You remember all the times you've ever given someone the benefit of the doubt and gotten screwed (again).

We remember negative experiences more strongly and for longer than we do positive ones, which in turn, can make our gratitude and mindfulness practices feel hollow. We start to assume we can't "do life." We retreat.

So how can we form and maintain communities?

In "How to Be a Fighter When You Feel Like a Punching Bag," writer and organizer Kelly Hayes writes about agency, linking to a piece by Elise Granata that includes information on what agency might look like within communal spaces:

A volunteer finds their onboarding confusing and makes a handbook so others can more easily navigate their own journeys.

An attendee sees a bottleneck happening at the event’s doors and jumps in to help folks navigate.

An artist wants to collaborate with others who share their identity or lived experience and curates a showcase of bands or visual artists like them.

For those of us struggling to identify what "community" looks like when you're just coming out of isolation, justice advocate Mia Mingus offered "Pods for Our Current Moment," "a few or more people [who] can help in the interim and especially in the years to come. A pod is made up of the people that you would turn to for support. You can have as many pods as you like and you can be part of as many pods as you have the capacity for."

These ideas are incredibly valuable, and yet, as I wrote in a comment on Hayes' piece: "...my experience living with CPTSD has really, really screwed up my ability to discern whether my nervous system is only projecting onto others, or alerting me to very real dynamics I've already escaped."

At the same time that my own sense of agency is encouraged to flourish in local civil service, I've found that the two years I spent in therapy (back when I could afford it) really didn't heal as much as I hoped it would when I started.

Of course, therapy has many limits. But it only takes one triggering to feel like all that cognitive behavioral stuff is just pretty words, and you really are as broken and deficient as you were conditioned to believe.

As I commented further to Hayes:

"A thing I've noticed in our society is how eager we are to tell people to go to therapy, assuming it will teach them everything they need to know about boundaries and self-trust they need to be "fixed" and thus able to be part of our communities. We do this because of our own limited capacity, of course. But in my experience, it tends to alienate those of us who were never sure to begin with that we were reading social rules correctly. I wonder how community leaders and members might work towards addressing these kinds of issues?"

Finding community requires openness and trust

In my workplace, everyone has suffered some kind of trauma: poverty, domestic abuse, addiction. By nothing short of a miracle, most of the women there have been able to integrate their traumas. It's part of them, but it doesn't run them. They set boundaries for appropriate behavior that keeps the whole place running, but they make themselves available to listen and care.

I didn't go looking for them, though. No one had told me to apply because this place was so great, for example. It was the result of a lot of trial and error.

First there were the misfires. The community groups I joined to help clean up local riverbanks and mobilize for local labor and tell local stories all offered people who were polite but not especially eager to form friendships, or else open to friendship but not equipped to deal with my messy feelings or chaotic thinking.

Then came the long period of isolation. In its own way, it was the antidote to my codependent tendency to rely on others to have all the answers. I didn't trust myself enough to see the answers within me, and I certainly didn't believe I could fix myself. Being isolated protected me, but only to a point.

Because at the time I was trying to heal, I was also running out of money. I took an hourly job to help pay the bills when writing wasn't going so well. That led to an opportunity to train upward into a different role with more responsibility (and more pay with more hours).

I found myself able to act with agency and uncover skills I'd forgotten I had. I gained trust and was told I was a "great fit."

But even as I developed these bonds, I knew the true test was going to be their tolerance for me when I fell.

I often say that opportunity -- that community -- was the literal answer to a prayer. I'm not religious, but I was raised that way, and I still pray, even though it feels like I have to work harder than ever before to see and trust the answers in front of me.

Those answers include the coworkers who, again totally by accident, have seen the worst parts of me and are still willing to abide my presence; for whom "professionalism" is a reasonable boundary rather than a box into which to shove me and shelve me, and a foundation to develop the strengths they know I have.

This is what I think Hayes and Granata and Mingus are writing about. The communities we think should be obviously welcoming aren't always, and won't necessarily give us the sense of connection we crave. But as Granata wrote:

"If we use agency as a prism to assess our daily activities, we might discover that it is not just about having enough information, trying enough toolkits, browsing or scrolling about it; it is about cultivating our own capacity to act.

"It is about rushing towards the sources that stoke a sense of agency in us, so that we may tap into our own power and build things with other people as much as we dream about it."

Regaining our sense of agency is another way of saying regaining the sense of power we lost in the environment(s) that harmed us. Our triggers show us where we feel powerless. Healing them starts with believing that we do still have power, so that we can tap it and build on it.