The Raging River

Imagine that you're in the middle of a raging river. Your heart is racing, adrenaline is pumping and all you can focus on is surviving and getting to the bank on the other side.

Once you are safely across you look around in order to figure out where you are and how to get home.

Once you're safely home and away from the danger of the raging river, you might start processing the event and thinking about how scary that was and how on Earth you made it through that ordeal.

It may be months or years later. You are running the bath water. You watch the water lap against the edge of the tub and that fear and anxiety catches in your chest. You think, "I hate the raging river" and "There's no way I'm getting in that bathtub."

Phobias may begin to crop up, like the fear of going into deep water, or driving over a bridge. I refer to it as the "swirl" but I have friends who describe it as being stuck in the water spinning down a faucet. Interesting that we visualize the feeling the exact same way.

For me, the raging river is my cancer diagnosis diagnosis and surviving the treatment in 2008. I coped in order to get through the trauma. Later I began to process what had happened and then there was a trigger (one of my best friends, Jenn, was diagnosed with stage-IV breast cancer) and that allowed me to suddenly grieve the trauma/loss felt back in 2008-2010.

This is how my therapist describes post traumatic stress disorder to me and the only analogy that has actually made sense based on my experience.

I hope by sharing this here it can help someone else. Your experience doesn't have to be cancer, it can be any loss or trauma you have experienced. You're not alone and it does get better.