I was rereading Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving the other night — one of those “circle back when you’re ready for another layer” books — and a line hit me in a way it didn’t the first time around.
Walker talks about how the grieving phase of cPTSD recovery often lasts two or three years, sometimes longer, and that healing looks less like a staircase and more like a spiral:
three steps forward, two steps back.
Intellectually, I understood this the first time.
Emotionally? I didn’t.
This time, I felt it land in my body.
Because lately, that’s exactly what my healing has felt like.
Some days I’m grounded, present, functional, even hopeful.
Other days I feel like I’m unraveling, like I’ve made no progress at all, like I’m back at the emotional ground zero of the Mom-pocalypse.
Pete would call that normal.
My nervous system calls it failure.
And that’s the tension I’ve been sitting with — this sense that I “should” be further along, “should” be done crying about certain things by now, “should” be able to speak about the past without my voice shaking, “should” be able to navigate work stress without my body reacting like I’m under threat.
But recovery from a lifetime of trauma does not move according to the rules I was raised with.
Ultra-independence, perfectionism, self-erasure, and pushing through were my survival skills.
They don’t translate to healing.
Healing is slow.
Healing is nonlinear.
Healing invites you to feel what you never had permission to feel.
And that’s uncomfortable as hell.
The Backward Steps Aren’t Regression — They’re Revisits
Walker says something that I didn’t fully grasp until now:
cPTSD isn’t a single wound. It’s a system of wounds, layered across years, shaped by repetition, silence, and survival.
So of course the healing isn’t single-layered either.
When I have a “bad day,” I’m not failing — I’m touching a place I can finally bear to touch.
I’m revisiting.
Reprocessing.
Reclaiming.
But because I’ve spent my whole life performing stability for the sake of everyone else, the moment I wobble, an internal voice goes straight to:
- “You’re slipping.”
- “You’re losing progress.”
- “You’re overreacting.”
- “You should be stronger than this.”
And yet, according to Pete Walker — and honestly, according to my nervous system’s story — the wobble is not a breakdown.
It’s capacity expanding.
Trauma Was Repetitive, So Recovery Is Repetitive Too
This part floored me.
Trauma didn’t happen once.
It happened every day in tiny and not-so-tiny ways:
- in the lies
- in the chaos of the Missouri house
- in the triangulation
- in the financial abuse
- in the identity rupture
- in the parentification
- in the expectation to endure without question
- in the demand for loyalty over truth
So why on earth do I expect recovery to show up as one clean break, one cathartic moment, one emotional milestone?
Healing mirrors trauma in one specific way:
It returns to the same places until those places no longer hurt the same.
Not because I failed.
But because my body and psyche are unwinding decades of survival reflexes.
Different Layers Heal at Different Speeds
Another thing Walker says that hit me hard:
“You may be progressing beautifully in one area of recovery while feeling stuck or regressed in another.”
That is exactly my experience right now.
I’m further along in:
- boundaries
- understanding emotional flashbacks
- No Contact clarity
- naming manipulation
- choosing peace over chaos
And yet I feel like I’m failing in:
- work stress regulation
- emotional fatigue
- identity reconstruction
- self-permission to rest
- pacing
- self-compassion
That mismatch creates friction — internal pressure, guilt, and frustration.
But it’s not because I’m doing something wrong.
It’s because I’m healing multiple lifetimes at once:
my childhood, my adulthood, the years I didn’t know the truth, the years I pretended not to see it, and the years I endured more than I ever should have.
That’s a lot of threads to unravel simultaneously.
The Frustration Itself Is Part of the Grief
This is the part Pete doesn’t sugarcoat — and I appreciate that.
Grieving what you endured is not only about the past.
It’s also about grieving:
- the time lost
- the self-abandonment learned
- the childhood you didn’t get
- the innocence you were trained out of
- the fatherhood years spent surviving instead of thriving
- the truth arriving late
- the years you didn’t know you were wounded
- the work it takes now to reclaim yourself
Walker’s 2–3 years of grieving isn’t a timeline.
It’s permission.
Permission to accept that healing takes as long as it takes.
Permission to stop expecting linear progress.
Permission to stop calling emotional movement “backward” when it’s actually inward.
Permission to be exactly where you are.
Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back… Still Moves Forward
This is what I’m holding onto:
Even when it feels messy, slow, repetitive, unproductive, or humiliatingly emotional, I am still moving.
You are still moving.
Every “step back” is not evidence of failure.
It’s evidence that another layer has surfaced — one you are finally strong enough to face.
And that is progress.
Even if it feels like grief.
Even if it feels like chaos.
Even if it feels like nothing is changing.
Pete Walker is right:
Healing from a lifetime of trauma is really, at its core, a patience practice.
And maybe the most compassionate thing I can do for myself right now is stop demanding that I be healed already — and instead honor that I’m healing at all.
