If you are a parent in the storm right now, wondering if things will ever get easier, you are not alone. The healing journey can be long, confusing, and at times incredibly discouraging.
At the beginning of my journey raising a child who was constantly overwhelmed and easily frustrated, I felt like a deer in headlights. Every day felt the same. I kept wondering if tomorrow would be better, if it was just a phase, if he would eventually grow out of it.
But as the weeks turned into months, it became clear it wasn’t a phase. The daily turmoil, especially around simple everyday tasks, was torturous.
As the year went on, I started noticing something else happening inside of me. Certain noises, the time of day, the sound of my child’s scream, it would immediately trigger an anxiety response in my body. My chest would tighten and I would either want to run away or lay on the floor, frozen.
At one point, someone suggested I might have PTSD. That didn’t fully resonate with me then. What did resonate was something I later came across called Continuous Traumatic Stress Disorder (CTSD). That description made so much more sense to me because the constant stress I was under was never ending.
Months turned into years of constantly bracing for the next meltdown. I didn’t want this to become my normal, but when the same stresses invaded my everyday life, my stress response slowly became stuck in that pattern.
Each day my stress bucket started at max capacity, which made it almost impossible for me to react only to the moment in front of me. Even the smallest stressor felt like the final drop that made everything overflow, and I found myself responding with more emotion than the moment alone deserved.
I was exhausted going from appointment to appointment, seeing little to no progress.
A few months after we started neurologically focused chiropractic care, we started seeing results. For the first time in a long time, I felt real hope. It was magical to go from extremely hard to noticeably better, and a quiet part of me believed the worst was finally over.
As time went on, I started noticing the old patterns creeping back in. Almost instantly, my mind and body reacted like we were right back at the beginning. That type of physiological response is often what CTSD looks like in real life. I was not overreacting. I was reacting to the weight of everything I had carried. CTSD made it nearly impossible to see the progress.
Instead of being able to see the subtle, positive changes I began to question everything. Why did this stop working? Have we really come all this way just to end up back where we started? What’s the point of trying?
Healing Takes Unexpected Turns
Imagine a pilot flying a plane across the country. Before takeoff, the route is mapped out carefully from the starting point to the final destination.
Once the plane is in the air, a storm appears directly in the flight path.
Instead of flying straight through the storm, the pilot changes course miles off the original flight path. The pilot may even circle or loop around the storm system.
From the passenger’s perspective, it can feel confusing. Looking at the map, it almost seems like the plane is going the wrong direction and back toward where it started.
From the cockpit, the pilot can see something the passengers cannot. The detour isn’t taking the plane back to the beginning — it’s navigating around the storm so the journey can continue safely.
Sometimes the body has to circle through old patterns, revisit stress responses, or move through another layer of healing before it can keep moving forward. From the outside, it can feel like you’re right back where you started. Whereas on the inside maybe you’re just navigating around the storm.
For The Days That Feel Like Nothing Is Working
Walking this road of healing from the inside out requires more patience, energy, and perseverance than some people may ever see or understand. And on many days, it can feel like all of your effort isn’t making a difference.
Every appointment you schedule and show up to, every late night spent researching, every difficult day you show up as you are, those things matter more than you may realize. The time, energy, and sacrifices you are making is not wasted effort. Much like a long flight, the journey isn’t moved forward by one dramatic moment in the air, but by the steady work of the engines carrying the plane mile after mile. When CTSD has trained your mind to focus on the hardest moments, it can make those miles feel invisible.
Hold space for the hard days. They are not the absence of healing… they are part of it. So on the hard days, hold space for what is, not just what you hoped it would be.
Because even here, in the middle of it, healing is still happening.
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