Trauma has no expiration date. It does not go away the longer you wait. It does not go away the longer I wait.

And in fact… it just does not go away. No matter how much I deal with it, no matter how much I talk or cry or process it. You can spend the rest of your life in therapy, talk about it, and the trauma still happened. Trauma happened, it will always have happened. It doesn’t go away from your past, it doesn’t expire, it has never not happened.

When I was ready to start healing, I finally found a therapist who was right for me. And when I started therapy, I thought that he had a magical toolbox for extracting my trauma from my past. I thought I’d lay on his therapist couch like I’d lay on a dentist chair and he would carefully pull out those painful, infected roots that trauma had grown in my soul. I thought that he had all the answers, he just didn’t give them to me. I’d have to earn his trust and prove my worthiness, and my therapist would fix me. Kind of like a dentist. Because the trauma I had been carrying had caused a painful infection and I had tried to extract it myself without anesthetics.

Trauma has no expiration date. The body remembers even if the brain tries actively not to remember. So what’s the point? What is the point of therapy if it doesn’t even make the trauma disappear from my past? What’s the point in breathing techniques and hours and hours of Tetris, if the trauma doesn’t go away? Apparently Tetris can be used to prevent post-traumatic stress symptoms. Why do I spend years talking to a therapist, if he won’t even fucking take the trauma away?

Therapy isn’t extraction. So many times I wanted to quit therapy, because I didn’t feel any different. I didn’t see the difference. I wasn’t turning into a different person who had different experiences in her past. I thought with enough therapy, I could finally become someone else, someone different. I thought with therapy I could become someone that never had that trauma to begin with.

One of my old coworkers once said something that still, eight or so years later, affects me a lot. I think about it a lot when I’m burned out or frustrated or just feel like I’m not advancing in whatever shit I’m going through.

“It doesn’t get easier, you just go further.”

Sure, the quote was originally about cycling. How practice and consistency makes you go further, but cycling still takes hard work. The roads don’t get easier and the hills don’t get smaller. One day you might be able to cycle for 20 minutes, and the next day 21 minutes. How your muscles still ache, you’re still thirsty and in pain after exercise, but your muscles can take more than before. I’ve been holding onto this quote from my workmate all there years and every time I fall apart, I go back to it. “Today wasn’t easier, but I still went further.”

Therapy does the same for mental health. Talking does the same. Trauma doesn’t go away. Whatever caused that trauma, it still happened. You still have trauma. Traumatic whatever has happened, you will remember it, you will be affected by it. Your mind and body remembers. You still have panic attacks and fears and nightmares.

But you just go further.

Maybe you still cry every day, but panic attacks happen less or take less time to settle. Maybe you don’t have nightmares every single night. Maybe you’re able to get out of the bed a little faster some mornings.

Maybe you can answer a phone call without earth shattering anxiety or you can book the appointment you’ve been avoiding.

That has been the hardest thing to accept in therapy. Why am I spending all this time and money to do something my therapist can’t even take away? Why won’t he just fix me and take it all away? Because even if my brain actively didn’t remember, my body does. Even if I was unconscious, the body remembers. And trauma does not go away, it has no expiration date. Before therapy, I felt constantly unsafe, because I had no idea where he might pop up. I could be at my safest place, with my safest people, and he might just walk past. I had no control of my panic attacks, and I was so frustrated that he had the power to make me fall apart in front of a coworker just by walking past.

I still have no control whether he walks past. But I do have control whether I fall apart.

It’s been over 20 years, and my brain and my body still remembers. But somehow, year after year, the anniversary day is a little lighter. I don’t wake up in bad mood. I don’t spend the anniversary day in bed. This year it wasn’t even my first thought when I woke up. I am not scared to go to certain cities in case I might bump into him. But when I talk about it, even with my safest people, I still tear up. It isn’t easier. Trauma hasn’t expired. But I’ve gone a hell of a lot further than I ever expected.