Here's Your Proof

I recently celebrated my one year anniversary with my peer support services. 🎉🎉🎉

---

Just to be professional

these services included an individualized, recovery focused approach that promotes the development of wellness self-management, personal recovery,

natural support, adequate coping and self-advocacy skills as well as the development of independent living skills for housing, employment and full community inclusion.

---

Meeting with my mentor today for an annual recertification I had the opportunity to see how far I really have come in the past year. I have a tendency to sell myself short, especially if I don’t happen to have constant and immediate “proof” that I am growing.

My hope is to significantly

reduce the stigma and prejudice associated with mental illness by sharing my personal journey and promoting health awareness by advocating for the LGBTQ+ and alternative lifestyle communities.

Its easy to let the voices convince you that you are “blowing it out of proportion”, loosing your mind, not doing enough, and whatever else our minds tend to fill us with. To be able to reference back and see the black and white is so empowering.

I am so proud of how far I have come, I am pursuing my passions and learning self-acceptance. I am always becoming more self-aware and holding myself to the agreements I have made to be the healthiest me. I may stumble here and there but I keep moving. I know I am on the right path and that my journey has purpose, even just as a reference for others.

Let's empower each other

---

I was thankful for the short conversation with my mother today as well. My relationship with her has grown greatly since I had the big reveal conversation about how I'm on a journey to heal from my childhood trauma. It's not an easy thing for a mother to hear, that her child need therapy to heal from the life you were able to provide. I know she was simply working with what healing she had up until that point, and after my Dad came out she was now facing her biggest trauma since her childhood trauma.

Today she shared some concerns she has been having with my siblings and I was reminded just how much I am fighting for. Hearing how my siblings are all still struggling with their unhealed traumas reenergized one of my passions for what I am doing. I am breaking this cycle in our family! We all have individual healing to do but our family also needs a lot of healing. I will be able to help my “brothers and sisters in arms” to heal through the trauma of our own personal battlefields from childhood. So our new generation won't need to learn the lessons the hard way again.

Each of us faced a lot of traumas and each one build different defenses and coping mechanisms. i know my exact path of healing will not work for them because each path is created uniquely just as our traumas were built uniquely. My hope is that as I show them how I've begun to tear down my defenses and change my coping mechanisms to rediscover the raw me. that It may give them courage to do so on their own. If I can show them how I’ve learned to love myself, any of them can!

---

simply bringing awareness to the variety of trauma responses we have, we can begin to recognize when our reaction is not our identity. As we do this we begin to separate from the reality each particular trauma response has led us to believe.

when we hear ourselves repeating the same words and actions we can almost certainly recognize that this is an automated response our traumas have created for us. Then we can begin to decide more and more to not just let the autopilot run, to take our reality into our own hands. We begin to learn that our power and strength truly resides within us.

I was the bad kid, the one always acting out and fighting. At least that is what everyone assumed I was doing and I myself became convinced that I was just inherently “bad”. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my “acting out” was me standing up for what I knew wasn’t right. I refused to accept the reality our lives were trying to force feed us. I would slap away the spoon, so to say.

Since then I learned that I was always facing some pain that happened to be fueled by invalidation. "I should just accept it, sit down, shut up, and let it happen" words echoed in my mine daily. I refused, I refused, I refused until right after high school and then I began to submit and allow that toxic reality blind me. I had been convinced to accept it, and so, I became numb and hallow. Just a shell because I sat down and let it happen just like the world wanted.

I literally spent most of my adult life in a state of disassociation feeling as if I wasn’t actually living or doing any of this. It was as if I was watching my life play out like a movie in front of me and I couldn’t affect anything. Imagine the reality of an NPC if an actual person’s consciousness were downloaded into an NPC. They would feel trapped in that form, only being able to repeat the same actions over and over. That is much like how our Avatars feel to our higher selves. Our Avatars have been programmed to "just accept it" through abuse by this reality. There are many forms of abuse so people of all types can still reach this weapon. I don’t know if a part of my higher self was always with me or if I’m just now realizing that I was playing out my life as an avatar up until now.

---

As I began to awaken and heal I began to bring my higher self more and more into this body and have gained some control over that darn thing. Still I get stuck in NPC mode here and there but I recognize it so much quicker and log back in. right now I’m working towards creating a balance ⚖️

Maybe that is what I need to do, find some way to convince myself daily how far I truly have gone, like 50 first dates.

Remember, Love is Everywhere

- <3 KIT