I'm so glad I saw this today because for once I have an answer. I had that bed and couldn't afford to get a new one (a few months before a lot of trauma happened in it I'd splurged on an expensive new mattress and bed). I also had housemates in a small room that made it difficult to sleep on the couch, etc. I slept on the floor, tried rearranging my room, even slept on it with my head at the feet and horizontally. Over time I moved past it, painfully and mostly because I started dating someone and didn't know how to explain why I slept on the floor. But I still had years of nightmares in that bed and went through years of therapy, eventually working as an advocate and then in domestic violence research, etc. The bed came with me through many moves, the rest of college, life as a working adult, more relationships, graduate school, etc. I also did a lot of work on my own healing during that time. Now a decade later I just bought a house and that bed is going into my guest room because it's old and I need a new mattress. It was just a natural decision that I made because the mattress is old and I can afford a new one. It didn't even hit me until today what was happening because I haven't thought about how scared I was of that bed for so long. I've already ordered a mattress and had all but forgotten about how paralyzed with fear I used to feel when faced with that bed. Now it really is just a nice, but old mattress that will probably due for guests for a few more years before I replace it. Once I realized what it meant that I get a new one in my new house and my established life where I am very safe and feel safe and that it is no longer "my" primary bed...whoa boy did I shed some happy tears.

I'm in the middle of boxing up my stuff and I have a week left in it. I'm tearing up again just thinking about the person I was and how far I've come from surviving that.

I can't really tell you the why of it all either and I don't expect you to take the same path I did (hell if you think moving or buying a new bed will help and have the capacity to do so go for it). But I can tell you from the other side that it is possible to move past it, or at least it was for me.