What Helped You in the Initial Stages of Healing/Rebuilding?

Different people respond to that kind of abuse differently. You have been through trauma, and healing legitimately takes time. You're putting yourself through mental physiotherapy, basically. 1) Don't freak out about clutter and cleaning to an extreme if you live alone. When something gets unreasonably bad (garbage smells) do something about it. Learn not to stress about your surroundings not being perfectly clean. Rebuilding your life takes time. Work, school and rest are more important. Yes, having things better organized is helpful too BUT you're also coming out of trauma and stressing yourself with cleaning that isn't going to go anywhere needs to be low priority for a bit until you're doing better. Focus on one thing at a time. Get the most pertinent things done when they need to be done, but only after you are able to better manage your work and school schedule as best as possible. Once you have a feel for your work, school and health schedule, add a larger cleaning task you want to get done once a week when you have a block of time available for it. Cleaning is important, but it is okay to let things get a bit cluttered and disorganized, just not completely gross preferably, until you better pull out of this. 2) Get into good health habits. Drink more water, eat more greens, vegetables and lean protein. If you are female, don't be afraid to have red meat more often to keep your iron up. Try to go for a jog, walks more often, sit ups, push-ups, yoga stretching if you know any- simple stuff you can do on your own. Don't overdo it and burn yourself further. 3) Try to eat a substantial meal that digests slow a bit before going to work or doing anything school related if you can help it (you won't need to distract yourself with meal breaks as often). Drink water more often (and plain tea, etc). Avoid sugar and caffeine unless you're tired and a pick-me-up can help (or you're feeling hypoglycemic). Don't beat yourself up for not being able to get into a good natural schedule for work and self-care right away. This is part of trauma and it takes time to heal. Try to notice when things trigger you and give yourself slow exposure therapy to them. Find people and places that are non-judgemental, understand and are familiar with trauma. There will be other people there that will help you understand trauma, or help you identify your own by hearing things they have been through that caused them trauma as well. 4)I don't know your personal life, but trauma tends to lend very, very poorly to intimate relationships. If you have someone like that in your life already, that is one thing, but if not, be careful. Most people will not understand how to be close to you in a way that is not going to set you off and make things worse. Most people will trigger you or not know how to build a healthy, safe repertoire with you first before considering being intimate with you. Intimacy is often a very bad idea when you are recovering from trauma. You are vulnerable, and it will likely trigger you and set back healing. There are very few people who understand how to be close to someone coming out of trauma without making it worse or unintentionally being a part of the problem. Be very, very careful in attempting to have some form of an intimate relationship with anyone if they do not understand trauma well. They WILL regress your recovery. Only concern yourself with safe, light friendships that do not demand a lot of you. People who do not understand trauma well, or how to handle it well will give you attitude problems, make it worse, blame you or put you down. Stay the fuck away from anyone like that, but do your best to catch yourself when you are having reactions based out of trauma responses that make it hard for you to be around people and hard for people to be around you.

5) Try to get your body on a more natural schedule that relies on electronics less to keep your daily life sorted. It will help you have a more natural synchronization with work and school.

/r/raisedbynarcissists Thread