When Safety Feels Strange: Healing from PTSD After Survival
For those who have endured trauma, the journey to healing is rarely linear. The label of PTSD can feel both like a revelation and a relief, offering language for an experience that once felt unspeakable. Yet, as peace settles in and the nervous system slowly learns to trust safety, new challenges and unexpected emotions arise. This blog explores the complexities of living with PTSD after survival, the paradox of comfort, and the sacred work of teaching your body that the war is finally over.
The Relief of a Name
When you first receive the label PTSD, there can be an unexpected sense of relief. Finally, a name for the chaos. A word that wraps language around the invisible storm you’ve weathered for years. The label becomes a kind of tether — not because you wish to be defined by it, but because it tells you that what you’ve endured has a name, that you are not broken, only human.
The Triumph in Survival
As you start to unwind from some of the most traumatic chapters of your life, pride naturally surfaces. Look at what I’ve built despite it all, you think. There’s triumph in acknowledging that you’ve survived — that you’ve found a way to live, work, love, and create, even as you carried invisible wounds.
The Comfort of the Well-Rehearsed Story
It can even feel easy to tell your stories, the ones that once haunted you. They become well-rehearsed lines, performed to an audience that changes but always reacts the same way. The repetition feels safe; predictability is soothing to an anxious mind. You can anticipate the listener’s reaction, even your abuser’s hypothetical denial. In a strange way, the retelling becomes comforting — a controlled re-enactment of what once felt uncontrollable.
The Return of Pain in Safety
But the thing about PTSD that can leave you most disturbed, most vulnerable, is when the anesthesia of dissociation begins to wear off. On a random Tuesday, as sunlight spills across your desk, as you do something you love, the pain returns sharply to your chest.
Without warning, without a visible trigger, your windpipe tightens. Air escapes your lungs, your vision narrows, and a heavy blanket of sadness descends. The once-lustrous world dulls to gray. There’s so little oxygen in the room. The wave hits hard, rogue and uninvited.
The Body’s Reluctant Trust
According to the American Psychiatric Association (2013), this is one hallmark of post-traumatic stress disorder — the body’s fight, flight, or freeze response misfiring in the absence of danger. The nervous system, conditioned by years of survival, continues to brace for impact long after the threat is gone. It doesn’t yet trust safety.
The Loneliness of the Summit
There are still days like this for me. I struggle to let the waves wash over me, to let pain surface. I spent years repressing it — shoving it deeper, tacking it to my rucksack of “to be unpacked later.” I climbed mountains carrying it all: crawling on all fours, gripping the slippery slope of survival, promising myself I’d unpack it once I reached the peak — once life was calm.
But no one tells you how lonely the summit can be. Who is there to guide you when you finally arrive at safety? When you are warm, fed, and free to move about the cabin without criticism? It’s disorienting to live in abundance after years of scarcity. You’re grateful for clean water, for food you can eat without permission, for peace and space to nap, to make art. But something feels foreign about the ease.
The Body Keeps the Score
Your body remembers. It stays alert, ready to protect, even when your mind insists you’re safe. Trauma researchers like Bessel van der Kolk (2014) explain that the body “keeps the score” — storing unprocessed memories and sensations in the nervous system. Safety itself can feel like a threat because your body has not yet learned to differentiate peace from the pause between battles.
Eventually, you must unpack what you carried to the top. And once it’s all laid out — every scar, every memory you said you’d process “later” — the true work begins.
The Practice of Healing
It’s jarring to feel pain that doesn’t seem to belong to your present reality. You can’t always explain it to friends or family because you don’t know which memory it belongs to. But your body does. Somatic therapists call this implicit memory — emotional and sensory imprints stored without words (Porges, 2011). They surface not to harm, but to heal.
I’ve learned to ride the wave. To remind myself I will not drown. To trust that my body, once my enemy, is now my ally. Healing isn’t in the climb — it’s in the unraveling. It’s in expanding the capacity to feel everything: old pain and new joy, grief and grace.
When life finally becomes peaceful, you begin to see just how horrifying your past truly was. What you once normalized reveals itself as the monster it was. Yet this revelation, as painful as it is, is sacred. The magic happens in the unfolding — in the small rituals of care that remind your body it’s safe now: a gentle yoga class, a quiet walk through the woods, or curling up on the couch with a familiar, comforting show.
Healing is not about forgetting what happened. It’s about teaching your body that the war is over — and that the warmth of safety is not a warning, but an invitation to rest.
This is your invitation to discover deep, rich rest with me in my petite retreat series. Retreats designed to help the bone deep exhausted woman come home to herself through both passive and active rest. Find the details on our next retreats here: