Healing Sleep Trauma
I have struggled with sleep since I was a child. After the age of 5 there wasn’t a day I ever felt safe. The abuse I experienced put an enormous amount of stress on my body, just like it would to do anyone’s. That, along with being sexually abused at night, made it so that I struggled to both go to sleep and stay asleep.
There have been a handful of days in my adult life where I have woken up rested. It’s amazing. On those mornings I wake up feeling like I can do anything. I can’t believe how much energy I have and how clear my thinking is. I am in awe that there are people who get to feel that regularly. Mostly though, sleep has been a constant challenge since it was disrupted as a child and through adolescence. I’ll go into this more another time, but I want to mention that a child that is abused has so many challenges ahead of them even after the abuse is over. Challenges that most people wouldn’t even think of. For me, sleep has been an area that I have struggled to heal.
Because I’d had no memory of ever sleeping well, when I became an adult, I just didn’t know how to do it.
Mental health struggles can create, or worsen, sleep challenges and sleep challenges can create, or worsen, mental health struggles. When sleep gets particularly bad for me, I begin to experience depression and a general anxiety that seems to hover with none of my usual tricks doing anything to help. When I get so completely exhausted from lack of sleep I can burst into tears over anything and I generally feel like my skin is so thin that it is difficult to participate in the world. All of this negatively affects the quality of my days, which then makes it all the more difficult to sleep. It can become a downward spiral and it is hard to break free.
Because I’d had no memory of ever sleeping well, when I became an adult, I just didn’t know how to do it. After I got married my Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) surfaced at full force. Everynight I dreaded going to bed. I struggled to go to sleep and when I did finally fall asleep I was flushed with nightmares that I would awaken from in terror and panic. To help me, my husband began to do something that I had never experienced before—he tucked me in and read to me until I fell asleep. Each night before he began reading he’d tell me that I could wake him for any reason. He told me I wasn’t alone anymore. When I’d have another terrible nightmare, if I hadn’t already woken him in my sleep from trying to claw and scream my way out of the terror, I’d finally emerge from dreams that were so violently vivid and I’d wake Kendall and he’d soothe me until I settled.
About ten years into our marriage, I decided it was time for me to learn to put myself to sleep. My husband’s gift to me has been life changing. It’s been remarkably healing to be loved and cared for like that. He has done so much to make night time safe for me. Yet, I was 30 and still didn’t know how to put myself to sleep or get back to sleep. I had finally reached a place where I was ready to learn and felt like it was an important step for me to know how to take care of myself in this way.
For a year and a half, Kendall and I slept separately so that I could have the space to find my way through this. It was an incredibly difficult journey filled with so many sleepless nights. It was hard to not turn to the comfort of my husband when I was so exhausted. If I asked him, I knew he would comfort me, he would stay up all night with me. He would do it today if I asked him.
However, I knew that I needed to learn to trust my own abilities and to gain that trust in myself I had to learn the skills. So, I set a bedtime for myself. Kendall and I would hang out until my bedtime. Then, I’d tuck myself in and read myself a story until I was tired. It took experimenting to find the sweet spot of being wound down enough by the story but not over tired that I started getting caught in anxiety, weepiness and thinking traps.
I taught myself to relax and found what worked to help me. There were ways I got to know myself–what soothed me and what didn’t– tricks that I found to help me settle after a bad day, waking from a nightmare and disrupted hormones. I drastically altered my diet, cutting out sugar and alcohol among other things. I learned what time of day exercising helped me to sleep better and how if I just was too busy during the day, even with good things, I wouldn’t settle at bedtime. I had developed an intimacy with Kendall through his care for me in this, and now I was developing an intimacy with myself.
When I felt comfortable enough with my ability to fall asleep alone and was finally ready to begin sleeping in the same bed we reintegrated it slowly. One of the most powerful gifts Kendall gave me was that he allowed everything about bedtime to be on my terms. He supported me and was actually the main advocate in the importance of me gaining a sense of power over my body, bed and sleeping. Sleep and safety around bedtime wasn’t a struggle of his and while he was very affected by the situation, it was an offering he felt able to freely give me.
Since then I’ve continued to find ways to support myself with sleep. I’ve also found ways to support my physiology and take more steps towards its healing. Since I began this journey toward sleep health I’ve discovered just how deeply my physiology affects my sleep and how much my sleep affects my mental health. In particular I’ve gotten to know my nervous system and the way mine in particular was dysfunctioning—the affect of stress and sex hormones on the nervous system—and making it nearly impossible for me to have stable, reliable sleep. Nervous system restoration has been an important piece of the puzzle in me getting regular sleep. I now have new challenges added to the heap due to Long COVID but while they are difficult, they have been a catalyst for new depths of physiological healing.
- Topics:
- Sleep