I have learned that all those unhelpful "behaviours" that I have had, have served me well in hiding from all the tough memories and emotions and allowing me to function in life at some level.

In T we are asked to look at those things, to strip away all our defences and therefore it follows that we are going to start to feel that painful stuff and have to rely on our familiar coping strategies to get us through, to allow us to continue to function, so in my experience both the symptoms and intensity of behaviouurs to control them become worse.

However T is also about learning to sit with those feelings without feeling overwhelmed, to reduce the intensity of the feelings we may have in repsonse to trauma and so again in my experience, over time not only do the feelings become less intense and therefore the need to escape them becomes less urgent, I am also slowly learning strategies to manage the symptoms in a healthier way.

Although I still have a way to go, certainly some of the old faithful coping things sre easier to ignore right now, so yes I think it is darkest before dawn and as posted above, hang on to the fact that dawn does come, always.