Have been reading Judith Lewis Herman, MD, the psychiatrist who contributed the diagnosis "complex PTSD" some twenty or thirty years ago. She has long worked with survivors of abuse and trauma. She said something that resonated with me.

When a recovering patient goes through their memories and their story, especially the repressed, fragmented pieces around the abuse, time seems to stand still. Or, at the very least, time seems to pass much slower for them than it does for everybody else. It is as if time is frozen. It is natural for them to wonder -- as I did -- if they will spend the rest of their natural lives trapped in this heavy and frozen experience of time.

One sign that such a patient has moved on to another stage of healing and recovery, is that "time begins to move forward again", to quote Dr. Herman. There is even a sense of ordinary time being a special gift, after so long -- years in my case -- experiencing time as a form of purgatory.

I am having that experience now. My routine is mostly the same from week to week, with a schedule that is sometimes busy and sometimes waiting for the next thing. And the passage of time is no longer purgatorial. This doesn't mean that I am "cured". It means that I now get to go on healing in real time rather than in frozen post-traumatic time.

THis seems like a big deal to me.