• HealBridge

Six or eight months in, when the practical things are working and the worst is over, a great many women describe the same experience: a week where they cannot function, for no reason they can identify, having been fine.

It usually has a reason. It is just not a reason anybody thinks to look for.

The dates that do it

• The wedding anniversary. Reliably the hardest, and it catches people who thought they were long past minding.
• The date you left. Often difficult in a complicated way, because it is both a good and a terrible day.
• The date of a particular incident, especially the worst one.
• His birthday, and the children’s birthdays.
• Festive periods. Christmas, Sallah, New Year. Everybody else is with family. These weeks are difficult for safety reasons too.
• The anniversary of a pregnancy loss, which women rarely mention and which is frequently the heaviest one.
• Court dates, and the anniversaries of court dates.
• The change of seasons, or the start of a school term, which put you back into the same weather or the same routine as the year before.

The body often gets there before you do. Many women describe a fortnight of feeling terrible and only afterwards realising what the date was.

What a trigger actually is

Not a bad memory. Something in the present that your body has filed as danger, which produces the physical reaction before any thinking happens.

The common ones are unglamorous: a particular aftershave, a car engine that sounds like his, a raised voice in a shop, footsteps in a corridor, a phone ringing at a certain hour, a smell of cooking, a song, the sound of a gate, keys.

Two things are worth knowing. It is not a memory you are choosing to have, so being told to stop dwelling on it is useless advice. And the reaction is genuinely physical — heart racing, sweating, feeling sick, going blank — which is why reasoning with yourself does not stop it.

What the body does after all this covers the mechanism properly.

What helps with a date you can see coming

1. Mark it. Write the difficult dates down at the start of the year. Knowing why a week is hard removes most of its power, because the frightening part is usually feeling terrible for no reason.
2. Do not be alone on it. Arrange something ordinary with somebody, in advance, and make it a fixed arrangement rather than an intention.
3. Plan the day rather than surviving it. An empty day is worse than a busy one.
4. Tell one person in advance, so somebody knows why you are quiet.
5. Lower what you expect of yourself. Do not schedule anything demanding. Treat it like a day when you are physically unwell, because functionally you are.
6. Decide in advance about contact. Anniversaries are exactly when messages arrive, and deciding at the time is much harder.
7. Do something deliberate with the day if you want to. Some women reclaim the date — a meal out, a small thing bought, a day at the beach. It works for some and not for others, and it is worth trying once.

What helps with the ones you cannot see coming

Name it, silently and specifically. “This is a reaction, it is that smell, I am not in danger now.” That sounds trivial and it is the single most effective thing, because it reconnects the physical reaction to a cause and it passes faster.

Then get your body somewhere different. Stand up, go outside, walk, put cold water on your hands and face, hold something and describe it. Any of these interrupts the loop better than trying to think your way out.

Breathe out longer than you breathe in. Not deep breathing, which frequently makes it worse — a long slow out-breath, for a minute or two.

And afterwards, write down what set it off. Over a few months you will have a list, and the list makes the reactions predictable rather than random, which is most of what makes them frightening.

The children have them too

Often on the same dates, and usually expressed as behaviour rather than as sadness: clinginess, anger, bedwetting, refusing school, stomach aches with no cause.

Keep the routine unchanged on those days, tell the school something is happening at home, and do not require them to talk about it. Marking a date quietly — going somewhere, eating something particular — often helps children more than a conversation does. How they express all this is set out separately.

How it changes

The first year is the worst because every date is the first one. The second year is noticeably better, and by the third most women describe the anniversaries as noticed rather than survived.

Progress is not a straight line, and a bad month after six good ones is normal rather than a relapse. The measure that matters is not whether you have bad days, but how long they last and how quickly you come back — and both of those improve steadily even when the days themselves do not feel any easier.

When it is more than a difficult date

Get help if the reactions are constant rather than tied to particular things, if you are avoiding so much that your life is narrowing, if you are having flashbacks where you are back in it rather than remembering it, if you are drinking to get through, or if a bad week has become a bad three months.

That responds to treatment and it responds well. Counselling is one of our six programmes and you do not need to be in crisis to ask.

Questions people ask

If you need help now

If you are in immediate danger, call 112. To talk to HealBridge, email us at hello@healbridge.org, or use the form on our contact page. Every page on this site has a Quick Exit button at the top right, and pressing the letter E three times does the same thing.