Writing In Order To Do Battle

I can't find the answer to this, but I've been wondering about it for the last several days.  Wondering to the point of almost panicly worrying.  Does PTSD come and go?  For me that has been my experience, but I can't find anyone else saying the same thing.  I've wondered about this for years now, ever since a doctor gave me a word for what was happening to me.  I'm a bit funny with the way I describe things not realizing its something "real" and enough other people have had the same thing going on that they gave it a name.  Just this past year I discovered the word dissociate and what it was, and lo and behold it's what I've been calling "zoning", "being gone somewhere" or "losing time".  I have a great fear of re-entering the battle and once again ending up in those dark places where I lose my way.  I stopped writing when I got to a comfortable place.  God is held at arms length, but I can catch glimpses of Him in church on Sunday and through the overwhelming kindness of my church family.  It's a safe place in my journey, but I'm being nudged along to go farther.

I haven't been writing, anywhere, and that concerns me a bit, in the sense that it should concern me, but it doesn't--not really.  I write when I'm actively dealing with things and I haven't written in months.  I've been asked to make a list of fears and concerns to work through in counselling.
I would say "challenged", but that just sounds too baptist to me.  Of course to me it's not just a list, it's the contents of the boxes I've been dragging around all these years.  In some ways its the monsters in my closets that have come so close to destroying me in the past.  I use the word past in a way that includes not only my personal ancient past, but my recent past too.  Just yesterday I read two bloggers who posted on the topic of writing either directly or indirectly.  One of them sounds like he is fairly close to where I am in my own journey while the other one is in a place that often seems unattainable to me.  Both of them are writers that speak to me in the deep places of my soul.  http://redemptionpictures.com/2014/09/12/when-writing-is-an-act-of-hope/
http://messytheology.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/when-there-are-no-words/

Writing for me has always been cathartic.  I started my first little diary in third grade.  I still had it, up until almost four years ago when our house burned down.  As an adult, reading that first diary I ever kept, brought back memories, good and bad.  Almost all the good things in there involved going to my grandma's house, the food she made, the stories she told and helping her hang out laundry, pick apples and watch her work in her garden.  When I was old enough to not pull plants instead of weeds, I was actually allowed to go in the garden.  Other events I wrote about I remember writing carefully in case my diary was ever stolen and read.  My careful writing at age 9 wasn't careful enough and I got in trouble for what I wrote.  I didn't keep a diary again until 5th grade.  I learned my lesson and wrote carefully and left out the most ugly parts.  Yet years later reading my diary from elementary I again saw those events I so carefully edited in my writing, and the memories invoked were not edited.
The power of the written word is incredible.  And those were just my own childish writings, yet they held the key to my memory, to my own story.

By 7th grade I was writing furiously and unedited, except for the terrible secret I carried that I couldn't write about even in my own journal.  The raw anger flowed from my pen and filled spiral notebooks.  Anger, hurt, and betrayal, along with the pettiness of junior high drama, were my themes. I wrote for me and only me.  I wrote to keep my sanity and a place to siphon off the anger and rage that threatened to tear me apart.  My anger grew as my understanding of what had happened to me grew.  I never gave it a word until 2003.  I couldn't name it.  I was too afraid.  The anger was too powerful and I barely kept it in check through my writing.  By 9th grade I was learning to control the anger through other means and harness it.  I made good use of it and the abuse at home finally stopped, for me.  Still I wrote.  My survival depended upon it.

I wrote all through high school and into college at Bob Jones University, where I again looked for help and thought I found it.  I would have been better off to have kept writing and skipped the counselling.  The times I stopped writing were the times I was being successful at locking down all my boxes and shutting off emotions.  But of course anger was a main component of all the boxes and anger can only be contained for so long.  Thus the cycle of writing while depressed, angry and trying to close back the boxes that another counseling attempt had opened began.  I haven't written anywhere for a few months.  It's been different this time though.  At least one of my monsters has been destroyed and not all emotion has been cut off.  I think I've been experiencing life the way that other people do, to a point.  Real emotions have still been in play.  I've cried and didn't shut it off with anger.  I can't remember doing that before.  It's been incredible to smile and cry and not have to do my usual routine in order to "be normal".  I like it.  The problem is that this is only a plateau and there is a long journey still ahead.  I've been content here for long enough.  It was a nice break from the battle, but it's time to re-engage.  Once again, I write.