In reply to Jen Jones:
> The main hurdle was not to compare myself to anyone else including my past or future self.
That's the core of it - not comparing!
I had a bad climbing accident in 1968. I went from being a highly promising beginner to a complete gibbering wreck. I didn't make the connection. I didn't realise I was traumatised. Nobody else realised it either. People - certainly in climbing - just didn't talk about trauma bad then. It took me years to recover.
In the mid-70s, after two bad years in my life (when I tried to 'climb through the pain' - didn't work very well!) I spent a long time soloing, particularly in the mountains in Ireland, on my own. There was nobody to bail me out. If I came off, nobody would even realise until someone came to the hut the following weekend. Even then, they might not realise. They would have no idea where to go looking for me. It was pretty much total commitment.
Because obviously every route might be my last, I had to listen to my subconscious simply to stay alive. It didn't matter how good I'd once been; that was gone. It didn't matter what I'd soloed yesterday; that was irrelevant. I had to live in the here and now - in the moment.
Every time I went against my subconscious, it was a mistake! There were some very harsh lessons. But 'manning up' with all the odds stacked against me just wasn't going to work. And, in truth, it rarely works.
More than anything, the human spirit is resilient. You recover. But the best way to recover is to be kind to yourself - and to listen to that inner voice - and to learn to trust it. Trusting it will also stand one in good stead in many arenas far removed from climbing.
Good luck with Dan and you Jen with recovery. In an odd way, it's very life-enhancing. Often you come out of recovery, stronger. Almost always you come out different - in a good way.
Mick