Don't pick it

 Small pleasures must correct great tragedies

Vita Sackville-West

I'm not great at small talk. I try, but it's just not my forte. I just want to jump straight to the part where I know the person and they know me, and we can all relax. I'm even less good at intense personal conversations with people I hardly know. For this reason, the counseling I've been having since I had PTSD after a car accident back in 2010 is only now beginning to feel more comfortable. I also tried spiritual direction recently but found that if talking about myself to a stranger was awkward, somehow talking about my faith with a stranger was even worse. I'm not sure why this is so, but I'm going to take a raincheck on that for a while.
I'm also something of an introvert, so that's part of it. Part of the difference is also cultural, I've decided. North Americans like to talk things out, work through things verbally. We Brits are a bit more of the soldier-on school. There's a place for both, of course. It's good for me to learn to talk more. On the other hand, I sometimes feel that the sessions poke me until I hurt then shoo me away for another month. I realized recently that I want and need to accept myself as the damaged but whole person that I am, and it's not always productive - and sometimes harmful - for me to rehash things that I think will only heal over time, slowly, and without me necessarily doing anything about it. As a friend very helpfully pointed out the other day, you're not meant to poke wounds, you're supposed to leave them alone to heal from the inside. Our bodies are designed to be always in the process of healing our wounds, building up new cells from the inside. It's really quite remarkable how our bodies heal. This is also the work of the Holy Spirit: God works in us all the time to regenerate us gradually from the inside. God is always for our healing, our slow salvation. There's a place for talking, verbalizing, affirming aloud. There's also a time to accept imperfection as a working model. A time to trust that we are acceptable to God and therefore to ourselves as the bumbling mess that we are. God knows what being wounded is like and is always already at work healing our wounds, creating order from chaos, restoring our souls.

regeneration: c. 1300, from late Latin regenerationem (nom. regeratio) 
"a being born again" (1)