Five months, three days and exactly eight hours. No, just kidding.
First of all: Congratulation on your courage to take on your fears, your trauma. Your decision to work on them alone deserves applause.
What we sometimes forget is that healing is not „Trauma-trauma-trauma-healed“. It´s not a step, it´s a process. Every process is made of the starting point, the end-point and aaalll the steps, the whole distance, in between. The distance in between actually is the biggest part of it.
So, if you are healing you will always start off being much closer to the pain and sorrow than to the healing, to the good place. With every step you take, you´ll get a little bit away from the bad place, then a little bit more and a little bit more. And at some point, way down the line, when half of the journey is done, you will be closer to the healing, to the good place, than to the pain. But that is not where the healing begins, it’s where the healing pretty much is almost over.
It also isn´t always a linear process. In my experience steps backwards are equally important as the ones forward. I think that is to save or fixate the progress.
If you ask „how long“ I don´t think you want to hear a date or an actual number of days, weeks or months. I think you probably know that every healing process is different. It has to be, because every person, every life is different. I think what you want to know is if you are making enough progress. Or maybe you feel like you are making too little.
What is safe to say is that by talking about your healing progress you have made the decision to heal and that again means, that you are on your journey.
Try to work on your perspective to feel less frustrated. I assume you know online maps and have seen what happens when you are zooming in or out on those maps. If you put yourself on that road as a dot, fairly close to the starting point and zoom out, the you-dot will pretty much blend with the starting point. There will be no distance between them, the map will show no progress. But what if you zoom in? There will be a very distinctive difference between the starting point and the you-dot.
In other words: try to see the steps that you already have taken, even the smallest victories that you have achieved and celebrate them. Don´t focus on the big steps that you´ll yet have to take. Try your best now and now and now, knowing that you are on your way, taking the steps, walking the mile. Because in the end, that´s what it will have been: a pile of steps.