Before anything else: This post is not a substitute for trauma therapy. Complex PTSD requires professional support. If you are in crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) or the Crisis Text Line (text HOME to 741741). Journaling is a supplementary tool that works best alongside professional care, not instead of it.
Amara is 34. She grew up in a household that required constant vigilance — reading her parent's mood before entering a room, adjusting her behavior to prevent escalation, learning early that her feelings were inconvenient and her needs a burden. She was never safe enough to be ordinary. Now, twenty years later, she is professionally successful, relationally careful, and in possession of an inner critic so well-developed it can identify a threat before the conscious mind does.
She was diagnosed with complex PTSD three years ago. She has a therapist. She also journals — carefully, with specific guardrails — because the window between sessions is long, and the material doesn't wait for Thursday.
She uses Trovera specifically because the entries stay on her device. This is not incidental. For someone whose history involves having privacy violated and trust weaponized, the knowledge that her journal content cannot reach anyone else is not a preference — it's the condition under which honest reflection is possible at all.
What Makes CPTSD Different From Standard PTSD
Standard PTSD typically develops from a single traumatic event — an assault, an accident, a disaster. Complex PTSD (CPTSD) develops from prolonged, repeated trauma — often relational, often beginning in childhood, often involving a person on whom the survivor depended for care or safety.
The ICD-11 includes CPTSD as a distinct diagnosis, characterized by the core PTSD symptoms (re-experiencing, avoidance, hyperarousal) plus what are called Disturbances in Self-Organization (DSO): severe difficulties in emotional regulation, negative self-concept, and disturbances in relationships. These DSO features are what make CPTSD clinically and experientially distinct — and what make standard journaling advice potentially unsuitable or even harmful.
Pete Walker's framework for CPTSD identifies four primary trauma responses — fight, flight, freeze, and fawn — that operate as automatic survival strategies developed in response to prolonged threat:
Fight — hypervigilance, perfectionism, controlling behavior. The attempt to manage the environment to prevent threat.
Flight — anxiety, overwork, constant activity. The attempt to escape threat through movement.
Freeze — dissociation, numbing, shutdown. The withdrawal inward when neither fight nor flight is available.
Fawn — people-pleasing, self-erasure, compulsive helpfulness. The attempt to neutralize threat by becoming whatever the threat wants.
Most people with CPTSD have a primary 4F pattern and secondary patterns that activate depending on context. Amara's primary pattern is fawn — she learned early that her safety came from anticipating and meeting others' needs. Her secondary is fight, which emerges when she feels cornered.
Understanding these patterns is not the goal of journaling — that's what therapy is for. Understanding them is the prerequisite for journaling safely.
Why Standard Journaling Can Harm People With CPTSD
Standard journaling advice — "write about your feelings," "process what happened," "explore your emotions" — assumes a nervous system that can hold the observer position while examining difficult material. It assumes the "window of tolerance" is wide enough.
Daniel Siegel's window of tolerance describes the optimal zone of arousal for processing emotional material: alert enough to engage with it, regulated enough not to be overwhelmed by it. For most people without trauma history, this window is wide enough to accommodate most journaling content. For people with CPTSD, the window is often narrow — the distance between regulated and flooded is shorter, and the triggers that cross it are less predictable.
Standard journaling can push a CPTSD journaler outside the window in two directions:
Hyperarousal (above the window): flooding, panic, emotional overwhelm, dissociation upward into agitation. Signs include racing thoughts, physical agitation, hyperventilation, inability to stay with the writing.
Hypoarousal (below the window): numbing, dissociation, shutdown, depersonalization. Signs include feeling blank, detached, as if you're watching yourself from outside, loss of the ability to feel anything about what you're writing.
Both are signs that the session has moved outside the therapeutic window. The instruction — for both — is the same: stop. Ground. Return to the present.
Grounding Before Every Session
For anyone with CPTSD, grounding before a journaling session is not optional — it is the foundation that determines whether the session stays within the window.
A simple pre-session grounding sequence:
5-4-3-2-1 sensory grounding: Name five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch (and feel their texture), two you can smell, one you can taste. This sequence anchors the nervous system in the present environment, which is the antidote to re-entering traumatic material through memory.
Slow breathing: Four counts in, hold for four, six counts out. The extended exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Do this three times before beginning.
Orienting: Look around the room slowly, noticing exits, noticing what's safe. This is a nervous system regulation technique, not paranoia — it communicates to the survival brain that the present environment is not the past environment.
After grounding, check in: on a scale of 0–10, how regulated do you feel? Below 5, journaling about difficult material is not recommended. Write something low-stakes or use the Gratitude Vault mode instead.
Safe Journaling Approaches for CPTSD
The approaches that work for CPTSD journaling share a common structure: they stay in the present, work at the edge of the window without crossing it, and use parts language rather than merged language.
Present-moment anchoring. Start with what is true right now, not what was true then. "Right now, I am sitting in my living room. The lamp is on. I am safe." This is not denial of the past — it's a regulated starting point from which the past can be approached.
Parts language. Rather than "I feel terrified," try "a part of me feels terrified." The distinction is not semantic: merged language (I feel X) can collapse the observer into the feeling, which is what flooding looks like. Parts language maintains the observer position — the regulated adult who can be curious about the part rather than becoming it.
Titration. Approach difficult material in small pieces, not in full immersion. Write about the peripheral aspects of a difficult experience before approaching the core. Write about how the experience affected your body, your sleep, your behavior — before writing about the experience itself.
Time-bounded sessions. Set a timer. Ten to fifteen minutes maximum for sessions involving difficult material. When the timer goes off, end — even mid-thought. Ground again. The nervous system needs the boundary.
Not ending on a difficult note. After any session involving difficult material, close with something that brings you back to the present and regulated: gratitude, something small that's good, a physical sensation that's neutral or pleasant.
The Right Personas for CPTSD Journaling
Trovera is the only voice-first journaling app that offers 7 clinical perspectives and 5 AI personas — with all data stored on your device.
For CPTSD specifically, the persona and perspective choices are clinically significant — not all are equally appropriate for all states.
The Balm — for hyperarousal and acute distress. De-escalating, calming, non-analytical. Does not push toward insight when the nervous system is activated. The right choice for sessions when you're above the window and need to come down before you can engage with anything. Never The Catalyst when you're flooding.
The Presence — for the freeze/numbing states. Non-directive, attending without pressure. For sessions when you're in hypoarousal — disconnected, numb, dissociated — The Presence doesn't push. It simply holds space and follows whatever you say, however fragmented.
The Hearth — for shame and the inner critic. Warm, non-judgmental, stabilizing. For CPTSD, shame is often one of the most activated states — the sense of being fundamentally flawed rather than having done something wrong. The Hearth doesn't analyze shame. It doesn't try to correct the inner critic. It provides a relational experience of warmth that the survival brain slowly registers as safe.
The Catalyst — only when regulated and ready. Challenging, growth-oriented. Never use The Catalyst when you're in a trauma state. Use it only in sessions when you're well within the window, have been grounded, and are specifically working with material you're ready to approach directly. The Catalyst is for later-stage trauma processing, not for acute distress.
The Meridian — for practical planning. Structured, goal-oriented. For sessions that are not about emotional processing at all — practical planning, decisions, things that need clarity. The Meridian keeps the session anchored in the present and future rather than the past.
The Right Clinical Perspectives for CPTSD
Radical Acceptance — for the freeze and fawn patterns specifically. CPTSD involves fighting reality in ways that compound suffering: fighting the fact of the childhood that happened, fighting the fact that the person who should have protected you didn't. Radical Acceptance (from Linehan's Dialectical Behavior Therapy) doesn't ask you to approve of what happened — it asks you to stop fighting the fact that it did. This reduces the suffering that comes from resistance without requiring you to process the trauma content directly.
ACT Counselor — for the flight pattern. When anxiety and overwork are the primary pattern, ACT's focus on values and committed action rather than symptom reduction is more useful than approaches that focus on the feeling. "What matters to me, and what am I doing about it regardless of how I feel?" is the ACT question.
Narrative Therapy — for working with the toxic shame and the inner critic that Pete Walker identifies as central CPTSD features. Narrative Therapy separates the person from the story — "you are not broken; you had an experience that taught you you were broken, and you can examine that teaching." This distinction is clinically meaningful for CPTSD because toxic shame feels like a fact rather than an interpretation.
Psychological Perspective — for pattern work, only when regulated. Surfacing what's operating beneath the surface is valuable in trauma work, but only from a position of regulatory stability. Not for acute states.
Voice and Privacy for CPTSD
Trovera uses secure on-device processing to transcribe your thoughts — your entries live in your phone's local storage, not on our servers.
For Amara, this is the precondition for honest reflection. CPTSD often involves a history of violated privacy and weaponized trust. The knowledge that journal entries exist on a server — even encrypted, even with good privacy policy — activates a vigilance response that narrows what feels safe to say. On-device storage doesn't just protect the content. It changes the psychological conditions under which the content can be produced.
Voice has an additional advantage for CPTSD journaling: it removes the performance pressure of writing. Many people with CPTSD have a vigilant inner critic that monitors their writing for what's acceptable to say, what's too much, what sounds pathetic or melodramatic. Speaking bypasses that monitoring function more effectively than writing, because spoken language outpaces the editorial filter. The raw version of what you're feeling arrives before the critic can manage it.
What Amara's Journaling Practice Actually Looks Like
She journals four times a week, always after grounding. She never journals about traumatic content close to bedtime — the nervous system needs time to settle before sleep. She has a rule: if she's above a 7 on her personal distress scale (0–10), she uses The Balm and the Gratitude Vault mode, not processing material.
Most sessions are 10–12 minutes. She uses The Hearth most often because shame is her most activated state — the thing her inner critic returns to most reliably. The AI's non-judgmental presence doesn't fix the shame, but it creates a relational experience of safety that her nervous system didn't have in childhood and hasn't had consistently since.
Last month she had a session where she said, about the parent who had caused most of the harm: "I think I'm still waiting for an apology that's never going to come, and I think I organize my whole life around not needing it." She hadn't known that before she said it. It was the kind of sentence that takes four minutes of speaking to find.
Her therapist knows she journals. They use the sessions as material — she often brings what she found in a Trovera session to Thursday's appointment. The journal is not the therapy. It's the space between sessions where the material doesn't have to wait.
Try Trovera free for 7 days at gettrovera.com. See features at gettrovera.com/features.
FAQs
Is journaling safe for CPTSD?
Journaling can be a useful supplementary practice for CPTSD when done with appropriate safeguards — grounding before sessions, time limits, present-anchoring, and the use of parts language rather than merged emotional language. It is not safe without these guardrails, and it is not a substitute for trauma therapy. The approach described in this post should be implemented alongside professional support, not instead of it.
What is the window of tolerance and why does it matter for journaling?
Daniel Siegel's window of tolerance describes the optimal arousal zone for emotional processing — alert enough to engage, regulated enough not to be overwhelmed. For people with CPTSD, this window is often narrow. Journaling that pushes outside the window (into flooding/hyperarousal above, or numbing/dissociation below) is not therapeutic — it's retraumatizing. The grounding practices and session limits described here are designed to keep sessions within the window.
What is the 4F model and how does it apply to journaling?
Pete Walker's 4F model describes four trauma response patterns — fight, flight, freeze, and fawn — that develop as survival strategies in prolonged traumatic environments. Understanding your primary pattern guides which journaling approach is most appropriate. Fawn patterns benefit from The Hearth and Narrative Therapy (for separating self from the self-erasure story). Freeze patterns benefit from The Presence (non-directive, holding space). Fight patterns benefit from The Balm (de-escalating) before any processing work.
Why is on-device storage particularly important for CPTSD?
CPTSD often involves a history of violated privacy and trust. For many survivors, the knowledge that journal entries exist on a server — however secure — activates the hypervigilance that characterized the original traumatic environment. On-device storage changes the psychological conditions of disclosure: the entries cannot reach anyone. This isn't just a privacy preference — for many trauma survivors, it's the precondition for honest reflection.
Should I journal alone about traumatic memories with CPTSD?
No. Direct exposure writing about traumatic memories, without the regulatory support of a trained therapist, is not recommended for CPTSD. The approaches described here — present-anchoring, parts language, titration, time limits — are designed to process peripheral material and current-state material safely. Core traumatic memories should be approached in therapy, not solo journaling.
Which Trovera persona is best for CPTSD?
The Balm for hyperarousal and acute distress. The Presence for freeze and dissociated states. The Hearth for shame and inner critic activation. Never The Catalyst in a trauma state. The Meridian only for practical, non-trauma-content sessions. The persona choice should match your current arousal state, not your journaling goal.
How long should CPTSD journaling sessions be?
Ten to fifteen minutes maximum for sessions involving difficult material. Set a timer. End when it goes off — even mid-thought. Ground again after the session. The nervous system needs the time boundary. Longer sessions with difficult material risk pushing outside the window of tolerance without adequate time to return.
Can voice journaling help with CPTSD?
Voice journaling can be helpful for CPTSD specifically because it bypasses the inner critic that monitors written expression. Many people with CPTSD have a highly developed internal censor that manages what's acceptable to write — voice, being faster than the monitoring function, reaches the raw material more directly. Combined with on-device processing (so the voice recording stays on your device), it provides a private, low-barrier format for the kind of honest expression that produces benefit.
This post is not a substitute for professional trauma therapy. CPTSD is a serious clinical condition that requires professional support. If you are in crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) or the Crisis Text Line (text HOME to 741741). The practices described here are supplementary tools for use alongside professional care.
The Toxic Shame Dimension: The Inner Critic and How Journaling Addresses It
Pete Walker identifies toxic shame as perhaps the most pervasive and damaging feature of CPTSD — not guilt (I did something wrong) but shame (I am wrong). The inner critic in CPTSD is not a productivity coach. It is an internalized voice from the original traumatic environment, speaking with the authority of the people who were supposed to be safe but weren't.
The specific danger of journaling for CPTSD in relation to shame is this: the inner critic will read every journal entry over your shoulder. Left unchecked, journaling can become a shame amplification device — you write something honest, the critic responds, and the written record of both the honest thing and the critic's response sits in your journal permanently.
This is why The Hearth persona is particularly important for CPTSD journaling, and why starting sessions with shame content requires specific guardrails:
Name the critic as a separate part, not as your voice. "A part of me is saying I'm pathetic for needing to write about this" rather than "I'm pathetic for needing to write about this." The separation creates the observer distance that prevents the critic from being heard as truth.
The Hearth does not validate the critic. It doesn't argue with it either — arguing with the inner critic gives it more power. It holds space for the part of you that believes the critic is right, and for the part that knows it might not be, without forcing a resolution between them.
Narrative Therapy's specific contribution: The Narrative Therapy framework asks whose voice the critic is speaking in. For most CPTSD survivors, the answer is not their own — it is the voice of someone from the traumatic environment, internalized and now operating as if it were self-generated truth. Naming the source externalizes the critic, which creates the possibility of examining it rather than being governed by it.
Sloan and Marx's research found that structured expressive writing produced significant reductions in PTSD symptom severity — effect sizes comparable to established trauma treatments — specifically when the writing moved participants toward meaning-making rather than staying in pure re-experiencing (Sloan & Marx, 2004). The movement toward meaning is what distinguishes therapeutic journaling from retraumatizing journaling. The persona and perspective choices in Trovera are designed to facilitate that movement.
What to Do When a Session Pushes You Outside the Window
Signs you've gone above the window into hyperarousal:
- Racing thoughts, heart rate increasing
- Difficulty staying with what you're writing or speaking
- Physical agitation, restlessness
- Feeling like you need to stop but can't
Signs you've gone below the window into hypoarousal:
- Feeling blank, disconnected, watching yourself from outside
- Difficulty feeling anything about what you're saying
- Voice becoming flat, monotone
- Loss of track of where you are in the session
When either happens: stop the session immediately.
Grounding sequence for hyperarousal:
- Place both feet flat on the floor and feel the pressure
- Look around the room slowly, name five things you can see
- Hold something cold or textured in your hands
- Breathe: four counts in, six counts out
- Stay in the present environment until the activation settles — this may take 10–20 minutes
Grounding sequence for hypoarousal:
- Move your body — stand up, shake your hands, walk around the room
- Make temperature contrast — splash cold water on your face or hold something warm
- Use strong sensory input — a strong smell, a tart taste, something with texture
- Orient to the room by touching surfaces and naming what you feel
Do not attempt to return to the journaling session the same day. The nervous system has signaled its limit. Return tomorrow if the material feels unfinished — it will still be there.
Building a Sustainable CPTSD Journaling Practice
Sustainability for trauma survivors requires specific structures that most journaling advice doesn't address:
Consistent timing. Same time of day, same location. The nervous system benefits from predictability — the body learns that this is the time and place for reflection, which reduces the vigilance response before the session begins.
Not too close to bedtime. Allow at least two hours between a journaling session involving difficult material and sleep. The nervous system needs time to settle. Dream content is often activated by unprocessed emotional material, and processing too close to sleep can intensify nightmare patterns.
After a meal, not before. Blood sugar instability can amplify emotional reactivity. The regulated body makes the regulated journaling session more likely.
Have a transition ritual. After every session — but especially after difficult ones — do something that marks the end of the reflection space and the beginning of ordinary time. Make tea. Take three slow breaths. Go outside briefly. The ritual signals to the nervous system that the processing window is closed and safety is restored.
Track what works and what doesn't. After each session, note on a scale of 0-10 how regulated you felt when you started, and how regulated you felt when you finished. If sessions consistently move you down the scale, the approach needs adjustment — speak with your therapist. If sessions consistently move you up the scale, even slightly, the practice is working.
Amara tracks this. Over six months, she has noticed that sessions using The Hearth reliably move her from a 5 to a 7. Sessions using The Psychological Perspective move her from a 7 to a 6 — useful insight, slight cost to regulation. Sessions using The Catalyst she avoids unless she starts at an 8 or above. The data is simple and it tells her everything she needs to know about what her nervous system can hold.
Trauma-Informed Prompts for CPTSD Journaling
These prompts are designed to approach difficult material safely — from the present, in parts language, without direct immersion in traumatic content.
For present-state check-in:
- Right now, in this moment, what does my body feel? Where is there tension, and where is there ease?
- What emotion is most present for me right now — and is it mine, or is it something I picked up from the environment today?
- On a scale of 0-10, how regulated do I feel right now?
For the inner critic:
- What is the critic saying today? (Name it as the critic's voice, not your own.)
- Whose voice does that sound like? When did I first hear that message?
- What would I say to a close friend who believed that about themselves?
For freeze/numbness:
- I notice I feel disconnected right now. What is the last thing I remember feeling before the numbness arrived?
- Is there something I'm not letting myself feel? What might it be, if I had to guess?
- What small, safe thing can I do right now that feels like taking care of myself?
For fawn/people-pleasing:
- What did I agree to today that I didn't actually want to do?
- What did I feel when I said yes, underneath the yes?
- What would I have wanted, if my wants were allowed to matter in that moment?
For shame:
- A part of me believes [X]. Where did that belief come from?
- Is this a fact about me, or is it a message I received that I have been treating as a fact?
- What would it mean if that belief weren't true?
These prompts stay within the window. They approach the material obliquely — from the present body, from parts language, from the belief rather than the memory. They do not ask you to relive. They ask you to observe from a safe distance.
The Research on Expressive Writing and Trauma: What It Shows
The evidence base for expressive writing in trauma recovery is substantial, though the CPTSD-specific research is smaller than the general PTSD literature.
Pennebaker's foundational work on expressive writing showed that translating traumatic experience into language — with meaning-making as the goal — produced improvements in psychological and physical health outcomes (Pennebaker, 1997, doi:10.1177/0022167897374002). The key phrase is "with meaning-making as the goal": passive re-experiencing of traumatic content without movement toward understanding does not produce these benefits and can worsen outcomes.
Sloan and Marx's research on written exposure therapy found that structured written exposure produced significant reductions in PTSD symptom severity across multiple studies — with effect sizes comparable to established first-line trauma treatments (Sloan & Marx, 2004). Written exposure therapy is a specific protocol with trained therapist oversight; it is not the same as solo journaling. But it demonstrates that structured writing, when properly guided, produces clinically meaningful outcomes in trauma recovery.
The critical qualifier throughout this research: structure and guidance are the variables that distinguish therapeutic writing from retraumatizing writing. The difference is not what topics you approach — it is whether you approach them from within the window of tolerance, with appropriate pacing, and with external support (a therapist, a structured protocol, or in Trovera's case, an AI that follows rather than floods).
Baikie and Wilhelm's 2005 meta-analysis found that expressive writing produced the largest benefits for people with significant pre-existing distress — suggesting that the people who need it most also benefit most, when the approach is appropriate (Baikie & Wilhelm, 2005, doi:10.1080/17439760.2005.11678161).
The clear implication for CPTSD journaling: the approach matters enormously. The trauma-informed guardrails described in this post — grounding, window monitoring, parts language, titration, time limits — are not cautionary extras. They are the conditions under which journaling produces benefit rather than harm.
Internal Resources
- Why journaling makes you feel worse — and how to prevent it
- Is journaling good for you? — honest science review
- Journaling for anxiety
- Journal prompts for anxiety and depression
- Full features at gettrovera.com/features
CPTSD is a serious clinical condition requiring professional support. Nothing in this post constitutes medical or psychological advice. If you are in crisis, please contact 988 (Suicide and Crisis Lifeline) or text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line). Work with a trauma-informed therapist before implementing any journaling practice involving traumatic material.
Finding Your Edges: The Difference Between Discomfort and Dysregulation
One of the most useful skills to develop in CPTSD journaling is learning the difference between the productive discomfort of approaching difficult material from within the window, and the dysregulation of having moved outside it.
Productive discomfort within the window feels like:
- Noticing a feeling you'd rather not look at, but being able to stay curious
- A slight increase in heart rate or breathing that remains manageable
- The mild resistance of approaching something important rather than the urgent pull to escape
- The ability to remain aware of where you are (in your home, sitting safely) while the content is difficult
Dysregulation outside the window feels like:
- The content becoming immersive rather than examined — feeling as if it's happening now rather than being remembered
- Loss of the observer position — no longer watching the feeling but being the feeling
- Physical symptoms that escalate rather than plateau: racing heart, difficulty breathing, physical shaking
- Or the opposite: a sudden flatness, disconnection, blankness — the shutdown response
Learning this distinction takes practice, and it takes honest self-monitoring. Amara rates herself on the 0-10 scale before, during (if she checks in), and after each session. The data over time tells her where her edges are — not in the abstract, but for her specific nervous system on a specific type of content.
This is the work. Not the dramatic insight (though that comes). Not the resolution (though that comes too, slowly). The work is the repeated practice of approaching the material, staying within the window, and returning to regulation. That pattern — approach, stay, return — is what heals the nervous system's expectation that difficult material is always dangerous.
It isn't always dangerous. With the right approach, the right support, and the right conditions, it is workable. One session at a time.
How to Use Trovera for CPTSD Journaling: A Practical Start
- Ground before opening the app. 5-4-3-2-1, slow breathing, orientation.
- Rate your regulation. Below 5 → Gratitude Vault mode and The Balm only. Above 5 → proceed.
- Choose your mode by your goal: Evening Reflection to process the day. Stress Release if you're activated. The Presence if you need to simply speak without direction.
- Choose your persona by your state: The Balm for high activation. The Presence or Hearth for low activation or shame. The Psychological Perspective or Meridian only when well-regulated.
- Set a timer. Ten to fifteen minutes.
- Use parts language throughout: "a part of me feels X" rather than "I feel X."
- When the timer goes off, end. Ground again. Transition ritual.
The 7-day free trial at gettrovera.com includes full access to all personas and modes. No card required.
The Long View: What Consistent Safe Journaling Produces Over Time
Amara has been journaling for two years. The changes she notices are not dramatic — there was no session where everything resolved. There were hundreds of sessions where one small thing became slightly clearer.
The inner critic is still present. It is less authoritative than it was. She has learned, through repetition, to hear it as a voice rather than as truth — which is different from silencing it or arguing with it. It speaks. She notices that it speaks. The distinction between those two experiences is the work of two years of journaling practice.
Her nervous system is still reactive. It is more predictable. She knows her edges better — knows that certain topics require The Balm rather than The Catalyst, knows that late sessions are harder than morning sessions, knows that she needs two hours of transition after difficult content before she can sleep.
She still needs therapy. Journaling has not replaced it. It has made it more efficient: she arrives at Thursday's session having already done some of the surface work, which means they can go deeper faster.
That's the honest account of what consistent, trauma-informed journaling produces for CPTSD. Not healing as an event. Healing as a direction — slow, nonlinear, punctuated by difficult sessions and surprising sessions and sessions where nothing much happens. But the direction is consistent. And the distance from the starting point, over time, becomes real.
