Healing From Trauma
What is Trauma?
Everyone in this world faces hardship. Being alive means being able to experience everything: the good, the bad, everything in between and beyond.
Many of the experiences that we can go through are often more than we can handle. Trauma is subjective; what is traumatic to one person may not be traumatic to another. Trauma can be one intense experience, or it could be an experience that happened too many times, too early in life, too suddenly, was too unexpected or beyond our capacity, or it could be something that we needed but didn’t get.
Trauma tears a big hole in our mental construction of reality that forms what we expect to see. For example, if throughout your life, you only experienced love and peace and safety, and thus you expected life to continue on that way, but an experience occurred that was hateful and chaotic and dangerous and your brain and body couldn’t metabolize, make sense of, or integrate the experience into what you believed to be true about the world, it could put you in a state of shock and confusion, unable to know what to expect, questioning everything you ever assumed.
Trauma happens when we face a threat and we are unable to either defeat or escape it. This is called fight or flight, and if we are unable to complete fight or flight, we enter a traumatized state in which we are stuck in the physical and mental sensation of wanting to fight, to run away, to be hyper alert, or to be numb and disassociated, or all at the same time. If we have an experience that reminds us of the trauma, we can go back into this state. There’s also the fawn response, which is a desire to appease the threat, and it manifests as people-pleasing, overworking, overapologizing, and self-blaming to placate the threat rather than confront it or flee from it.
Trauma can cause us to expect something similar or worse to happen again in the future and cause us ongoing suffering. Healing from trauma takes rebuilding our mental construction of reality and our felt experience of safety, processing and integrating the traumatic experience into an empowering future narrative, and allowing ourselves to slowly and carefully feel back into that traumatic state and connect it with a resource state of safety.
Healing From Trauma:
In somatic experiencing, a trauma therapy method, the term is pendulation or titration, slowly feeling into moving closer to the traumatic experience in mind and body, then moving away from it, seeing how much we can handle and what we still aren’t ready to feel. Over time and practice, somatically and through connecting the traumatized neural network with the resource/safety neural network, we can eventually feel neutral about what happened, so that it no longer impacts our daily lives, and be able to think about it, learn from it, and find empowering meaning and lessons in it to bring into the future.
I made a trauma recovery care menu here available as a print or a download based on the Japanese art philosophy of kintsugi, which is reassembling broken ceramics with gold or silver lacquer to accentuate rather than hide the breaks, believing that the breaks make the object even more beautiful, valuable, and meaningful than before. I think of humans going through hardship in the same way. Each break is an opportunity for wisdom, beauty, and strength with the right treatment and support.
The first step in trauma healing is finding a safe space and safe people to talk to. If you are feeling harmed in some way, even if you don’t know quite what’s wrong, it’s important to find a place or a person to talk to that feels safe. If that’s someone at work or school, a public service employee, a help line, or a friend or family member, that’s the first thing to do.
Second is to get your immediate needs met and relieve stress. Food, water, shelter, warmth, comfort, relaxation, someone safe to listen and be there for you.
The third can be getting a treatment/action plan set up. Therapy, lifestyle changes, decisions about where you are living and who you are allowing in your life, and how to continue treatment going forward. At the end of this post, I have links to tools and resources to help, and as I wrote before, my kintsugi healing care menu art print/download has lots of ideas for how to heal from trauma.Empowering Concepts:
There are some concepts that helped me be more resilient and brave in the face of difficult experiences that could come:
There’s a Hindi concept called “Lila” (lee-lah), which refers to all of reality being the playground for the divine, that an absolute being, Brahman, separates itself into every piece of reality in order to experience it all. This concept reminds us that reality is divine, and we are the pieces of the divine who can see these experiences as opportunities to feel, learn, and play. I like to think that anything difficult that happens is a lesson to learn in becoming a more compassionate, strong, and capable person.
Dr. Carolyn Lovewell is the author of Existential Kink, a version of Jungian shadow work that holds the foundational assumption that we are all-powerful beings that are subconsciously choosing relationships or situations that harm us or don’t align with our values because we secretly get something out of putting ourselves through that or holding ourselves back, (this could be avoiding responsibility, vulnerability, success, failure, intimacy, feeling like a martyr or a victim, or actually enjoying pain and conflict) and we need to look at how to integrate the part of us that keep choosing that instead of what’s really good and healthy for us and what truly aligns with our values.
It was helpful for me to reflect on why I was holding on to a place and people that were harmful to me. I learned that it felt familiar. To be neglected, abused, unsupported, and betrayed, these were all things I knew very well. I was trained as a kid to tolerate this and stay connected to my caregivers even if they treated me badly, because that was how I was able to survive. I learned that I could thank this survival instinct, but ultimately let it go because what everyone deserves is real love, support, and safety, and it’s good to remove people and situations from my life who don’t provide that, even if it breaks my heart to lose people I love or places I felt so much hope about being a part of.
Psychological Safety:
Safe & healthy relationships and cultures are defined by their high levels of psychological safety.
Low levels of psychological safety create conditions for traumatic experiences, whereas high levels of psychological safety create conditions for trauma healing.
This is how to identify the health & safety of your relationships/cultures:
Psychological safety is creating an environment where open and honest communication is rewarded rather than punished.
Low levels of psychological safety in a relationship or culture looks like dismissing, invalidating, shaming, or blaming individuals for their ideas, questions, concerns, mistakes, feelings, boundaries, values and needs.
Low levels of psychological safety includes:
Disregarding, dismissing, downplaying, justifying, or invalidating what the individual is trying to ask for help in addressing
This looks like:
“That wasn’t a big deal,” “You’re too sensitive,” “That didn’t happen” “That was necessary” “Don’t worry, be happy” “Get over it”
Diagnosing, pathologizing, blaming, gaslighting, villainizing, discrediting, silencing, othering, punishing or humiliating the individual when they express their feelings and observations
This looks like:
“You are hurting me by telling me how much you are being hurt” “You aren’t seeing clearly because of your past trauma or mental health condition” “You are being hurtful, manipulative, abusive or trying to destroy our lives by expressing your observations and feelings” “This person is deeply troubled” “We don’t want someone like you in our organization” “Take a look at this person, this is what happens when you are too negative”
This results in individuals feeling fear, shame, self-doubt, low self-esteem, distrust, disconnection, depression, anxiety and social withdrawal. It destroys relationships and disintegrates cultures and is also deeply hurtful and traumatizing to the individual.
High levels of psychological safety in a relationship or culture looks like active listening, empathy, validation, taking accountability, acknowledging issues and collaborating on a solution.
High levels of psychological safety includes:
Listening deeply with curiosity and compassion to what the individual is trying to communicate
Taking on their perspective, being understanding and empathetic to their experience
Acknowledging what happened, taking responsibility for any actions or conditions that were harmful to this person, and working collaboratively on a solution.
This results in individuals feeling safe, comfortable, valued and connected, and is the lifeblood of healthy and nourishing relationships and cultures.
What causes low levels of psychological safety?
Power dynamics - hierarchical or imbalance power makes individuals more unlikely to speak up
Authoritarian leadership - when there is only one overall decision maker, individuals feel less likely to speak up
Shame and defensiveness - when people feel shame instead of guilt and defensive rather than compassionate when behaviors and conditions are questioned or criticized, the individual’s feelings and observations can feel more like a threat than a request for support and the person or people with more power in the situation may prefer to avoid this individual’s experiences rather than face it.
Fear of repercussions - when people are scared that they will be punished, alienated, or villainized for speaking up, they might avoid doing so.
Social exclusion/Groupthink - when people feel like others will avoid them or they will be excluded if they speak up, they will be less likely to say anything
Inflexibility - when those in power are not open to other perspectives or ideas on how things should go, individuals will be less likely to share their thoughts and suggestions
Pseudo-psychology - when those in power use pseudo-psychology to pathologize, diagnose, invalidate or gaslight individuals when they speak up, and talk about them poorly behind their back or pre-frame them as unstable to proactively invalidate any criticisms they may have in the future as symptoms of their mental issues rather than real concerns
Spiritual bypassing - when those in power justify harmful or inappropriate behavior or conditions by saying it is necessary for healing and/or growth, individuals may feel like they are simply not spiritually developed enough to be okay with behavior or conditions that are harmful to them
Toxic positivity - when those in power say things like, “don’t worry, be happy,” “everything’s fine” “You’re making something out of nothing” and refuse to acknowledge the reality of whatever is hurtful to the individual
Blame culture - when those in power accuse the person speaking up as being mentally unstable, deeply damaged, evil or intentionally hurtful, abusive, manipulative or attempting to destroy their lives rather than listening to what they’re saying, taking responsibility, and working on a solution so that the individual feels more safe and comfortable.
How to create high levels of psychological safety:
Balancing the power dynamic/getting rid of authoritarian leadership - distributing power more equitably, making democratic decisions, implementing a governance structure with checks and balances of power
Developing emotional resilience to criticism or accountability - doing the internal, somatic work of being able to handle someone expressing how your decisions, the conditions you are co-creating, or the decisions of those you care about have caused them suffering
Rewarding & encouraging feedback - creating an understanding within the relationship or culture that it is good and appreciated when individuals express their observations, concerns, needs, boundaries, values and feelings because that helps to co-create a healthier and safer environment through problem solving
Being flexible & inclusive of ideas & diverse needs - listening to and implementing the changes and suggestions expressed with compassion and awareness and embracing of diversity, differences, and the individual happiness, health and well-being of each individual which may require different things
Clear, ethical & appropriate boundaries - no armchair psychology, no diagnosing or pathologizing other people, no intimate physical or emotional or verbal interactions where there is a power imbalance or a relationship/context in which that is not appropriate or ethical
No dismissal or justification of harmful or inappropriate behavior or conditions - take every individual’s observations, concerns, feelings, boundaries, values and needs seriously and acknowledge, address and resolve the behavior or conditions that are negatively impacting them
No DARVO - Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender - when someone expresses their feelings and observations and requests to address the behaviors and conditions that are causing them suffering, do not blame them, punish them, or accuse them of being abusive, hurtful, manipulative or having harmful intentions.
Trauma Resources:
Trauma can make us want to run and hide from life, from connection, from our own dreams and passions. It can make it hard to feel excited about life and to imagine a bright future. Sometimes, it can even be incredibly debilitating in our daily lives, preventing us from living authentically. If you think you may have experienced trauma, or if you have, I invite you to look into your access to trauma-informed therapy, resources & tools like the following:
Help Call & Text Lines:
Crisis Text Line | Text HOME to 741741 Free, 24/7 Mental Health Support
National Mental Health Hotline | 866-903-3787
988 Lifeline - If you need emotional support, reach out to the national mental health hotline: 988.
List of Hotlines for Mental Health Help
Types of Therapy:
Types of Therapy | Psychology Today
Somatic Experiencing Therapy: 10 Best Exercises & Examples
BetterHelp | Professional Therapy With A Licensed Therapist
Trauma-Informed Yoga: How it Heals, Benefits, and Poses to Try
How Movement Therapy Can Heal Traumatic Stress
Health Insurance to help cover health expenses:
How To Get Health Insurance – Forbes Advisor
Kinstugi Trauma Recovery Healing Care Menu:
