Worried it’s Impossible to Heal From Trauma? Here are 14 ways to do it.

If you’ve experienced trauma and its symptoms, PTSD or CPTSD, I’m sure you’ve asked yourself the question “will this ever end?”

“Can it be healed?”

The following is based on personal experience, research, and work with clients. When I shared it in trauma recovery forums, many reached out to say it reflected their own experience.

The stories were similar.

1. Recovery took a number of years. (7–10 being common)
2. It was hard work. (Everyone stressed this point)
3. The result wasn’t what they were expecting but they love it.

Most people noted that while some of their symptoms remain, they know how to navigate them better and believe they have found a way to learn from them.

Quite a few expressed thankfulness for their experiences, believing they led to a better understanding of others and appreciation for life. They said they enjoyed being a survivor, a beacon of sorts who can help others on their healing journey.

Alongside these messages of hope and inspiration were others who shared their desperation, the fact that they can’t see their way through the pain.

This article is for them.

We have to be careful.

It is important to be mindful when exploring the question of whether trauma or the medical labels of symptomatic PTSD or C-PTSD can be healed.

Why?

Because expectations are dangerous.

Trauma (I’ll use this as the general term to refer to trauma, PTSD, and C-PTSD) is a serious condition that will take a lot of work, resources, and exploration to heal.

While it is certainly possible and I have seen people overcome PTSD, it’s a journey that is different for everyone and may lead to different experiences of what “healing” looks like.

Trauma changes you.

Healing from trauma often means becoming a very different person than the person who originally experienced the trauma.

Part of the condition of being “healed” is that the person is accepting of this difference as they are now at a place where they accept themselves.

However, this might not look like what others expect from healing.

For instance, healing from trauma often leads to Post Traumatic Growth, which changes a person’s outlook on life.

People often experience a greater level of empathy with others after experiencing trauma or overcoming trauma. Their values may shift, giving more value to life, creativity or spirituality and less to wealth or career success.

There may be an expectation of the people familiar with the experiencer of trauma that they will “go back to normal,” entering back into their career and doing what is expected of them. In reality, they may join a monastery or become a painter or travel the world talking about trauma.

This is their new self, post healing.

Expectations are dangerous.

No matter what they decide to do, a person with trauma is doing what they feel they need to do that moment.

Trauma often leads to unhealthy behaviors, such as drug abuse or other self-harm. We need to be mindful that these behaviors are the attempt of the individual to cope.

In a way, these actions are an attempt to heal.

We can offer emotional support, resources, and education to show a better way to heal but we can not make a person heal. Even when we offer love, information or resources that are accepted we must do so without the expectation of “how quickly they’ll recover.”

Trauma is in the Body.

As such it is slow to change.

The difficulty with trauma is that it is very physical — neurological. It is in the brain, it has changed the way the brain functions and the very way the brain is structured.

Trauma in the body and the body’s responses to the world.

It is in the structures that we use to understand and navigate the world. Healing this takes a lot of time, work, and resources.

We have to have plenty of patience and understanding that the healing journey might last for a few years or a few decades, perhaps a lifetime.

So to answer the question, yes, it is healable. Neural plasticity and other neurological and therapeutical models have shown that there is room for healing.

This process, however, is unique to each individual and while we hold hope for people undergoing the process to be fully healed what is far more important is that we hold space for the person suffering and accept them where they are.

How to heal.

1. Get Help

There’s a lot that you can do on your own but when it comes to trauma, especially PTSD or Complex PTSD, it can be dangerous to do the work without professional help and support. This is because many of the methods for healing trauma drag things out that can be traumatizing in their own right.

It’s best to do this work when you have the space to do it and professional help to heal the smaller traumas of working with it.

When you get your support network set up then look into the following.

2. Get Into Your Body

Many people who have experienced trauma dissociate throughout the day.

Sometimes we feel like we’re no longer in our body. (Many of my memories of childhood are from over my shoulder rather than centered in my body. It’s an experience I hear often from clients.)

Sometimes we attempt to be overly rational, ignoring our body and its emotions.

Other times we focus on a particular emotion that blocks out the rest, like focusing on anger and ignoring our sorrow or anxiety.

One of the best ways to root out the symptoms of trauma is through reconnecting your mind (or your awareness) with your body. It’s difficult work and it will be uncomfortable but it can open up the door to your healing and understanding what is happening in your body.

Breathing exercises can be one of the best ways of doing this.

Simply sit with the emotion or experience in your body and breathe into it. Allow yourself to feel what is happening in your body and use your breath as a focus and anchor so as to not get overwhelmed.

If the experiences you have with this method seem extreme, please seek a mental health professional to help you through this process. Sometimes trauma work can cause renewed traumatization if we take it too fast or without enough support.

3. Move Your Body

Moving your body in a mindful way is one of the best ways to reconnect your awareness to your body. Try practicing one of the following, focusing on your breath and the experiences you have:

• Tai Chi
• Yoga
• Walking Mindfully

A reader pointed out that for some the above activities would be difficult either due to being a group activity or because, in the case of walking, the vulnerability of being alone.

In this case, Yoga and Tai Chi videos can be found on the internet. You might not get the perfect form but what we’re more interested in is getting your mind back into your body as you move.

Try to find a teacher who focuses on the breath and mindfulness. There are plenty out there, often a YouTube search away.

You can also try to create a meet up at www.meetup.com, finding people you feel safe with to do structured group activities like mindful walking.

In the end, it is all about awareness and breath. How does your body move? How does it stretch? What does it feel like? Where is it sore? Where are you holding on to your stress and strain? What happens when you breathe into this?

4. Develop Mindfulness

A meditation routine is one of the best ways to build mindfulness and mindfulness is going to allow you to feel what is happening in your body.

I recommend a breath-centered meditation because it works the most with the body.

Our emotions are linked to our breathing because our body’s attempt to manage and display them is linked to our breathing.

Deeper, fuller breaths are signs that we are in a relaxed state. The short choppy breaths of a triggered state are meant to increase oxygen and get your body ready for fight or flight.

When we practice a breath-centered meditation we start to see when our emotions are affecting our breathing. As we deepen our practice we’ll feel where we hold tension.

For instance, I hold a lot of tension in my legs. (I’m always ready to run.) An acupuncturist once told me this and I had no idea what she was talking about.

With some years of meditation and working my way back into conscious awareness of my body I can now feel when my legs get tense. It’s a clear sign of when I’m triggered.

By being aware of this shift into “fight-flight-freeze,” signaled by my tensing legs, I can now focus on relaxing them and often succeed in relaxing my body and mind through the experience.

Meditation is as simple as focusing on your breath. Don’t worry about making your mind blank or empty, just focus on the experience of breathing air into your body. Your mind will get distracted, that’s normal, laugh it off and bring your focus back to your breath.

This is the point of meditation. Not to silence your thoughts but to notice when they have distracted you and then to bring your mind back into focus.

5. Create a Container

Create time and space specifically for trauma work.

For example, I have counseling on Tuesdays. I know that there are days I’ll be fine afterward and there will be days I can’t see straight because my body is triggered.

So I take Tuesdays off. All I have on my calendar is Tai Chi in the morning and counseling in the afternoon. If I get more done with my day, great!

If I do nothing but read and journal or stare at a wall, great!

What this allows me to do is reduce the stress of interacting with my trauma. Rather than take on the difficult experience of doing trauma work and expect myself to be productive afterward I am able to focus on the healing itself.

It also helps prevent the trauma work from spilling over into other aspects of my life. If there is triggering content I know I want to journal about I can tell myself “I will work on this Tuesday,” my mind and body know that I will actually do the work because I have set the time aside.

This allows me to focus on the tasks at hand the rest of the week.

You might not be able to set a whole day aside but setting aside a couple hours on one of your days off can be useful. Try and make it the same time every week so that your mind gets used to the schedule.

6. Recognize Triggers

This is one of the most important things you can do with trauma work. Only by recognizing your triggers can you work to heal and deactivate them.

Practicing meditation and mindfulness will help you keep track of when your body starts to get anxious or distressed or when your mind runs down those old familiar paths of worry and fear.

Journaling can also help you note when exactly you’ve been triggered and collect more information about yourself over longer periods of time.

7. Tell Your Story

Talking about traumatic experiences or even writing it down can help you organize traumatic memories and reframe it in a package that is easier to cope with.

When we experience trauma the parts of the brain that normally record and sort through our memories get overwhelmed. This leaves us with scattered bits of information.

By telling or writing our story we start to pull these bits and pieces together into a single narrative, which is how most of our memories work. By doing this the mind becomes more familiar with what happened and our memory becomes more cohesive than the jagged bits that originally got recorded.

This helps the mind cope more easily as it overwrites the chaos of the unknown with a story; the mind loves its stories.

You can start by telling the story to yourself or writing it down. Then move on to telling other people. Please make sure to save this for people you feel will be accepting and supportive.

It can be traumatizing to share something this personal with someone who is dismissive or unable to deal with their own emotions when hearing it. (This is where professional help really helps.)

8. Establish Boundaries

If an environment or person triggers you and you have to interact with them make sure you limit your total interaction.

Prepare for the experience beforehand and try to give yourself room to recuperate afterward.

If you are not forced to interact with someone or an environment that is triggering, learn not to. Realize that it is ok to say no.

Often this is difficult because our triggers can be linked to our most familiar settings, such as a family home.

I know for me I felt guilty not going home to visit.

After several years of going manic every holiday season, I finally listened to the advice of my friends, mentors, and therapist. I stopped going home during the most stressful time of the year.

My mental health has never been better.

Now I visit my family in the summer when I feel healthy, during times when we are able to enjoy ourselves more. I limit the time spent and everyone walks away happier than if I go home, stretch myself out too much, and start reacting to my triggers.

If you get triggered no matter how long or short your visit, but you still want to visit with loved ones, consider setting things up in a different environment.

Ask your family to go out to dinner with you or on a hike or picnic, anywhere that isn’t the same triggering environment you are used to.

Whatever you do, take care of yourself. Yes, family and loved ones are important but so are you.

9. Create Rituals

Something we’ve lost in the modern-day is the power of ritual. Our minds and bodies love ceremony and it can take on a lot more significance in our healing than the initial act.

A simple shower can put symbolic distance between you and a trigger.

I like to clean the kitchen and tell myself I’m organizing and cleaning my mind and chest. 9 times out of 10 I feel better afterward.

10. Explore Life and Spirituality

A lot of growth and healing comes from exploration. Whether it’s traveling the world or exploring it through books, challenge yourself to find new ways to see the world.

Everything a person creates or writes puts a part of themselves into the world.

By exploring these creations whether its metaphysics, spirituality, analytic psychology or a good sci-fi novel we are exploring the gems of wisdom people have gathered from their own experiences, joys, pains, and trauma. This can help us heal ourselves.

You’ll find that cultural or spiritual exploration is often linked to a person’s tale of self-healing. This is known as Traumatic Growth, one of the positives that come from trauma.

I know it has been a key influence in my own life and that of many I have talked to.

11. Create

Another aspect of Traumatic Growth that is common is an increase in artistic expression. People feel more creative and in touch with life through working with their art and self-expression. This process helps us process our pains, traumas, and emotions.

Writing has been incredibly useful for me and I couldn’t recommend it more!

But don’t limit yourself just to words, drawing, sculpting, painting, singing and any other form of positive self-expression can become a form of catharsis.

12. Help Others

My most powerful transformation has always come when helping others.

There’s a time and place for this. Don’t rush out to help others while you’re still drowning but when you’re at a place where you feel like you can take on that experience I highly recommend it.

You don’t have to wait till you feel perfect. (No one ever does.)

I know I waited a long time to launch my coaching practice because I wanted to wait until I was “more stable.” What I’ve found is that working with others (while I’m practicing my own self-care) is the perfect recipe for me remaining stable.

My clients experience consistent growth and powerful transformation and working with them acts as a catalyst in my own healing.

You’ll often find that by helping others you will find new and powerful ways to help and understand yourself.

13. Eat Healthily

We really are what we eat. If you’re trying to heal from anything, please eat healthy. Our emotions and consciousness have a chemical basis. If you want a healthy mind and body you’ll need to give yourself the right building blocks.

Finally, have patience.

It’s a long process to heal. For some, it may take their entire lives. When I first started my process of healing it was with the goal to be “normal” again.

Not that I was ever really “normal” to begin with.

The truth is there is no normal, just an expectation of the way we think we should be.

Healing trauma often touches on this, the expectations of ourselves, of others, the expectations we feel from others. Trauma itself is an expectation, shifting from “I expect to be as x, y, z. i expect to be safe” to “I am wounded and expect to be wounded again.”

Some of the most important work we can do is to heal our wounds and expectations because these affect more than ourselves, they affect the world.

When we heal ourselves we are claiming responsibility for the only thing we really have any control over. By doing so we not only heal ourselves but we make the world a better place.

Call to Action:

When it comes to trauma work, order is a very important part of the puzzle.

I’d recommend working on creating a container first. Seek professional help for your journey and set aside time to work on your healing.

A great first step can be to set aside time once a week for your healing. Journal about what you want to do and what you need for this process to feel safe for you.

Maybe you need to set aside a special part of your home? Or prepare a ritual of making some tea and getting into comfortable clothes.

Maybe it's the more practical piece of finding out what your insurance provides or finding the therapist that’s right for you.

Whatever it is, don’t put it off. Mark a space and time on your calendar that allows you to engage with this process with plenty of time to spare.

That’s the important part, give yourself plenty of space and time.

It might seem simple enough to pick up the phone and call someone to ask about therapy but if it’s the first time you’re doing it and your trauma has yet to be addressed it’s a huge step forward.

Give yourself room for whatever reactions you might find in your mind, body, spirit.

May you be blessed in your journey!