Don’t Sit in Your Pain: Advice on Healing from Emotional Trauma 

A Survivor’s Perspective

Many people who have suffered a traumatic childhood find that there are a lot of missing parts in their memory of the past. When we are children there are sometimes things that happen that we don’t quite understand at the time, or emotions that we can’t process so they get stored down and locked away in our psyche. But, as we start therapy, or whatever healing journey works for us, these things resurface. As the memories start coming back, we feel them as if they just happened and eventually, we process them so we can file them away again. Sometimes those moments and memories get stuck like a bad taste in our mouth or a fart we can’t stop smelling.  

As much as we want to move on and drop the baggage, we find ourselves stuck with it and sometimes so caught up in it that we can’t function. Recovering from trauma is a long process that involves many stages and typically is not a linear thing. One week a person may feel that they have turned a corner and can now fully function in society again only for the next week be full of depression or other symptoms the person thought they were through. It is a tough process of accepting and integrating your trauma into a brand-new version of yourself. Many of us develop this version of ourselves by a lot of painful lessons on emotional regulation, setting boundaries, and even learning how to identify and express our wants and needs.  

The difficulty of rebuilding your life after trauma.

There is a lot of literature on stages of trauma recovery, but for me it has also been beneficial to know the five stages of grief as outlined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying published in 1969 which I have never read, but these stages are taught and otherwise talked about widely. However, we grieve more than just death and in the case of trauma, I find myself grieving my dreams, whatever my potential could have been, the person I used to be, things I used to be able to do, shows I used to love to watch. The list of things could go on and on. Those of us in trauma recovery try to stay as busy as possible to keep our minds from wandering back to dark places, but I have found from my own experience and from what I have read on others that if violence and sex are part of your triggers it is becoming more difficult to avoid them with the rise of normalizing sex and violence in media. Not focusing on our trauma becomes a nearly impossible achievement at times adding to our paralyzing thought loops that leave our ability to focus in tatters.

Some days we need to just let our minds wander and process. We must be kind and understanding with ourselves and give ourselves space to simply be. If we don’t get the dishes done, then they just didn’t get done. If we sleep all day sometimes, that is just what we did. It is important to practice self-care and listen to your body when recovering from traumatic events, and sleeping when your body says you’re tired is part of that (Hood, 2018). The bottom line is that a person who is recovering for a traumatic event or a traumatic lifetime needs to practice a lot of self-care and does need to sleep more.

Part of healing from trauma is discovering ourselves.

Part of the reason why recovery is so hard is because it requires us to completely rewire ourselves, change all our habits, overcome things that we didn’t even know were a trauma response. The earlier in your life that the trauma occurs, the harder it is to tell what behavior was the ‘real you’ (Brenner, 2017). If we think of recovering from trauma as a dog chasing a car, what we do with ourselves once we catch the car? Who are we without our blanket of invisible, or maybe some physical, emotional trauma scars?  It is a scary world outside and if we heal, we must rejoin it. I do believe it may be sometimes be the draw of familiar pain that keeps us from letting ourselves outgrow or trauma blanket. It is typical of all kinds of humans to be afraid of change, and living without emotional distress would certainly be a big change. I don’t think we consciously prevent ourselves from healing, but more that we feel drawn to familiar habits and emotional responses.  

The common thought on how to treat symptoms that stem from traumatic events is to talk about the events, and analyze them (Barron M.d., 2015). I have read some personal experiences where they state that this approach does not work at all and makes their symptoms worse. One of the best examples I have for this is Anna Runkle who talks about this on her Crappy Childhood Fairy YouTube channel. For me, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy from a therapist familiar with trauma has integral to my healing, and I am sure there are a lot of other types of treatment options that have worked for others as well. In my opinion, you should not leave a therapy session feeling worse than you did before. There are many ways to heal and we all just must keep trying until we find something that works.  

Final thoughts:

Though there are many ways to heal, the fact remains that we can’t allow ourselves to just sit in our pain. There is an idea that traumatic experiences can lead to positive outcomes and strengths as well (Clark & Redekop, 2016). We should be proud of how far we have come, and that we faced what we did and are here to tell the tale. We did not choose what happened to us, but we can choose to be here and stand proud. The events that happened to us, whether it was one event or a multitude of experiences, did disrupt our lives and leave us with emotional, and sometimes physical, scars. However, after healing they leave us with a stronger sense of self, and new passions. Eventually we learn to be in the here and now rather than those experiences we tried to forget for so long. We can make a new life, be a different us, and fulfill promises that we made to ourselves.  

References:

Hood, J Ph.d. (12/20/2018). The Importance of Self-Care After Trauma. Highlandspringsclinic.org https://highlandspringsclinic.org/the-importance-of-self-care-after-trauma/  

Barron, C M.D. (January 27,2015). When Not Talking About Past Trauma Is Wise. Psychologytoday.com https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-creativity-cure/201501/when-not-talking-about-past-trauma-is-wise  
 

Brenner, G. (July 6, 2017). Six Ways Developmental Trauma Shapes Adult Identity. Medium.com https://medium.com/beingwell/six-ways-developmental-trauma-shapes-adult-identity-4cf1613db065 

Clark, M; Redekop, M. (November12, 2016) From Life’s Difficulties to Posttraumatic Growth: How Do We Get There? Psychology, Vol.7, PP. 1451-1466 https://www.scirp.org/journal/papercitationdetails.aspx?paperid=71822&JournalID=148