What I Wish I Knew Earlier About Healing Psychological Trauma
Your body intuitively knows how to provide you with deep emotional healing & your body wants to heal you
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Understanding emotional trauma & healing psychological trauma
I’ve read a lot of things about the process of emotional healing and healing psychological trauma that I agree with and that make sense to me. But I also know that these ideas resonated with me earlier in my life at a time when I was deeply confused about how to go about the process of healing psychological trauma and desperate to get it underway. None of the things I read actually told me anything I could connect with about how to emotionally heal or what it looked like. A lot of what I read felt more like a simultaneous truth and platitude to me.
I think this is inevitable to a significant degree because the truth about the process of healing psychological trauma is something that is primarily felt and that defies full explanation in words. Describing the emotional healing process in deeply spiritualized metaphors is the most accurate method of description as it gets closest to the experience of the deep felt sense of emotional healing, but heavily metaphor laden descriptions are also least accessible to those who haven’t yet had the experience. This is certainly a frustrating paradox, but I also feel that perhaps there are things that an earlier version of me could have heard that might have helped at least a little.
While I can only speak to my own journey healing psychological trauma - and perhaps this too will feel like inaccessible platitudes - here is what I would tell a younger version of myself about the emotional healing process.
It’s okay to not understand what you need to emotionally heal from.
For decades, I had some sense that there was something wrong, something that I needed to fix. But I had no explanation to provide to myself about what was so wrong, or about what needed to be fixed. On some level, I would chide myself for feeling this need. Why couldn’t I be grateful for my life? What did I have to feel traumatized by? What I didn’t realize was that these thoughts were in fact symptoms of trauma. My trauma was childhood trauma, largely psychological trauma (intense emotional and verbal abuse and profound emotional neglect). I had some memories from my childhood, but I didn’t realize how many memories from my childhood were “missing,” and I certainly didn’t remember how my childhood felt. (These “missing” memories were the inspiration for my post on Journal Prompts For Taking A Memory Inventory). I also didn’t understand how my childhood had been different from others. This was in part because I had nothing else to compare my childhood to so it seemed normal, and in part because when I encountered evidence that other families were different I subconsciously believed these families were putting on an act of some sort because putting on an act was part of the dysfunction in my family of origin.
Just because life is okay now, doesn’t mean you don’t need emotional healing.
Time and your life move on, but emotional pain can remain in your body and impact your daily life without you knowing it. Check out The Body Keeps the Score if you want to learn more about how the body holds trauma.
Your body knows how (and when) to heal psychological trauma.
For me, the metaphor that best describes healing from psychological trauma is vomiting. Healing is like vomiting for your nervous system. Healing is like vomiting for your soul. Vomiting is a process initiated by your body and carried out by your body, not your conscious mind. The conscious mind’s job is simply to allow it to occur. Healing from psychological trauma, for me, is also a lot like fixing a broken bone that wasn’t properly cared for at the time of the break. The bone must be re-broken, re-set, and then time and the body do the work of healing. Healing from psychological trauma is the process of learning to listen to your body (through accessing intuition) and then providing your body with safety it can feel and trusting/following it through the emotional healing journey.
Healing from psychological trauma is a process.
Healing from psychological trauma is not suddenly stumbling upon the right idea, thought, or way of living. Healing from psychological trauma is not strong-arming yourself into following the right checklist (eating right, exercising, reading more, meditating for 10 minutes a day, etc.). Healing from psychological trauma is about learning to hear your body, your inner intuitive guidance, and following it on the emotional healing journey it has prepared for you without a consciously imposed agenda about how the emotional healing process should unfold or how long it should take. (Check out the posts on intuition development here.)
Healing from psychological trauma is about more than thinking the “right” way.
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Intellectual learning about topics like how to set boundaries, how to challenge negative thoughts, how to overcome perfectionism or other traits that bring harm to your life is very important. This is part of the emotional healing process, but it is not the entirety of the process of healing from psychological trauma. For me, learning about topics like this was important and certainly improved my life. At the same time, I felt like something remained unfinished on a deeper level. Though I knew how to set boundaries, how to challenge negative thoughts, etc., it was still difficult to do these things on a consistent basis. Healing from psychological trauma on a deeper level was like suddenly having all of these difficulties and road blocks removed without “thinking” my way through them.
Feelings are things that you physically experience in your body.
This will not be news to everyone. However, I had no idea that I was utilizing two different forms of dissociation to get through my daily life because I had been doing it since preschool. The result of this disassociation was that I could not physically feel emotions in my body. I knew when I was sad, I knew when I was angry, I just didn’t physically feel these things in my body. I didn’t know that other people had a physical experience in their chest or stomach when they felt an emotion. Pilates, somatic therapy, and Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart were very helpful in getting me to a point where I could feel my emotions instead of think them. I was then able to learn how to label, understand, and regulate my emotions (allow the emotion to enter, experience the emotion, comfort myself, and allow the emotion to pass). If connecting with physical sensations is your body is difficult frheck out the post on Journal Prompts For Connecting With Your Body.
During the process of healing my childhood psychological trauma I experienced “muscle spasms” that I believe are neurogenic tremors. I re-experienced physical pains that I had forgotten were part of my childhood (a persistent cough, pain in my right heel, etc.). Images and phrases began to suddenly jump into my mind, each with a story to tell me or information to provide. I would spontaneously be thinking about musical lyrics, lines of poetry, and even lines from philosophical texts I had once read. I began to re-live the experience of my childhood emotionally; I began to remember my childhood, including how it felt. I began to have intense dreams with repetitive themes and symbols that slowly pieced together to create a story that felt transcendent and held deep symbolic and spiritual meaning to me. (Check out the posts on dream journaling here.) This was particularly surprising to me because my childhood involved painful experiences with a fundamentalist religion and I have long been agnostic and not engaged in a spiritual life.
You are already on the emotional healing journey.
For decades I held in tension the sense that I had no reason to need to heal with the sense that I desperately needed to fix some “wrongness” in me. I now understand that my nervous system was stuck in a perpetual and exhausting fight-flight-freeze-fawn cycle. I also understand that my body was fighting desperately to heal and that all my attempts to fix what was wrong mattered. For years those attempts didn’t reach fruition or remove the sense that something was wrong, but I now see that these attempts and all of my earlier experiences were the foundation for the deeper psychological healing that would come. It was as if I had been unknowingly piecing together small portions of a puzzle that would one day be brought together to form the completed picture. In the tail end of this leg of my journey, I began to feel as if I had already healed long ago, and that I simply needed to allow myself to feel the journey and the victory that was already mine.
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