Healing Trauma on Different Levels

Many people have experienced some type of trauma during their life. Trauma can be anything that has a major impact on your life, either for the short term, or the long term. Trauma can be a bad relationship, abuse, a car accident, the death of a loved one, loss of a job, loss of ability, or any other thing that is sudden, unexpected, and changes your life.

It can take months or years of healing to be able to move past the trauma. Sometimes it is necessary to seek the help of a trained counselor or therapist. This would be highly recommended in trauma cases where abuse in any form is present. While working to heal these traumas it is important to remember that there is no miracle cure for them and that it will require work on the part of the individual to help move past the trauma that has occurred. 

After the physical healing, began the process of mental healing. What is meant by mental healing is working on changing the inner dialogue in your head that has developed due to the trauma(s) that you had experienced. It is a difficult thing to begin to become aware of the interior dialogue that is almost always ongoing inside our own minds. However, in becoming aware of that dialogue you can begin to change it for the better. 

Visualize grabbing a hold of the negative thoughts and then setting up logical arguments of why that thought wasn't a truthful perception of yourself or the situation. For example, if you were to think, "No one wants to be around me because I'm always so sad." you would then contradict that thought by saying, "No, that's not true. Jenny wanted to get together with me for lunch. Lisa wants to get together for a scrapbooking session." or whatever else was going on in your life at the time. This takes time to learn and get easier with practice. Lots of practice!

The next stage of the process was on the emotional level. When we feel sad, there were thoughts that caused us to feel sad prior to the emotion being felt. An important thing to remember during this process is that we can acknowledge our emotions, but remember that they are not necessarily a truth. We are always the creator of our own emotions. No one else can make us feel love, sad, angry, or any other way, unless we let them. Emotions only follow our own internal thoughts, in every single situation.

Heal the Soul

The next stage of the healing process is much deeper and at what is found at a soul level. At this level of healing it is important to see where our own actions played into causing the trauma. For example, in the case of abuse, what role did you play as a victim of abuse? Keeping secrets? Feeling like no one would believe you? These can be seen as part of the role of a victim, actions that enabled the abuser to continue the abuse. There are valid reasons for all of those actions and feelings at the time during the abuse. Lack of emotional intelligence, lack of life experience, etc. 

This is not about blaming yourself for the abuse, but instead about accepting responsibility for your own choices that were made at that time. Remember that you need to be kind and forgiving of yourself and your actions that you did or did not take during the trauma. We can only make decisions based on the knowledge we had during the original trauma. 

During this stage of healing it is also important to release the shame and embarrassment that may have accompanied the trauma. A good tool to help you do this is to ask, "If my best friend told me this story, what would I tell them?" We are almost always harder on ourselves than on someone else that we care about.

Healing trauma takes time, patience and lots of healing.  But if you work to improve, just one day at a time, you are strong enough to get over any hurdles life throws at you!