Trauma & Healing

“Trauma is not what happens to us. But what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”  — Peter A Levine, PhD

Everyone’s healing journey is unique. We each have individual responses to events that happen in our life.

Trauma engages the body in patterns of protection and defense.  Often we start to seek therapy when those patterns and ways of being are no longer desirable maybe they are even getting in the way of other goals or desires. Grounding in safety can be a helpful place to start. What does safe feel like or what they imagine it to feel like? From a biological perspective when we experience safety our breath moves freely. We can can rest and digest, experience connection, and have access to our brain functions like attention and focus.

There are many, many ways to approach healing from traumatic experiences (DBT, EMDR, tapping, somatic work, talk therapy, psychedelic therapy, etc) Most of the approaches suggest starting with some kind of psychoeducation so you can make choices around the approaches you’d like to use. The second suggestion is developing some kind of mindfulness practicing. Mindfulness allows us increased capacity for self-regulation & self soothing which is a tool we usually need as we explore painful emotional experiences.

Additional Resources:

Bruce Perry & Oprah, Gabor Mate , Bessel Vanderkolk , Judith Herman, Peter Levine, Eliana Gil, Tim Ferriss, Tara Brach , Jonathon Faust , Stephen Levine , Peter Walker 

“I also hope this map will guide you to heal in a way that helps you become an unflinching source of kindness and self-compassion for yourself,” ― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving 

“It’s interesting-most people think about therapy as something that involves going in and undoing what’s happened. But whatever your past experiences created in your brain, the associations exist and you can’t just delete them. You can’t get rid of the past.

Therapy is more about building new associations, making new, healthier default pathways. It is almost as if therapy is taking your two-lane dirt road and building a four-lane freeway alongside it. The old road stays, but you don’t use it much anymore. Therapy is building a better alternative, a new default. And that takes repetition, and time, honestly, it works best if someone understands how the brain changes. This is why understanding how trauma impacts our health is essential for everyone.”

― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing