Welcome to the next episode in our ongoing series, Surviving and Thriving After Trauma. The inspiration for all of our podcast series comes from the issues we see clients deal with on a regular basis, and the category of trauma is a big one. The million dollar question our clients ask when it comes to trauma is: “How do I heal?”
Trauma is any experience that overwhelms your ability to cope on your own and can stem from events like divorce, abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, health crises, betrayal and more. However, it’s not just the event itself that is disruptive, but the lingering emotional and mental impact that makes healing difficult.
Lynn, John, and Austin sit down to discuss 4 key elements needed to heal from trauma:
Ongoing safety
Self-regulation skills
Giving voice to your trauma
Unburdening your trauma
This episode has the same disclaimer as the previous one, which is simply that as you listen to us talk about trauma, it may bring up situations you’ve personally experienced as well as the emotions that go with them. Pace yourself as you listen, and find a friend, mentor, or counselor to process with as needed.
Common Causes of Trauma
Because there are so many types of trauma, it is hard to list them all. Even if you don’t see a particular event that you can relate to on this list, no doubt you've encountered painful circumstances that have left you feeling overwhelmed and perhaps stuck in distressing emotions or harmful memories. Here are some of the ones we see most often:
Divorce: your own divorce or your parents’ divorce
Abuse: physical, emotional, verbal, and sexual, particularly in childhood
Sexual assault: rape, stalking, harassment
Violence of any kind: domestic violence, aggression, threats, rage
Health crisis or death of a loved one: hospitalization, surgery, infant or child loss, death by suicide
Other traumas include: war, racism, addiction, betrayal, neglect
In the last episode, we described trauma as anything that overwhelms your brain’s ability to process an event. We also discussed how the trauma is not only the event itself, but what happens to you as the result of the event – how you come to interpret the event.
In addition to the precipitating event, there is the “trauma inside the trauma”, which is the feeling of being alone, abandoned, and misunderstood. You may blame God for allowing it to happen, others for not protecting you, and yourself for causing it to happen even though it was not your fault. That sense of shame is a false narrative on top of the event itself and pushes you down a dark hole.
What Do You Need to Heal?
It will take time to restore a sense of safety and well-being, so be patient with yourself. The good news is that healing can be found in these 4 foundational therapeutic practices. As we go through them, keep in mind that these are things you can do for yourself, but they are also things you can do for others.
1. Ongoing safety
You need a safe, secure, comfortable and consistent place, person, and/or community that will be there for you as you work toward healing. When you have someone bear witness to your trauma – someone who can provide ongoing safety – it will help you handle overwhelming emotions, and create an internal “container” for your thoughts and feelings. If you bring up your overwhelming emotions to someone who isn’t safe, then you might be re-traumatized.
Characteristics of a safe person include:
Someone who listens without judgment
Someone who can validate your feelings
Someone who can provide basic empathy
Someone who can help contain your intense emotions
If you’re in crisis – a verbally or physically abusive relationship, continual cutting and demeaning remarks by a parent or co-worker or roommate – you’re not going to be able to heal while you’re in the middle of those situations because the hurts keep coming. Manage the crisis as best you can until you get to a place where the crisis and/or threat has passed. Find small pockets of time where you can implement some short-term strategies to manage the crisis until you can get some longer-term relief:
After you leave your house, take 10 minutes to do some deep breathing in your car
Talk to a friend or co-worker about your feelings and have them pray for you
Take 20-30 min/day to walk or exercise to flush out the stress from your system
Many people are eventually able to unpack and heal from their traumatic upbringings – verbal, physical, and even sexual abuse from caregivers, siblings, distant family members – because they aren’t living with them anymore. The ‘war is over’, so to speak, and now they can begin healing in a safe, secure, and comfortable location that is ongoing for as long as needed.
2. Self-regulation
In order to manage your emotions in a healthy way, you will need to identify your triggers – when you’ve experienced something traumatic, those distressing feelings create a brain state that can easily be re-created in the present. For instance, if as a child, you were abandoned by your parent and you felt scared and alone, then if your friend doesn’t text you back right away, or your spouse makes plans without consulting you, you can experience an aroused physiological state of fear and a sense of being abandoned, even if that’s not what is happening in the present moment.
The way to calm down is to name your feelings and emotions. When you get upset, ask yourself: “What am I feeling? Why am I so upset? What does this situation remind me of?” By naming and labeling what you’re feeling and connecting it to a past event, your brain can calm down. Instead of facing a nebulous “threat”, it is now a “threat” that you can understand and make sense of and put into perspective. You can tell yourself: “That was then, and this is now.”
In therapy, we use the acronym SIFT. Pay attention to:
Sensations
Images
Feelings
Thoughts
Learning to regulate your emotions means that you don’t need to live in a constant state of trauma response (fight, flight, freeze, or fawn), but you can live in the present moment, in a calm state, able to connect with others and make healthy choices. Remember: when you can self-reflect, you can self-correct. Part of healing from trauma requires you to take personal ownership over your trauma responses and to realize that you are no longer helpless in the face of them.
3. Give voice to the trauma
When you narrate what happened in the presence of someone who is safe and caring, it negates the shame that seeps into every part of us. A helpful way to identify shame is through the 3 questions that God poses to Adam in Genesis 3:9-11. These same questions can be used to diagnose the main categories of trauma:
Where are you? Another way to ask this is, “What happened to you?” God is coming toward Adam, and Adam feels safe in God’s presence. He admits that he ran and hid, but in this encounter when God asks him the first question in the Bible - “Where are you?”, Adam doesn’t continue running, he answers God’s question, and he’s even bold enough to blame God for what he did!
Who told you? Specifically, “What lies have you believed?” What God says about you is very different from the lies that the world, your own deceitful heart, and the enemy will seek to weave into your soul. Giving voice to trauma is learning to detect the false narratives that you believe as a result of your suffering.
Did you eat from the tree? In other words, “What are the hurtful ways you’ve chosen to cope with your pain?” This question adds the category of choice. Things happen to us in this world. Sad things, tragic things, hurtful things, traumatic things. We are sinned against, and at the very same time, we also sin against others. We don’t make the wisest, smartest, and healthiest choices. In fact, sometimes our choices make the problems worse, and more complex!
4. “Unburden” the trauma
Unburdening cannot, and should not, take place when you’re still in the middle of a crisis, or an overwhelming, or traumatic situation. Unburdening requires safety. This is often best done in the presence of a trained professional counselor, or a wise and seasoned pastor, friend, or mentor.
When you unburden a painful memory or experience, you’re going back in time and revisiting the traumatic event or situation. That doesn’t just involve thinking about the situation, but it will likely involve feeling the situation and seeing the situation.
As you do that, at a time and pace you can handle, slowly but surely those experiences lose their power. What might have been a 9 out of 10 on the anxiety scale eventually becomes a 2 out of 10 on the scale. It’s not that you completely erase the experience from your memory, but you unburdened and processed it with someone in the context of safety. The open wound becomes a scar.
Practical Takeaways
Utilize Professional Care: It might be time for professional care when your coping mechanisms and strategies aren’t working. It’s a chance to replace old patterns with healthier patterns of relating, and to develop skills to recognize triggers and work through the accompanying distressing emotions and automatic and subconscious behaviors that follow them.
Utilize the Power of Scripture: Read and pray through the Psalms, meditate on the truth of God and his character, and relearn your identity in Christ as a new creation. Receive his cleansing and forgiveness. Wait on the Lord and seek refuge in him from your enemies. No matter who your enemy is, or you perceive them to be, God is your rock and your salvation, an ever-present help in time of need. Turning towards him is a way to protest the damage that trauma does and reorients you to the bigger story that God is writing for your life.
No matter who your enemy is, or you perceive them to be, God is your rock and your salvation, an ever-present help in time of need. Turning towards him is a way to protest the damage that trauma does and reorients you to the bigger story that God is writing for your life.
The Healing Power of God Breaks the Bondage of Trauma
Even if you understand everything we’ve said in this episode, your healing journey may take a lifetime. The healing power of God might come to you though other people – for example, through the means of counseling and sitting with someone safe you can unburden with.
If you’ve gone through trauma, it’s okay to be broken, it’s okay to struggle, it’s okay to not have your problems solved right away. There are wounds so deep that no therapist can understand, places so tender no therapist can touch. Your pain is your own, and only you and Jesus can know it truly intimately.
We’d like to close with the reminder that Jesus enters the weeds of our human trauma and conquered the ultimate trauma: the power of death. He did this by confronting evil on the cross and enduring the shame and suffering of the crucifixion. He took on our shame, judgment, and condemnation, descended into darkness, and rose on the third day.
This makes Jesus a safe person for anyone who has been through trauma – he knows your griefs, sympathizes with your weaknesses, and binds up your wounds. As you journey towards healing, remember that there is no trauma so deep that it can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus.