What I wish I knew about healing from trauma
I am a survivor of childhood emotional and sexual abuse, and did not become aware of the abuse until I was in my 30s because I had blocked the memories. I still don’t have full memories of what happened. I can remember random things from my traumatic experiences, like a smell, or an image of a room, or a felt sense of not being safe. I had to do a lot of detective work by way of interviewing multiple family members to figure out who the perpetrator was, how old I was, and who was aware of the abuse. Turns out no one knew it was happening, and the perpetrator was someone known to my family (it is common for abusers of children to be a known person to the child). I still don’t have all the answers of what happened, and I likely will never know all the details.
Fortunately, I know as a clinician that one doesn’t need to remember the trauma or have all the details in order to heal from it. I say this to assure you that if you are a survivor of trauma and don’t really know what happened to you, you can still heal. We treat the symptoms (such as avoidance, hypervigilance, chronic anxiety), help heal the negative cognitions about ourselves (such as feeling unworthy, feeling damaged, feeling unloveable), and practice trusting our bodies, emotions, and other people to teach our brains and nervous systems safety in relationships.
Looking back on it now, I can see that there were many signs that I was a trauma survivor. I was very controlling and rigid (a consequence of having control taken from me early in my life). I was often in abusive romantic relationships. I was easily triggered and emotionally dysregulated. I engaged in self-abandonment routinely, meaning I would put the needs of others over my own in an attempt to keep them close to me. I loathed myself intensely due to the amount of shame I carried, which prompted me to try to earn self worth through achievement. I functioned better in chaos than in times of calm, because chaos was what I was used to. So I kept my life chaotic and busy, and avoided my feelings through working too much.
I wish that there had been people in my community who would have helped me identify I needed help, but there was so much stigma and lack of information about mental health issues in the South Asian and Middle Eastern communities I grew up in, that I was just seen as an emotional mess rather than a person in need. As with many who are neglected or abused, I became louder and angrier to get my basic needs met, which just perpetuated my reputation of being an emotionally chaotic person.
In my 30s I started to have memories of the abuse in therapy, and this opened the door for me to address my abuse through trauma informed treatment like Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR), Pia Mellody’s Post Induction Therapy, and other healing modalities like energy healing (spiritually based healing) and somatic work (body based healing). I have tried many conventional and non conventional healing modalities in my quest to “solve the issue” of being an angry person, as I was told over and over again by others that my anger was an issue. The truth is, that the trauma had to be integrated into the core of my being rather than seen as something that has to be cut out like a cancer and “solved.” It has taken many years for me to get to a place of peace in my heart and start to believe that I’m loveable as I am, and to also release the anger in safe and meaningful ways.
I want to share three things I’ve learned both as a survivor of trauma and as a clinician assisting others to heal from trauma, in case this could help others.
Time does not heal trauma, treatment heals trauma. Without trauma informed treatment, trauma symptoms gets worse over time. If you find yourself making your world smaller and smaller (less activities, less socializing, etc) it could be a way for you to feel more in control of your life, and it’s easier to control your life and feel safe if there are less components to control. But this isn’t thriving, this is just surviving your life. You deserve to thrive and have a full life. It’s important to work with providers who have specialty training and experience treating trauma, who can help you reach your full potential.
Relational trauma heals in relationship. If you experienced relational trauma (being harmed in a relationship with another person), it can feel safer to avoid relationships altogether. Part of healing will include learning to build discernment, the ability to develop a good filter for identifying danger, and then practice letting safer people into your world. Learning to choose safe relationships to practice healing can be helpful, and therapy (individual or group) can be a wonderful starting point to learn to be in healthy relationship with others.
Healing from trauma can be a lifelong endeavor. This may sound exhausting, but it’s important to acknowledge that trauma can show up in your life in multiple ways, like an ache in a joint that flares up from time to time. The more you work to heal the trauma, the less intense and less frequent flare ups there are, but sometimes they happen anyway. The goal then, is not to make the trauma go away, but to provide you with tools to navigate flare ups so that they are less painful and you bounce back quicker.
Once I started learning more about trauma symptoms, I realized that I had mistaken these symptoms for my personality. I’m not an angry, emotionally chaotic person by nature. I experienced those states because those are normal human reactions anyone would have to extraordinarily abnormal events, such as being abused. Now that I am further along in my healing, I am starting to discover who I really am without thinking of myself as just within the confines of my emotional suffering. I am so much more than just a survivor of pain, and so are you.
For further reading about a personal story about an Asian American woman healing from relational trauma and living with Complex PTSD, see the book, What My Bones Know, by Stephanie Foo
If you are at risk of harming yourself or others, please call or text the national suicide hotline at 988
If you could use support with healing from trauma, schedule a free 15 min phone consult to learn more about how my practice can meet your needs.