Healing from Trauma

The search for the REAL you…

Searching for reconnection with yourself?

“Why is life so hard?” The house is a mess, the checking account is empty again, and you have to take another sick day.

You’re smart and know it, but life’s simple tasks seem too large to handle on most days. The energy isn’t there.

If you could finish your degree, you could get a better job and earn more money. It’s just too much.

Getting any traction to move forward in your life is overwhelming. At this point, you’re trying to get through each day and stay alive. Sometimes you seriously wonder if life is really worth living.

“People think I am fine, but I’m not.”

Although people say you have it together, you know you don’t. Inside, you’re a wreck because anxiety is relentless. It’s there all the time, but you only feel it when it is extreme.

You learned to hide negative thoughts and have been successful. However, anxiety’s critical voice ceases, creating constant worry. Your response has paid off, right? How else could you be where you are today?

Now, however, you wonder whether working so hard is finally taking a serious toll on your relationships, your health, and your life, because inside you feel exhausted, in pain, and not worth it.

You are beginning to think, “But how do I make it stop?” What you’ve known your entire life about what to do and how to be isn’t working anymore.

“People don’t get me.”

They don’t get why things scare you, why you don’t break the rules a little, or go to the party. Nobody understands why things bother you so much and make you so upset.

People say you are too sensitive, and you believe them. Those comments reinforce the hunch that you’re weird, messed up, or broken, so you stay quiet.

You are obedient, dependable, and always quietly helping others, but people don’t seem to notice. They take advantage of you, expecting you always to be there.

To satisfy others, you are easygoing and hide your opinions about where to eat or what to do on Saturday. Stating your opinion isn’t worth the risk of being rejected or, worse, starting a fight.

Negative childhood experiences can linger.

It is an overwhelming environment we have lived in for years, maybe even decades. During that time, we felt powerless to deal with it and couldn’t run, shout, cry, or stand up for ourselves as we would have liked.

Maybe it was because we were so young and didn’t know how, or were so overpowered physically, or overcome psychologically with the horror of what was happening. It could have been because the way we were treated was so “normal.” Therefore, it didn’t occur to us to respond in any other way.

We had to learn to respond in ways that protected us, keeping us from being hurt even more. Sometimes we had to forget what happened.

The impacts of trauma are long-lasting.

Trauma is also when something you really needed to happen but didn’t. Not getting something you really needed – unconditional love, emotional presence, for your feelings to be allowed rather than shut down, caring words, and safe physical touch – can be as traumatic as getting something that hurt you.

Trauma makes it very difficult to be with pain. It teaches us to cease trying, be cautious, doubt ourselves, get angry, hide our feelings, put other people’s needs above our own, or blame ourselves.

It also causes us to try to be perfect, control every aspect of our life, disconnect from our body, not have boundaries, be in constant battle with ourselves, and a whole slew of other thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that were our saving grace at one time and are ruining our lives today.

Therapy can help you heal from trauma.

Healing is often a long road to overcome trauma, but it’s absolutely possible and worth it. You may be surprised to hear that digging up all the painful details of what happened to you and putting them under a microscope is not what I’ll suggest we do.

Trying to get rid of trauma only makes us suffer more. All the resistance and wanting it to go away create unnecessary suffering. This is where therapy can make a difference. In therapy, we will work together on your terms and at your pace to get you reconnected.

We will begin by helping you feel safe, learn ways to create a felt sense of safety within, and notice that there’s something inside you besides the effects of the trauma. There is something good in there, and that “good something” can make life easier to navigate.

As you get better at finding that inner peace and safety, we can begin to look at those hard parts of yourself, the ones you keep pushing away. Our goal is to get rid of the difficult parts of yourself, not trauma’s effects. We want to help you have a relationship with the pain, increase compassion for, and develop the ability to love these hurting parts of yourself.

The results are inner peace and safety.

Now, you will be able to face the feelings you fight to avoid, including guilt, shame, rage, terror, and loneliness. As you gain a sense of inner calm, it becomes possible to be with these emotions in a new way – one that doesn’t crush you.

Learning to focus on your body might be difficult at first because of something you learned to ignore. There might be sensations you’d rather not feel, or you might find it difficult to notice anything. Over time, you will become an expert at noticing your body’s sensations.

Next, we will tackle the critical things you say to yourself. After all, this is how you learned to make sense of the terrible things that happened. They are the parts that you needed to believe in to keep you safe and get through your life. Those things are exaggerated and hurtful the way they play out in your head. I’ll help you find a way to deal with that ongoing dialogue in your head that tells you how worthless you are.