What word comes to your mind when someone mentions TRAUMA?
Maybe it’s a childhood hurt, something you went through, or something you’ve been trying to forget. The reality is, trauma can come in many shapes and sizes, from childhood abuse to a bad relationship or a life-altering event. Trauma is more than your memory, it’s something that can be slowly deteriorating your life without you even realizing it. It’s the baggage you’re dragging around from the past, stuff you’re unaware of, and don’t even know you’re carrying. That’s weighing you down so heavily, holding you back in relationships, and from making your fullest contribution to this world, and is showing up as anxiety, depression or physical pain. The best news? You don’t need to stay stuck. Change is possible! And more than that: there are a series of simple, transformative techniques you can use to bypass your trauma for good, once and for all. And get on with the life you deserve.
Why Trauma Holds You Back?
1. Affects Your Self-Esteem: Many people with histories of abuse or trauma, especially early childhood trauma, carry an unspoken and unquestioned sense of shame or personal unworthiness. You might even experience an almost habitual sense of “not being good enough” Which can affect your career, relationships, and how you see yourself.
2. It Blurs Your Emotions: Trauma can cause emotional blockages, keeping you from trusting people, getting close to others, or from even being able to show your feelings. You might not even realize why you’re reacting so strongly to something seemingly minor.
3. Trauma rewires your brain. When a trauma happens, your brain activates the fight-or-flight response, meaning that you constantly feel like you’re on high alert. Your system eventually starts overreacting, or hyper reacting, causing you to be highly anxious, overly sensitive to details, in your environment, and unable to wind down even when you are under no threat.
4. Physical Symptoms: Believe it or not, unprocessed trauma can also show up in your body. People who suffer from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) or experience a history of abuse often find that they commonly suffer from headaches, chronic pain or digestive problems. Your body can hold on to stress as tightly as your mind does.
RECOGNIZING THE CHAINS OF TRAUMA
The first step to healing is bringing the trauma to light and recognising how it’s been holding you back. So many people spend years completely unaware of how their past has been affecting their current decisions, thoughts and feelings.
Some common signs that past trauma may still be affecting you include:
- Difficulty forming close relationships
- A tendency to sabotage your own success or happiness
- Unexplained anxiety or depression
- Feeling stuck in the same patterns (whether in love, work, or other areas)
- Hypervigilance or always feeling “on edge”
- Avoidance of certain situations or people
If anything here rings your alarm or your bells – you are not the only one, the good news is that trauma, no matter how dire it might seem, is almost certainly treatable. You can break free.
TECHNIQUES TO HEAL AND UNBLOCK TRAUMA
It can seem impossible to move beyond the effects of something that’s been with you for decades, but tried-and-trusted techniques used with millions of other people have proven to be extremely effective.
1. Therapy (It’s Not Just Talking): It’s often the most effective way to turn the tide on trauma: a great therapist will listen to your pain. But it’s actually not just talk therapy. Often, therapists are trained in trauma-informed modalities such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) or somatic experiencing, which help to rewire the trauma brain to wind down rather than reacting to intense emotion.
2. Mindfulness and Meditation: If you’re traumatized, almost all the time you’re still in the past. Mindfulness pulls you back into the present, usually through breathing, yoga or meditation exercises that calm the nervous system so your mind can digest your emotions without descending into panic.https://amzn.to/48jmBPK
3. Energy Healing: Trauma isn’t just a mental thing. It’s also trapped in your energy body. For example, Reiki for chakra balancing or even acupuncture can unblock your energy and support your emotional healing.https://amzn.to/3A3AHs6
4. Journaling Writing things down can be helpful for sorting our feelings and processing emotion. When we express that emotion on paper, even if it sounds nonsense, it’s a little bit less stuck inside.https://amzn.to/48hTHQ9
5. Movement-Based Therapy: Trauma lives in the body, and in fact can get stuck in the body and your body is releasing what your mind might not have had the courage to yet. Practices such as yoga, or dance or just simple exercises help you to re-establish connection to your body, finally, so it can release the tension or trauma it’s holding in and it can let go.https://amzn.to/4fjqKpa
6. Hypnotherapy Accessing the subconscious can provide a deeper understanding of trauma and access insights that can lead to healing. Hypnotherapy is also effective at bringing out hidden patterns, beliefs or triggers, helping identify what’s keeping you stuck, and then facilitating ways to reframe those same thoughts and experiences in healthier, more empowering ways.
Perhaps you have been trying to hold something in your body for a long time, and maybe you think that trauma is so heavy, you couldn’t possibly put it down. Well, you don’t have to do it alone. There is human support. There are resources. There are techniques that can help you unblock the trauma in your body. There are many ways to allow your life to be free again.
It begins by taking a single step: seeing your trauma not as the source of who you are but as only one aspect of your complex personhood, and one that can, with the right tools, be healed, aided and eventually set aside.
Whether you suffer from PTSD, anxiety or any complex trauma, healing from trauma isn’t just about feeling better, it’s about reclaiming your life. It’s about coming out from the shadow of your past so you can fully embrace the present and build a future that represents you!
