How to heal from a traumatic event

Have you ever experienced something big and scary, but because you weren’t physically harmed, you kept up with life as if nothing happened? 

Did you know there might be residue from the event in your body?

We're not always aware of the effect traumatic events have on our lives. It can take a few weeks for symptoms to show. And when they do come up, we don’t always make the connection.

If you start having psychophysiological symptoms, look back and see if something out of the ordinary happened a few weeks earlier.

If you know you’ve gone through something traumatic, you may want to do something to heal as a preventative measure.

To help clients renegotiate a traumatic event, I ask them to recount the moment that they realized that they survived. 

It may seem obvious because they wouldn’t be here to tell the tale otherwise, but so often when something like this happens we don’t actually notice it. 

Noticing that you survived, even in hindsight, is key to trauma resolution. 

Often people register survival on a superficial level, but the key to healing is getting to expand this moment and take it in fully, as an embodied experience.

That means you not only get to talk about the details of what happened that let you know that you survived, but you actually notice how it feels in your body now as you talk, think and imagine that moment. 

You might feel all kinds of things: anger, regret, grief, relief. You might notice a certain level of activation in your body.

You probably didn’t get a chance to notice all of these things back then. There was no time or space or support.  

You get to be with whatever arises from the vantage point of the present moment, from a place of resource and safety. You can feel only as much as you can tolerate in that moment. 

As you’re sensing and feeling into that moment without getting too overwhelmed, you might be able to discharge the sympathetic energy that got trapped in the system.

That’s how trauma gets renegotiated.