Healing From Trauma

Healing from trauma is more than just rehashing the memory. Feeling anything you pushed away, honoring it and letting go. Finding purpose and meaning in your new self. Yes, this is all part of it. But once you’ve done that, healing from trauma is about not being miserable anymore.

You need to practice feeling joy and expand your capacity to tolerate positive emotions. Joy, intimacy, affection, caring, bonding, love, peace, calmness, gentleness, gratitude. All the things you didn’t experience and maybe don’t believe exist, or you don’t deserve them.

Meditate on positive emotions and practice feeling them in your heart. Hype up any positive experiences in your life, like the first sip of a hot cup of coffee on a cold winter morning. The anticipation, the smell, the steam rising, bringing it up to your lips, closing your eyes. Feeling it in your mouth and throat. Feeling the comfort and satisfaction. We can do this about almost any experience. It requires a slowness that the traumatized nervous system is not yet capable of. Try to slow down and rest, notice and let go of self judgement or fearful thoughts, and give yourself small gifts of pleasure. Not the addictive dopamine rush of using something to numb hopelessness. Real sensory joy from the experiences of life in a physical body.