Trauma Recovery

Experiencing trauma can make living difficult. It can make you live in survival mode, not experiencing life to the fullest. Recovery is something your mind and body beg and strive for. Sometimes you feel like you will never be able to move on, that this incident will cast a shadow on you throughout your whole life.

Other times you feel strong and do not let it control your life. But then those moments are short, and you easily slide back into feeling helpless. Trauma recovery is a long process, but it is a crucial step to regain control of your life.

What is trauma?

To understand trauma recovery, first, we need to address what is trauma. According to the American Psychological Association trauma is “an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster”.

Nevertheless, one may experience trauma from any event they perceive as threatening or harmful, whether physically or emotionally.

Internal safety

What trauma does to our bodies is make us feel like it is the only thing there is in the world. It paralyzes the mind and takes away the feeling of internal safety. This is the most common thing that happens and later it affects the healing process.

The most important thing to identify after experiencing trauma are moments of safety. When talking about what happened with your loved ones or your therapist, oftentimes you feel triggered and the body experiences the feeling of danger.

Initiating the sense of internal safety can be done by remembering the situations when you felt safe after the trauma. Calming sensation and relief will fill your bodies and it will establish the awareness of “after”, that now you are in a safe environment and that the traumatic incident is now behind you. The reason it is important to switch to a relaxation response is that only then the nervous system makes space for trauma recovery.

Trauma Recovery

Trauma recovery happens when one can live their life being completely in control. Recovering from a traumatic experience you slowly become more compassionate and gentler with yourself, and the feelings of shame and secrecy fade away.

Therapy plays an important role in this process, as healing does not happen in isolation, but in the creation of new connections. During this process, internal safety is established, and the person can move to other stages of healing. When you give your body the time it needs, it relaxes and unloads the excess energy from the traumatic experience, and it frees the energy in the nervous system. This is when you can move on with your life.

For trauma recovery to work, one must decide on their own to start, because only the victim is the author and arbiter of their own recovery.