The Quick Guide to Healing Trauma

Convos With Humans & Windshields

I got drinks with my coworkers one night after work. We shared our experiences with anxiety, depression, and bipolar.

One coworker opened about his depression and drug and alcohol binges that almost ended his life.

He also mentioned the struggles of his girlfriend. Her antidepressants have caused her to lose sleep, weigh an unhealthy eighty-eight pounds, and at times, worsen her melancholy.

My other coworker told her story about her manic episode that made her feel a euphoria that dwarfs drugs, followed by days of darkness that led to a panic attack at work and, ultimately, a Bipolar diagnosis.

After the conversation with my coworkers, I was driving like a lunatic.

No. I wasn’t driving dangerously. I was talking and gesturing to my windshield as if it were my coworkers.

I’d reorganize and rehearse my thoughts, giving my voice and arms a breather before continuing the conversation with my windshield.

After hours of thought, typing, and invisible conversations, this article is my attempt to help my coworkers overcome their mental health issues.

The Cause of Mental Illness

There are many hypotheses about the causes of depression, anxiety, bipolar, and narcissism. Most of them are too complicated and outdated.

I’m a psychology major and aspiring Marriage and Family Therapist. I just finished an upper-division abnormal psychology class, where it detailed the alleged causes of the most common mental disorders mentioned previously. Genetics and brain chemistry being the two main culprits.

I don’t entirely disagree. But many people don’t suffer from illness despite their family’s misfortunes.

Conversely, many come from stable lineages and yet suffer from mental disorders.

My mom was diagnosed Bipolar when I was 14. Her parents, grandparents, and sisters are emotionally stable.

My dad, emotionally solid and genuinely a calm, happy person, spent weeks in a mental hospital six years ago. My dad has eight brothers and sisters — none of whom have mental issues.

My brother has been diagnosed with depression many times. I suffered (and still suffer) from social anxiety. Despite our parents’ recent difficulties, there’s no sign of concern.

In my case specifically, most of my family are social butterflies. I seem to be the only one who struggles with anxiety socially.

I dated two girls who were diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder. Their family history, clear.

The family of every person mentioned shows no signs of mental illness or brain malfunction. Their struggles developed and worsened over time.

Even if your issues are genetic, has that explanation helped you?

Has traditional psychiatry — antidepressants — and talk therapy improved your “condition”?

Has your diagnosis brought peace or shame?

If your family history and brain chemistry aren’t the cause of your mental problems, then what is?

Unprocessed emotional trauma.

Trauma 101

Trauma has many faces. It isn’t limited to war veterans and rape victims.

Other forms of trauma: Emotionally unavailable and disapproving parents Parents that were emotionally suffocating and too involved Personal interpretation of external events Bullying, teasing from peers or family Unhealthy messages from social media, books, gurus, and teachers Relational infidelity, betrayal, and mistreatment

The emotions from a traumatic experience get stored in the body and control your thoughts and behaviors.

Over time, the emotions’ intensity strengthens, causing the body and brain to be overwhelmed, creating states of depression and anxiety.

Physical and psychological health can increase or decrease over time. During the process, we enter and exit states.

For example, bad eating and exercising habits cause a person to become obese and diabetic.

My dad used to run seven miles a day, lift weights, play hockey, and have a body fat percentage of five — leaner than most athletes. After years of no exercise and fast food, he was diagnosed as prediabetic in May of this year. Last month he was diagnosed as diabetic.

My mom — described as a happy child — eventually became addicted to drugs and alcohol and got involved in unhealthy relationships.

My grandpa gave me a letter my mom wrote to my grandma. At thirteen years old, my mom was pleading for the love and approval of my grandma, who was a strict parent — not letting my mom dress the way she desired, close her bedroom door, or be on the phone for more than ten minutes.

In high school, my mom began acting erratically. She’d ditch school and throw parties at her house when my grandparents weren’t home. She got expelled from her first high school and began hanging with the “wrong crowd.”

My mom won beauty pageants in high school and was physically healthy until my brother and I entered elementary school. She used food as her coping mechanism and ballooned to nearly three hundred pounds as a five-foot woman when I entered middle school.

Her low self-esteem attracted men that only shrunk her confidence further, leading her to drug and alcohol abuse.

She appeared recovered when I was sixteen years old. She was working at a job she liked, running every morning, and dating a good man.

But there seemed to be an internal battle that overtook her being. She began abusing again when I was in college.

Heavy emotions get stored in the body and compound, gradually altering a person’s thoughts and actions.

But how and why do feelings stay within the body?

What Tigers Can Teach Humans

Animals have an unconscious ability to process intense emotions. Peter Levine describes this capability in his book Waking The Tiger: Healing Trauma.

A Tiger is in an elevated state of stress, fear, and anxiety when chased by a Lion.

When the Tiger is safe, its body begins to shake vigorously. The shaking breaks the tension in the body, allowing the emotions to flow and dissipate.

An earthquake does the same thing to a building — it shakes it until it crumbles.

Humans have a similar mechanism (minus the vigorous shaking) as the Tiger, but Tigers can’t control their thoughts and emotions, allowing the vibration to occur effortlessly.

Humans can consciously and unconsciously suppress difficult thoughts and emotions, inadvertently blunting the healing process.

We do this because we’re scared to feel and re-experience painful emotions. The unprocessed feelings remain in the body and are frequently triggered by external events and internal interpretations.

Common ways we suppress emotions:

• Control our thoughts and feelings by “positive” thinking
• Distract ourselves via phones, tv, work, friends, family, etc.
• Dissociciate through drugs and alcohol
• Chase internal and external validation via social media, friends, family, accomplishment, and self-improvement

Let’s say your parents yelled at you for getting a C on your report card. Their screams penetrated your soul with fear and injected your self-esteem with shame.

Moving forward, you try and be perfect, anxiously walking on eggshells around them because you don’t want to make a mistake and ridiculed again.

At work, your boss calls you into his office. You assume you did something wrong because your parents scolded your report card. Your heart starts to race and feels as if it’s crawling towards your throat.

Your boss gives you constructive criticism, but you interpret it as your “dumb” or “flawed,” and this further cements the belief “there’s something wrong with me.”

You feel inferior around your friends. You’re the butt of the joke because they can sense your timidity. You’re scared if you stand up for yourself, you’ll lose their approval, and you’ll be alone.

To suppress the angst and mute the self-hate, you watch Netflix. When you can’t focus on the television because the voices are too loud and obtrusive, you reach for your phone.

Soon, you begin watching television and being on your phone while drunk.

In high school, I sucked with girls. I didn’t kiss a girl, which is very unusual. Even “nerds” at my school were having more success than me.

In college, I began to read and watch videos about dating and relationships. Years later, I got involved in my first relationship. It wasn’t healthy and didn’t last long.

To understand what went wrong, I continued to read and learn. There’d be sentences that would send me into a panic. Shame and self-criticism would strike me randomly.

I was visiting my dad, and while sitting on the couch, the thought that I caused my first relationship to fail caused my heart to spasm and my blood to flush my face. I couldn’t enjoy the moment with my family because my inner turmoil consumed me.

To calm down, I told myself, “I’m amazing. I didn’t make a mistake,” because, at the time, I believed “affirmations” would control and improve my self-image and results.

Believing there was more to learn, I continued to read. Knowledge was the weapon that I used to conquer my inner commotion and desired results.

Eventually, I began using drugs to quiet the theories, principles, and concepts that I judged myself by.

How To Heal

You probably guess it. You have to allow the brain and body to process difficult emotions.

You do this by becoming whole or learning how to integrate and transcend thoughts and emotions.

When we label thoughts and emotions as bad, dangerous, destructive, or negative, we immediately create splits within ourselves.

The “bad” emotions are the inadequate versions of our personality, and the “good” emotions, the adequate.

To integrate challenging emotions and eliminate internal splits, you have to practice self-compassion and mindfulness.

“It’s OK”

One thing you have to realize is thoughts and emotions aren’t going to kill you. They aren’t to be feared. The “reality” of your beliefs won’t cause you to have a heart attack. Believing so forces you to suppress them.

But thoughts and feelings aren’t easy to accept and embrace. Self-compassion will relax the tension and shame around your inner experience.

Self-compassion entails being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism, according to Kristen Neff, the author of Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Nice to Yourself.

Kindness gives you the confidence and comfort to deal with traumatic feelings.

An essential practice of self-compassion is your internal dialogue. “It’s OK” is an organic expression of self-kindness.

“It’s OK to have these feelings.”

“It’s OK. These feelings are normal to have.”

“It’s OK to be scared.”

“It’s OK. Everything is going to be OK.

Feelings > Thoughts

To accept and process emotions, you have to become aware of them. Mindfulness is the discipline of becoming aware of your thoughts and feelings.

It’s more essential and effective to focus on feelings rather than thoughts because one feeling contains many thoughts.

When your boss calls you into his office, you could be thinking, “am I in trouble? Am I going to be fired? What will my parents think? I’ll need to find a job as soon as possible to pay rent. What if I can’t pay rent? Where will I live?”

All those thoughts create fear. When you let go of fear, you also release the accompanying thoughts.

As you know, feelings get stored and manifest in the body. When you experience fear, your heart begins to race, your shoulders rise, and your jaw tightens.

To release the fear, you have to relieve the tension in your body.

When and How to Practice Self-Compassion and Mindfulness

You can practice being nice to yourself and emotional and physical awareness all day, every day.

Throughout your day, ask yourself how you’re feeling, find the emotion in your body and say, “it’s OK. How I’m feeling is normal. Everything’s going to be OK” while breathing and relaxing the tension in your body.

Yoga & Meditation

I’m not a firm believer in yoga and meditation because of how they’re marketed.

Yoga and meditation are advertised as tools that will make you an “enlightened,” peaceful fairy that only sees rainbows and butterflies.

They have to be marketed this way; how else will they get you to hold painful poses and sit on a mat for long periods?

But, yoga and meditation can help you practice self-compassion and mindfulness. But understand, they are not the be-all-end-all; they alone will not heal you.

Positive habits can become an addiction too. Believing you “need” to meditate to lower your stress or heal will cause a practice to become a dependency.

I do like yoga because holding and deepening poses causes the muscles to shake, breaking the tension in that area, similar to the Tiger’s healing mechanism.

Trauma expert and author of The Body Keeps Score — Bessel van der Kolk — states yoga as being one of the only physical healing modalities that actually works.

I occasionally meditate. But I notice I get into meditative states throughout my day the more I practice self-compassion and mindfulness.

Signs You’re On The Right Path

• When things go wrong, you don’t automatically blame yourself
• You’re less sensitive to rejection or criticism
• You don’t ruminate about what you should’ve said or done
• You take pride in your ability to control your thoughts, feelings, and actions healthily
• You’re able to see yourself wholly
• You’re able to express yourself freely

Personally, I knew I was healing when I:

• Felt less anxious and more expressive socializing
• Didn’t care to argue or be “right”
• Stopped trying to control the way people viewed me
• Didn’t try to get every girl to like me
• Realized I’m not meant to connect with everyone
• Made life simpler

Words of Caution

Healing is a trap. Don’t overthink or over glamourize the healing journey.

Believing you or your life will be immaculate “after” you heal is a misconception.

Becoming hyper-aware of the tension in your body or your internal dialogue will only impede your progress.

Healing is a never-ending journey. Fear, anxiety, and disappointment will never disappear.

Still, your relationship and response to your external and internal world will allow you to process and learn truths that will guide you through life gracefully.

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