Do you have trauma from your past that needs healing, but don’t know where to start? As a psychotherapist for over 25 years who has helped countless people heal from trauma, as well as being a trauma survivor who has done significant healing myself, I have a lot to offer in this regard.
The bulk of this article consists of recommendations for the best resources I have found that can assist you in your journey to heal from trauma. Also, I will share my thoughts on the most effective therapeutic approaches for both resolving and transcending trauma.
First of all, I want to share a profound truth that I have experienced both personally and professionally:
Not only can we heal from trauma, we can also be spiritually transformed in the process.
Learn more about this phenomenon by reading this:
Learning to Trust Your Body
When we have unresolved trauma living in our body, we cannot access the most enjoyable experiences available to us as humans: joy, wonder, pleasure, awe, contentment, peace and relaxation. I am a case in point. Almost two decades ago, when a well-meaning therapist asked me, “What do you do for fun Esther?” I honestly didn’t know what the answer was. I went home and looked up the definition of the word “fun.” I literally didn’t understand the concept. I would love to say that I have learned to have more fun since then, but I’m still working at it. I recently heard an affirmation from a yoga video that absolutely blew my mind:
“Joy is my birthright.”
I actually stopped the video right there and then because I was overcome by deep sadness. I allowed myself to pause and grieve for the child within me, who did not have much access to joy because she was so busy just surviving.
I’m hoping you will find this video/podcast helpful in learning to trust your body (even if you aren’t an HSP):
In the same vein, I highly recommend The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living by Hillary McBride from which you will learn why you most likely have such a complicated and fraught relationship with your own body, along with some starting exercises you can practice to heal that. I highly recommend her other book, Practices for Embodied Living: Experiencing the Wisdom of Your Body, as well, which is a hands-on guide to becoming embodied.
“When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.” – Mark Nepo
Unfortunately, I experienced two episodes of severe depression during the last five years of perimenopause; both which left me completely incapacitated. Having recovered, I am doing everything now within my power to never end up in that situation again. In retrospect, I realize that these “depressions” were an attempt to stuff down mountains of trauma I had endured throughout my life, but didn’t know what to do with.
Gabor Mate, in his book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, in the chapter entitled, The Mind Can Do Some Amazing Things: From Madness to Meaning, reframes “mental illness” this way:
“…rather than seeing it as an intruder from the outside, consider what it might be expressing about the life in which it arises.”
He goes on to describe “depression” this way:
“The word’s literal meaning is quite telling. To depress something means to push it down, as one might a beach ball in a swimming pool. I like that analogy especially because one can easily feel how much concerted force it takes to keep the ball submerged, and the way it “wants” to find a way back up to the surface. Keeping it down takes a toll.”
My “depression” was a metaphor for all of the things I had stuffed down from my past (including multiple traumas) that I could no longer manage nor contain. I knew that the survival strategy of “living from the neck up” was no longer serving me and was actually preventing me from accessing the good things in life, especially JOY-which I wanted so badly.
I recommend that you check out this podcast, How to understand and heal your trauma featuring Gabor Mate:
Along similar lines, I recommend this book: . I like the fact that instead of focusing mental disorders/illness, they dig beneath the surface to understand the conditions and life experiences (i.e, trauma) which lead to so much struggle in adulthood.
Here is a good overview of the book:
“Both (Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Perry) are concerned with the abuse of children and with adults who now suffer from unresolved childhood trauma. They want the public to be trauma informed and for people to heal. So, they delve into how the brain becomes wired in infancy and the early years, what creates childhood trauma, builds resilience, and helps heal.”
Which Type of Therapy is Best For Healing Trauma?
In my long career as a psychotherapist, I have explored and experienced many of the popular “trauma therapies” that are out there with little success. I have come to the conclusion that trauma cannot be fully accessed and healed from a “top down approach,” (i.e., talking therapies). From the burgeoning field of neuroscience, we know that trauma lives in the body and and cannot be accessed through the head. Therefore, I recommend somatic, (or body-based) therapies to clients who want to heal unresolved trauma and be transformed as a result.
Healing with Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing
After my last bout of severe depression, I knew that it was time to heal from the unresolved trauma that was still residing in my body. I found a practitioner of Somatic Experiencing and started my deep healing and transformational journey. Somatic Experiencing was created by Peter Levine and has helped millions of people all over the globe to not only heal from trauma, but to be spiritually transformed in the process. Here is one of my favourite quotes from him:
“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”
In other words, most of us stay traumatized because we were alone for the original trauma, and continue to be alone with it in adulthood. We often isolate ourselves further by developing a hard outer shell in an attempt to keep ourselves safe. The result quite often is that others can’t get close to us and we feel even more alone.
A highly skilled somatic practitioner can help us release trauma from our bodies, bear witness to our suffering, and let us know that we are not alone. I have found this to be the most healing part of my own journey to wholeness. I am finally sharing tragic experiences from my past in a safe and empowered way with another person, and I am no longer alone. As an only child, introvert, as well as a highly sensitive person (HSP), this has come as a profound relief and I feel so much lighter and freer as a result. I never realized how alone I had felt for most of my life until I had another person by my side to bear witness and to guide my healing.
Levine’s first book, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma is a must-have. Here’s why:
“Waking the Tiger offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. It views the human animal as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity. It asks and answers an intriguing question: why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatized? By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals virtually immune to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of human trauma is revealed.
Waking the Tiger normalizes the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed to heal them. People are often traumatized by seemingly ordinary experiences. The reader is taken on a guided tour of the subtle, yet powerful impulses that govern our responses to overwhelming life events. To do this, it employs a series of exercises that help us focus on bodily sensations. Through heightened awareness of these sensations trauma can be healed.”
I also highly suggest you read his latest book, An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey:
An overview of the book:
“In this intimate memoir, renowned developer of Somatic Experiencing, Peter A. Levine shares his personal journey to heal his own severe childhood trauma and offers profound insights into the evolution of his innovative healing method. Levine describes, in graphic detail, the violence of his childhood juxtaposed with specific happy memories and how being guided through Somatic Experiencing (SE) allowed him to illuminate and untangle his traumatic wounds.
Explaining how he helped thousands of others before resolving his own trauma, he details how the SE method is derived from his studies of wild animals in their natural environments, neurobiology, and more than 50 years of clinical observations. Levine teaches us that anyone suffering from trauma has a valuable story to tell, and that by telling our stories, we can catalyze the return of hope, dignity, and wholeness.”
If you want to learn and practise some simple and effective Somatic Experiencing exercises, I highly recommend this YouTube channel: Somatic Skills with Emily.
This is my favourite that I use often:
I recommend this book by the brilliant psychiatrist and brain researcher, Bessel van der Kolk, to help you learn about how trauma affects the brain. I found it incredibly empowering when I learned that I could rewire my brain through healing my trauma. There are also many tools and techniques offered to help the reader do just that.
An overview of the book:
“Drawing on more than thirty years at the forefront of research and clinical practice, Bessel van der Kolk shows that the terror and isolation at the core of trauma literally reshape both brain and body…
Exposure to abuse and violence fosters the development of a hyperactive alarm system and molds a body that gets stuck in fight/flight, and freeze. Trauma interferes with the brain circuits that involve focusing, flexibility, and being able to stay in emotional control. A constant sense of danger and helplessness promotes the continuous secretion of stress hormones, which wreaks havoc with the immune system and the functioning of the body’s organs. Only making it safe for trauma victims to inhabit their bodies, and to tolerate feeling what they feel, and knowing what they know, can lead to lasting healing.”
My favourite part of this book concerns having what van der Kolk calls “agency” over our bodies.
Here is how he describes and defines agency:
“Agency starts with interoception — our awareness of our subtle sensory body-based feelings: the greater that awareness, the greater our potential to control our lives.
If you have a comfortable connection with your inner sensations — if you can trust them to give you accurate information — you will feel in charge of your body, your feelings, and your self.”
And lastly, I would like to share an article I wrote about another one of my all-time favourite books on healing trauma. I love this one in particular because the goal is to provide free, highly accessible, concrete and effective tools to help anyone, anywhere in the world, to heal from trauma. These tools and techniques are very simple and easy to learn and work beautifully.
