Why trauma healing isn’t working despite trying everything
I've made my fair share of 'mistakes' while trying to heal my trauma and I see my clients making the same ones when they first start working with me. Here's the most common reasons you may be struggling in your trauma healing journey despite doing ALLLL the things:
Trying to rush the process is actually slowing down your trauma healing
When we’ve been struggling with trauma for a long time and we finally realize it’s because of trauma, there’s a tendency to urgently want to heal. We’ve struggled for so long and NEED TO HEAL NOW!!! However, trauma resolution needs to go as slow as your most frozen, youngest parts need. Urgency and pressure further stacks trauma and entrenches their strategies. This means your frozen parts become even more frozen. Approaching healing with urgency is like trying to fight your trauma. It simply doesn't work! Urgency tell our body we’re not safe as we are and can lead to us doing too much in an attempt to heal.
Slowness and giving yourself all the time in the world is the antidote. This can be hard to do for yourself which is why working with a practitioner who can do that for you at first is paramount. The slow route is actually the fast route, I promise. Cultivating safety in the present moment is a great first step and can take a long time to cultivate. Give yourself permission to take as long as you need.
Trying to fix yourself will never heal your trauma
Shame is at the heart of complex trauma. This belief that I am unworthy, not good enough. We can often approach our healing with this underlying belief driving our behavior. We feel we need to fix ourself so we will be worthy. We see our trauma responses as signs of unworthiness needing fixing so we can be loved.
Think of your trauma responses and symptoms as valiant protectors. Trying to fix or change your trauma without validating the intelligence and necessity of your trauma responses is self-abandonment all over again. I seriously want you to consider how it has felt when someone has tried to pressure you to change. How did that play out? Did it feel good? Did that relationship last? Didn't think so. Trying to fix yourself also further entrenches trauma strategies aka makes them deeper, more frozen, more intense.
Instead try to cultivate self-compassion for yourself, how hard your life has been, and the difficult journey you’re on. How can you befriend your body and try to support it rather than change it? You have always done the best you could. You’ve never been broken. With support of a trauma-informed therapist or somatic practitioner your body slowly can shift how it automatically responds.
Only using top down therapies to try to heal trauma doesn’t work
Relying just on traditional cognitive therapies simply doesn’t work for trauma. Unfortunately therapists are trained in only cognitive based approaches that rarely get to the root of our issues. Trauma is a somatic experience that changes the brain Trauma is essentially experiences that have not been fully processed by the brain and are held as sensation based experiences that our brain thinks is happening right now. When we’re triggered our prefrontal cortex goes offline and any cognitive processing we’ve done is no longer available. Trauma healing requires cultivating an embodied sense of safety, metabolizing stuck energy, and feeling safe enough attachment. We NEED somatic and bottom-up, experiential therapies of one kind or another to process and resolve trauma.
Trying to heal all alone only makes trauma worse
Trauma is relational and thus healing needs to be relational. It wasn’t just what happened, but who wasn’t available or who shamed you when they should’ve been there for you. You can do all the somatic practices alone you want but it will only do so much. This is a common challenge I see and know intimately. I have tried so hard to just heal by doing practices all by myself and it only made me feel more alone.
A lot of healing occurs within reparative emotional experiences with safe enough humans or other living things like nature. If one-on-one work is out of your budget, look for peer support groups or group containers to help you experience connection with people with shared experiences. Trauma informed therapist and somatic practitioners are trained at cultivating reparative attachment experiences to help you undo the experience of being all alone.
Trying to be regulated can create more trauma
Regulation = control. The dictionary literally defines regulates as "to bring under the control of law, to bring order, method, or uniformity, or to fix or adjust the time, amount, degree, or rate of." This means there's an inherent hierarchy with nervous system states we should be in and nervous system states we shouldn't be in. There’s this idea that we should be calm and regulated all the time, which simply isn’t true. Instead it’s about being able to more fluidly move between nervous system states. Trying to just be regulated means you’re likely shaming your ‘dysregulated’ states, which only further traumatizes. Being dysregulated is a proportional response to the stress and overwhelming circumstances of life nowadays.
I’m not saying don’t do nervous system regulation practices or try to calm down. Deep, slow breathing is effective at quickly calming the nervous system and we all benefit from being able to quickly experience a little more ease. What I am saying is don’t try to be perfectly regulated all the time, don’t make that the goal. You’re human. It’s not a realistic goal. Instead, somatic trauma therapy can help you achieve more fluidly moving between nervous systems states and more choice in how you show up.
Overdoing trauma release practices can be traumatic
When there’s not enough safety, doing too many (or any at all) trauma release or cathartic practices only further overwhelms the body. Whether it's TRE, breathwork, or primal screaming, doing practices that activate and move energy when you don't feel safe and supported can cause intense overwhelm and often sends people into days or weeks long shut down. This is why approaching healing with a sense of urgency can cause more harm than healing.
Instead prioritize cultivating stability and present moment awareness first and foremost. This can look like:
Orienting aka looking around the room and noticing what is surrounding you. Noticing safety and lack of immediate threat
Noticing and feeling into a heavy object like a piece of wooden furniture, the cement foundation of your building, or imagining mountains. See if you can allow your body to borrow a sense of stability.
Feeling into the chair you’re sitting on. Notice how it’s holding you and it’s not going anywhere
Those are just a few examples and best experienced by being led by a practitioner. Only from having an embodied sense of stability and presence would someone intentionally and slowly do release practices.
Working with a non-trauma informed therapist or coach slows down trauma healing
Real talk, most counseling graduate programs don’t train therapists on how to effectively treat complex-PTSD so therapists are out here traumatizing their clients. Complex PTSD is included in the World Health Organization’s classification of diagnoses, but not in the DSM so there’s been less research on interventions specifically for complex-PTSD. I've definitely experienced this, as have most of my clients, and it’s what led me to working with a somatic practitioner.
Look for a somatic practitioner instead, especially one who is trained in Somatic Experiencing, Alchemical Alignment, NARM, AEDP, EMDR or IFS. Ideally you can work with someone trained in at least two of those so they can support you in multiple ways. Ask them how they approach working with someone with trauma, what modalities they use, and any considerations for sequencing.