10 steps to recovery from childhood trauma
If you’re reading this blog, On Being Brave, I assume you have been affected by childhood trauma. Perhaps you were sexually abused, physically abused, or have experienced other traumas such as emotional or spiritual abuse.
You might be wondering, “where do I go from here?”, “What do I do now?” “How do I heal?”
You may currently be experiencing many effects from a trauma that happened years ago, maybe decades ago. You may have at one point forgotten that anything happened to you, but now —it just won’t let you go.
I’m sorry that we must meet this way, but I want to extend to you hope that healing is possible. I won’t sugarcoat it—healing from childhood abuse is probably the most challenging thing anyone can do. Sometimes, healing means giving up something or someone that we hold dear, like family members or coping patterns that worked at one time but no longer serve us.
Below are ten steps to recovery from childhood abuse to help you get started on your healing journey. Please keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive list. There are many paths to recovery; these are just to help get you started.
Recognize and acknowledge what happened to you: this will help you get out of the world of denial and numbing. It’s essential to recognize how trauma shows up in our daily life. Trauma can show up in so many ways. It can look like ADHD; it can look like anxiety. It can look like depression. It can look like chronic illness, sleep disturbances, irritability, anger it can look like daydreaming, inattentiveness it can look like intrusive flashbacks, nightmares learning disability, emotional unavailability, muted emotions, detachment, dissociation, low self-esteem, perfectionism, feeling like you’re not good enough, feeling a deep emptiness feeling unlovable or feeling like you’re unworthy of being loved the way that you need or want. Having significant gaps in your memory, putting others’ needs first before your own often at your sacrifice, hypervigilance, strange phobias, inability to manage stress, or sometimes being the only one who can function well when under pressure, difficulties trusting people having social anxieties or phobias needing to be alone being afraid to be alone fear of being judged. Recognizing and acknowledging all the many ways that trauma shows up in our daily life is the first step to being able to change how it affects us on a moment-by-moment basis. I’m sure that you found many things in many ways that trauma affects you in that list. I encourage you to keep track of those and follow those through your day, and when they pop up, you know that this is a manifestation of trauma responses
Name it: Call it what it is. If your trauma was abuse, call it abuse. If it was neglect—call it neglect. Name the truth of what it was. This gives power to you and takes power away from the trauma and the one who abused you. Another powerful exercise is to get into the mindset of giving your symptoms a name. They’re all a part of your story, like characters in a book. They’re all trying to tell you what happened and trying to teach you how to heal. It may seem silly at first to name your symptoms but giving them an identity can help reduce the symptoms they are presenting to you—because you are finally giving them the attention they have been trying to get for so long! Let’s say you name your anxiety “Frank” Every time anxiety pops up, you can remind yourself that it’s your good-ole friend Frank. Frank has entered the scene because Frank needs something, and he’s trying to get your attention. Internally, you can become curious about Frank and ask him, “what are you trying to tell me, Frank?” “Frank, what do you need?” Practice listening to Frank each time you feel his anxious presence. Listen to what he’s trying for you to do or understand. Suppose we can acknowledge and understand that our childhood trauma is presenting itself today in the form of these trauma-related symptoms. In that case, we know enough to know that those symptoms are trying to communicate with us. When we begin to be attentive to their needs, we’re halfway home to healing.
Understand the Wisdom: remembering the trauma is wisdom. Your body is helping you and trying to tell you something, so listen to it. Feeling or symptoms is not a bad thing; it’s an excellent thing. Miraculously, our bodies can remember something that happened to us and then try to tell us the story of what happened. When we acknowledge and recognize and name all of the symptoms, we start listening to them. When we start learning from it, we can then understand that this is a sagacious process, and it’s not a process to be feared. It’s a process to be held.
Practice self-compassion, self-empathy, and patience: healing doesn’t happen overnight by yourself. So, because our body is trying to communicate with us, we need to remember that practicing self-compassion, self-empathy, and patience is paramount to this process. It does not help us if we judge ourselves, our responses, or our symptoms because our body is trying to communicate with us. So, it does not help if we judge ourselves. We need to become our own best friend and not our own worst enemy. Practicing self-compassion, self-empathy, and patience is paramount to this process.
Learn the art of self-care: learn how to take care of yourself, know what it means to be healthy, and maintain a healthy lifestyle. You’ll see that this blog talks a lot about self-care and what self-care is and what self-care is not. Briefly, for the discussion here, I am defining self-care as being intentional and treating ourselves as we treat others. So often, we are willing to go out of our way to help other people and accommodate them. Still, we don’t adjust or help ourselves. As most therapists will say, the first step of self-care is the old metaphor of putting your oxygen mask on first before putting someone else’s on. Because what good are you just somebody else if you can’t breathe, if you’re overwhelmed, if you’re ready to pass out and have no oxygen. You put your mask on first to help other people so that you are better equipped so that you are able. You don’t put the mask on first because you’re selfish or because you want the oxygen first, and you want the other person to be second. You put it on first because fundamentally, you understand that you’re no help to anybody else if you’re not breathing oxygen. So put your oxygen mask on first and then proceed with helping other people. Take care of yourself. Take good care of yourself so that you’re able to take good care of others.
Study mindfulness meditation and other grounding practices. Often our trauma responses are the type that will take us away from the trauma in some way, for instance, a numbing or dissociation. Those coping skills worked when the trauma was happening, but they don’t serve us now when the trauma is not present today in the current time. Learning how to become mindful, learning how to meditate to get into that calm space, and learning how to ground yourself when anxiety or panic try to take you away are vital components to healing. If you are constantly being triggered, you are always being pulled down by the trauma and unable to live your life controlled and healthy. Learning to manage triggers through mindfulness meditation and other grounding practices will help you to stay present enough to be able to tolerate and overcome those triggers that seem so overwhelming right now
Learn and understand radical acceptance and the art of letting go of what doesn’t serve you anymore. Learning radical acceptance of yourself of others. Radical acceptance is based on the idea that suffering doesn’t come directly from pain but from our attachment to the pain. Sometimes pain can become an identity. Sometimes, trauma can become an identity. Sometimes the pain and the feelings that are associated with our trauma or felt in a way that makes suffering a way of life. Radical acceptance refers to being intentional and not allowing the pain to become suffering. This means that we watch our thoughts in our feelings, and we identify when we are intentionally or unconsciously allowing ourselves to feel worse than we really need to feel. Radical acceptance is primarily applied in situations that you were unable to fix or change. It’s also used when things seem unfair. The grief and disappointment that we feel are our normal emotions, but suffering occurs when we don’t accept what happened. We prolong the painful the initial painful response without grieving or naming the grief and the disappointment. Radical acceptance does not allow our feelings and emotions to run wild radical acceptance also does not mean that you agree with what happened or that what happened is OK but rather an acceptance that what happened and not fight against it when we avoid rather than accept we can cause ourself more pain and suffering more misery. This blog will speak more about radical acceptance, but I want to clarify here that radical acceptance is not saying or equal to forgiving; the two are very different concepts. Radical acceptance is an advanced form of self-care.
Replace bad habits with good habits: Learn and understand your good habits and your bad habits and replace the bad with the good. When we have unhealthy coping patterns, we tend to have unhealthy habits. Recognizing these unhealthy habits is another step toward healing. We will talk about ways to look at the practices that we have and how they either positively or negatively affect our life. We will also learn how to evaluate our habits and discuss how to change or replace habits so that we can live a healthy lifestyle and deal with our trauma in different ways that serve us better.
Learn Intentionality: with every aspect of your life, this will help you gain control. This will help you gain a sense of control and will help calm some of the chaos you might feel in confusion. Being intentional with our life does not mean overscheduling and being perfect. Still, it does mean that when you do things with the intention you are trying to calm the chaos down, you become more assertive and not passive with your life. When you live with intention, you live, determining how your day, week, month, and year life will go and end. When you don’t live in it with intention, you live in a very passive way when life happens to you. The goal here is for you to determine how you live your life and not let life choose how you live.
Seek a highly trained Trauma Therapist: reach out for help, tell someone. Look for a qualified therapist. Know that some people may need to earn the right to hear your story. Don’t isolate. Seek support. This blog talks a lot about therapy. Therapy can be a safe place to land, and it can be a safe place to practice all these ten steps. Think of therapy as a practice arena. It’s a safe place to make a mistake, and it’s a safe place to succeed. It’s a safe place to practice radical acceptance and have it modeled for you and healthy habits and boundaries. Your therapist can provide you with a lot of education about trauma. Your therapist can listen to your story, help you hold it, examine it, and befriend it. You can’t do this alone. You can’t work through your trauma by yourself. There’s something to be said for being in a room with another human being who will not judge you, love you unconditionally, sit quietly and listen to your story therapy can be an amazing, life-changing experience if you let it. But you must be willing to commit to the process. You get out of therapy what you put into it. This blog talks a lot about therapy, how to prepare for the therapy, and what to expect from therapy. Take it all in and seek a therapist specializing in the type of trauma you experienced. Don’t go in seeking one specific therapeutic model. Go in with an open mind and a willingness to allow what comes up in session to come up and present itself so that you can examine it you can, acknowledge it can name it. You can have compassion for it and know that it holds the wisdom to help you grow.
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