Steps Towards Healing from Trauma

Dear Tony,

Major interventions such as healing from past trauma come in parts. You need to work on it for a while, make some improvements, then leave it and go work on something else. Think of a medical condition which requires multiple surgeries to fix. You prepare yourself and go to one surgery, heal and recover from that, then try to live your life to the fullest capacity until you are ready for the next surgery. Each surgery is legitimate, and you grow better after each one. But you can't do it all at once.

I needed to be out of the hospital for a while before I started to work on my trauma. When you decide to try to heal from trauma, that is what you are working on. That is the one skill you are working to build at the time. That is the primary reason why I waited: I felt I was better off improving my immediate life for a while. But that is just me.

Start with what is bothering you now. There may indeed be root causes or traumas which caused other traumas, but you still need to start with the most obvious and pressing issues. (One of the reasons why you will probably need to revisit trauma multiple times - you will develop a better understanding of the root causes are you are trying to heal. This cannot happen quickly.) The memories you work on should be based on how much it bothers you now - not how much it bothered you at the time or how much it does or does not bother other people.

Do what you can do, not what you need. Work on the feelings you can handle, deal with them, and let them go. Often, if I start to work on it, I can cut part of the troublesome feelings out pretty quickly. I generally felt like I could take off about 20% of my negative feelings by focusing on them this way.

Then I had to put it aside and go back to more immediate interventions. While I was doing that I gained more understanding of the causes of these traumas and what the next steps were. But I still needed to revisit it multiple times after that.