Reclaiming Wholeness After Trauma
Heal Your Self: Bessel Van de Kolk’s suggestions to heal
‘If light is in your heart, you will find your way home.’✨ Rumi
I’m Kate, a psychotherapist helping you to foster healing, self discovery and personal growth - so you can flourish in a life you love. Join us!
Hi friends,
Our soul is our home, and even if we are wounded - our light remains.
Today we’ll start the Heal Your Self Series: gentle tools and insights to help you unravel the wounds of past events that you may still carry. I’ll share the full outline next week.
Over the next two months, these gentle insights, tools, ideas and practices will help you heal, and reclaim your true self and live with greater ease, peace and clarity.
Today, we are introducing gentle practices to support this journey, suggested by trauma expert Bessel Van de Kolk that carry great potency when built into our lives.
After traumatic or difficult events, relationships, abuse, or ‘grains of sand’ - multiple mini traumas that grow into a sand dune - we can develop a trauma response. You may have heard of the fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses. We can end up stuck in one of these processes without realising we are there, how we got there, or whether we can shift out of it. We can.
Many people think trauma is something that happened to you a long time ago.
Trauma is the wound we carry.
It is the resulting residue in your body and psyche of the sensations, emotions, behaviours and thoughts that become intolerable.
It is something that happened that our minds did not at that time have the structure to deal with - it was too much. Our mind and body may then continue to respond to life from this wound.
In therapy, we provide a place for someone to land.
A space to process what comes up. Good therapists are not trying to dig around, or make you relive past events. We are addressing those difficulties that arise in the present: thoughts, overwhelming feelings or challenging behaviours, memories, issues with relationships or mood, career, parenting, self worth that can all arise as a result of trauma.
Trauma can also leave us hyper vigilant, exhausted, unwell, shut down, dissociating. We may have difficulty trusting ourselves or others - or even what is real. We can remain stuck in survival mode, even though the danger has passed. The trauma may be long forgotten - but the body remembers.
We all have a right to feel safe in our own skin, and it up is up to us to make it happen.
Healing is possible.
In the safety of a therapeutic co-created relationship, we can process, heal and reintegrate. Therapy is a secure base to re-discover and express yourself without judgment or advice. Therapy will help restore regulation, trust, fill out developmental gaps and work through unfinished business.
If you are functioning well enough but feel scarred and aren’t interested in therapy, there is also a great deal we can do for ourselves. (Do please seek professional help if you are frequently distressed).
We can develop a softer, more compassionate relationship with ourselves.
By committing to these practices that help us feel safe, grounded, and more at home in our bodies, and the world, we can heal our fractured soul, and reduce confusion, fear or shame.
These eight practices are from the work of trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk.
Healing comes from within. If you’d like to read on, and to join the Heal Your Self Series over the next two months, do become a member if you haven’t already. If not, that’s fine and see you next time!
Eight Practices to Gently Heal Trauma
Psychiatrist and trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk spent decades exploring how trauma works and how we recover. His work shows that healing happens not only in our thoughts, but in our breath, our body, our connections, our rhythms.
There is no quick fix. But these simple ideas hold golden keys, to be practiced over time. We can create space for landing, for feeling, and re-connection.
So here are some self-led practices drawn from his work that can help you begin to heal. Hold them in mind as you go through the following weeks, and jot down ideas from here to build into your daily life to create a gentle though potent action plan to heal.