Ways to Recover from Traumatic Experience

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a person who has not come in contact with any traumatic experiences in their lives. One of the most heartbreaking moments in the first residency of my MFA program was during a seminar about trauma. It was not the content of the seminar that broke me, but the number of hands that were raised upon being asked if anyone had been a victim of sexual abuse. Seeing almost every hand in the room slowly lift in the air was astonishing. While painful to share that experience with the majority of the room, we all knew we weren’t alone. Most people have had to process some type of traumatic experience in their lives whether abuse, natural disaster or the loss of a loved one. For some, the experience happens at an early age and for others, it may not happen until late in adulthood. Whenever the traumatic experience happens and whatever it is, it is important to know there is always a path to recovery.

I have learned (and am learning every day) that the trauma I experienced as a child will bleed into my present life if I am not adamant about my personal recovery.

Seek Professional Help:

In many cultures, there is stigma related to seeking professional help when needed. Families will heavily depend on one another for emotional support opposed to outside assistance, never minding the familial issues at the root. One thing I am very proud of my generation for is that we are knocking down emotional stigmas and asking for help. We are pointing fingers inward and outward and declaring our mental health a priority. When recovering from a traumatic experience it is impossible to do it alone. Our friends and family may be very well-meaning but they do not have the education, experience or wherewithal to carry the weight of our trauma and also give us tools to recover. Professionals are educated and trained on how to help people process their own trauma without having to embody it themselves. Today, we have access to readily available mental health professionals through websites, apps and even podcasts. Psychotherapy has been a major key to my own personal recovery. It took years and changing therapists, but being able to talk through my issues with a professional and be provided with tools and emotional support has largely aided in my recovery.

Lean on Positive Support

Do you know that feeling you get when you are overwhelmed and you feel like you just NEED to talk to someone? It seems like you call everyone you can, and no one is available. It may feel in the moment as if because no one is immediately available, that no one is there for you. That is just not true. When recovering from trauma –keep calling, keep reaching out. Call your friends, your parents, your boo –whomever. Set up lunch or coffee dates, go hiking, offer to dog-sit –anything. Sometimes we just need to talk to another individual about nothing, in particular, to know that we are not alone. Don’t feel like you are a troubling anyone, because those that care for you want to be that support to you when they’re able. Also recognize that everyone has their issues and if someone in your support system cannot be there for you at the moment, it is not because you are too much. It is because they have to take care of themselves before being able to offer support to you. So, reach out to someone else and accept their support. I have an amazing tribe of people in my life that give me reinforcements when necessary. I can call up my friends or drop on my brother’s couch and boo-hoo slobber snot on his shoulders if necessary. I have one friend that I call because I know he’s going to give it to me straight, no BS. He’s more logical as to where I am emotional and sometimes I need to hear logic even if it feels uncomfortable at the moment. Establish your support system and reach out to them and keep reaching when you need to.

Don’t Force It

Even typing those words feel inauthentic to who I am as a person. I generally like to force things first, figure out a better solution later. Upon acknowledging the root of my depression and anxiety as a young adult, I thought I could “fix” myself by bulldozing through the trauma I experienced. I believed that I could speed up the recovery and healing process by pushing every emotion I thought I needed to feel, out. I wanted to feel everything all at once in hopes that I wouldn’t have to ever feel it again. In theory, if I cried about something and talked it out with my support system–that would be it. I could wipe my hands clean of the trauma I experienced and move on. In graduate school, I chose to research child maltreatment –the idea was that learning to write on the subject of childhood trauma would help me process my own. I read various books about abuse, child soldiers, malnourished children, and sexual trauma –all with the hopes that I could heal myself by learning how other people survived their experiences. Quite the contrary. Despite hard suggestions from my professors and therapist to study a different topic, I pressed on. I tried to make pain the remedy and I further wounded myself.

Instead of recovering from my trauma, I prematurely ripped open wounds I was not equipped to deal with yet. What forcing it did was cause me to climb deeper into depression and suffer from severe PTSD that resulted in night terrors and adult bed-wetting. I lost the safety I once felt in my skin. It took time, more therapy and the practice of patience to understand that recovering from trauma –like recovering from anything, cannot be rushed.

Develop a Self-Care Routine

Trauma tries to tattoo itself onto our bodies. It etches itself into our skin –making molds of itself around our bones. It is our job to ensure that the effects of trauma fade, and are not lasting and permanent. One way to do this is to develop a self-care routine that focuses on taking care of your body. Practicing self-care means choosing to incorporate activities in your life that will aid in your personal wellness. Self-care can be taking a walk to cool off when you feel overwhelmed, or making a cup of tea and actually sitting down to enjoy it. Self-care can be anything you need to do to take care of YOU. By developing a self-care routine that incorporates care for your physical body, you are allowing your body to relax, release and recover.

In order to truly recover from a traumatic experience, you have to remind yourself how far you’ve come. Be patient with yourself and your body and let time be the salve. You cannot recover or heal from wounds that are being picked at and reopened like fresh scabs. You can recover from trauma by taking care of yourself, and sometimes taking care of yourself means reaching out to others.