Steps Toward Healing from Past Trauma
Experiencing trauma can cause lasting impacts on your life. Trauma can leave you feeling afraid, hopeless, sad, or confused. You may not understand how to move forward with your life, whether your trauma occurred yesterday or whether it happened years ago. Living with trauma is never easy. When you want to overcome your trauma and start the journey towards healing, you will want to start taking these steps.
Recognize Your Feelings
Many people may want to blame themselves for their trauma, or they may want to hide from the emotions entirely. By avoiding your pain, you can actually cause the harm to last much longer. Instead, it is important to validate your emotions by owning them. Remind yourself that your feelings are true, justified, and honest. This will allow you to face them head on, which can result in you accepting your trauma and taking steps to heal it.
Establish Support Systems
After trauma, you want to lean on trusted friends and family. Although you may not be fully ready to open up about what happened to you, you still want to be in the presence of those that make you feel safe. Be sure that you surround yourself with people that will respect your emotions and listen to your needs, as these will be a positive influence as you go through the difficult process of healing.
Pause and Think about How Your Body is Responding
Recognizing how your body feels is also important when you are healing from past trauma. You may start to feel your heart racing, your palms sweating, or just fear creeping into your mind. This can trigger you to feel uncomfortable or even revert back into those traumatic memories. By listening to your body, you can remove yourself from any uncomfortable situations before they cause a severe negative response.
Set Firm Boundaries
Taking time for yourself is also important when you are healing from trauma. When you are constantly overwhelmed, busy, or just overworked, you may struggle to put your mental health first. Over time, this can cause you to become bogged down by emotions. To avoid these slumps, be sure that you set appropriate boundaries and prioritize your needs. Take breaks when you need to and learn how to say ‘no’ when you do not want to do something.
Identify Your Triggers
When you are working with our counselors in Richmond, VA, you can learn how to identify triggers that prompt negative responses. This will help you to recognize certain situations, people, or sounds that may remind you of your trauma. As you learn to cope, you can start to face these triggers with all of your coping strategies ready to go. Although this takes time, it is a part of the process to heal from your trauma and regain control over your life once again.
When you have dealt with past trauma, you may still carry the emotions with you to this day. Although you are done living, and reliving, that previous experience, you may want to revisit the reasons you still have an emotional response to certain triggers to live a happy and full life. When you are ready to heal from your past trauma, contact our counselors in Richmond, VA to hear more today.