An Open Letter to Everyone Running From Their Healing
To my stepparent in childhood, whose own unhealed trauma and mother wounds created a hugely unsafe environment to live in, whose jealously reared its head at an innocent little girl, and whose bullying behavior created deep trauma for me;
To an ex, who couldn’t navigate any vulnerability in himself, or me, except by moving from relationship to relationship, and city to city, running from his own unhealed trauma;
To the many I have known (myself included) who have walked around for years carrying a hidden burden of pain, stuck in a loop of dysfunctional relationships, living with anxiety or depression, or creating cycles of feeling stuck, sick, and unable to thrive—but not knowing why or what to do to make it better;
This is for you.
This is both a love letter, and a wake-up call.
It is a compassionate hug, and a (gentle) bop upside the head.
It is plea, and a prayer.
Maybe it serves as a mirror, or a guide book, or a “holy-shit-that’s-me” moment.
Whatever it is, it comes from a place of love and having walked the road myself. May it serve to help you navigate your own.
~Jessica
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How to Stop Running and Start Healing
1. Call a (Trauma) Spade a Spade
If I had a crack at that classic podcast question—If you could say one thing that would reach the whole world on a billboard, what would you say?—mine would probably go something like this: Almost every single one of us is walking around with trauma, and we don’t know it. If we understood it and could heal it, we would change our lives and the world.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the lines trauma got identified as “Big T” trauma: PTSD after coming home from war, sexual or physical abuse. These are, indeed, huge and significant experiences that need good tools and resources to work through and heal from. But the problem here is that we seem to miss out on “little t” trauma—which almost all of us have. And so we think we’re fine, and we’ll just tough it out and cope with whatever is ailing us in our lives. After all, we probably “had a pretty decent childhood,” at least in comparison to those other unfortunate souls with the obvious Big T things.
This is keeping us stuck and sick.
"Little t” trauma might look like this:
A household in childhood with instability, anger, or suppressed emotion.
A moment in school where a teacher (probably unconsciously, bless their souls) made you feel stupid, ashamed, or incapable.
A feeling from your family or peers that you weren’t wanted or chosen.
A direct, but more likely implied, message that you wouldn’t be loved, liked, or accepted if you were your true self.
Feeling that you had to be someone else in order to get needs/love.
A parent figure who negated, shamed, or invalidated any big or “negative” emotions you expressed.
Feeling unsafe or that your needs might not be met in young life.
Being “invisible”—ignored by parent figures, spoken about as though you were not there, not being celebrated or validated for who you really are.
Being made to feel that you weren’t capable, smart, attractive, valued, or worthy by parent figures.
Witnessing dysfunctional dynamics, unhealthy conflict, or adults out of touch with their own emotions, needs, and selves in our families. The list goes on…
All of these experiences in young life lodge in our nervous systems in ways we’re mostly unaware of. They live in our bodies. They create a subconscious lens through which we view the world. As adults, we wonder why we’re struggling or repeating dysfunctional patterns, but we rarely stop to ask ourselves about the origin of these struggles. We coast over, suffer through, blame, or poorly cope, instead of truly healing the origins.
If there is one thing I’ve learned about childhood trauma (other than how pervasive it is), it is this: You did not deserve it. It was not fair. But it will keep you in a prison, and you are the only one who can go find the key and let yourself out.
2. Start Feeling All the Uncomfortable Stuff
Most of us are truly adaptive beings. Part of the problem with our abilities here, though, is our ability to adapt around feeling any and all of the uncomfortable emotions that come with experiencing and healing trauma. We get really good at stuffing it down. We find all sorts of (mal)adaptive behaviors to cope, to help ourselves feel less of the “bad” stuff: alcohol, substances, overworking, relationships, complaining, blaming, gossiping, drama, partying, numbing out with Netflix , the news, or video games… the list goes on. You don’t have to have a full-fledged substance abuse problem to be running from your feelings in myriad ways.
After all, intense, “negative," and big emotions are truly uncomfortable. And we don’t want to feel uncomfortable. So we resist. We shove things under the rug. We suppress (and then often barf out the suppressed emotions on people later, in unproductive ways, or they leak out in passive aggressive moments). The truth about emotions is, they are designed to be felt fully, and released. But somewhere we got the message that we shouldn’t or couldn’t let them out. And so we spend tremendous amounts of energy and all manner of behaviors resisting them.
Intentional practice makes perfect (or at least better) here, and we have to “learn” how to feel and release all the stuff we’re not used to dealing with. Some strategies might include taking some time alone, going for a walk or a drive. (Driving in the car I find is a great way to release anger, because you can yell or scream and not freak people out!) Have a cry, punch a pillow, journal, talk it out in the mirror. If the well of emotion is so big that you’re afraid it might “snow” you, create a ritual or container around it several days a week, where you devote yourself to letting yourself really “go there," within a safe space and designated time. Let yourself journal, cry, yell, move, or curl up in a ball. Remove distractions. Set a timer. But giving yourself a regular container to do this in—and then come out of—can be a great way to move through long-suppressed feelings that aren’t done in one pillow-punching session.
Another powerful point here is that there is a difference between letting emotions flow through you, and aiming them at someone else. It’s not that you will never need to express tough feelings to the people in your life, but practicing feeling your emotions fully and letting them move through you sets you up so that you can come to the conversations much more productively, rather than the other person getting dumped on by a volcano of bottled up emotion.
Remember too that you can give yourself permission and space to fully feel your emotions without attaching to the emotions and becoming them. One has movement; the other feels stuck.
3. Denial, Accountability, and Power
There is a special brand of denial some of us are masters at when it comes to avoiding our healing. We create 37 excuses as to why we can’t do the work. We declare “we’re fine, it’s not that bad.” We don’t make the time. We tell ourselves we’re going places, when we’re really going 'round and 'round on the same merry-go-round. We tell ourselves it’s our boss, it’s our partner, it’s other people, it’s anything and everything outside us that’s wrong and creating our problems.
The brutal but powerful liberation is radical self-responsibility. Our trauma may not originate with us, but our healing has to. This is brutal, because our ego will kick and scream and resist, yet powerful, because the moment you acknowledge that everything showing up in your life is a direct reflection of your internal self, is the moment you move from victim consciousness to conscious creator.
4. The Simple Formula for Change
I know of only one formula that really creates behavior change in life. It’s simple (notice I didn’t say easy):
Become self-aware of any patterns, choices, reactions, behavior that aren’t serving you. Your triggers will show you where these are. Rather than resist/blame in the trigger moments, let them be a little light that’s shining on something saying, “This is where we need healing."
Practice observing over and over. Be the gentle observer, meaning you learn to be both radically honest AND gently loving with yourself. You are not your trigger, you are not your trauma, but you are responsible for healing it.
Try a different way of behaving on for size.
***Note that I’ve never known a human to navigate these without some discomfort or fear. Say hello to fear. Invite him in for tea. He’s coming along for the ride. Just tell him he’s sitting in the back seat, he’s not allowed to navigate, and he’s not driving the car, as Elizabeth Gilbert would say.
While I’ll share some great resources for healing below, I truly know of no other magic method. It’s a continual process of observing and choosing, observing and choosing, not a one-and-done “I’m healed!” We keep practicing and getting better at it. We become more aware, we keep tweaking our choices and behaviors. As Samuel Beckett said, Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
5. Get Out the Toolbox
My own path of trauma healing has spanned about 28 years, including seasons of suffering in silence, and seasons of active healing. And I’m sure it’s not completely done. A therapist once described healing trauma like a spiral: You start on the outside, you’re chugging along in life, and then you hit a trigger that shows you, “Wow, got some stuff to work through here!” You dig in, do some work, and pat yourself on the back. Check! You carry on with life, thinking you took care of that. Next layer to the spiral rolls around and, Whoops! Bugger, another event or trigger that brings some of it up again. “Rats, thought I dealt with this!” So you do some more healing work, and keep on plugging. Until the next layer of the spiral…
I don’t mean to discourage, or make you think trauma healing is an endless slog of hard work with no end or reward in sight. But the therapist was right about the layers of the spiral. There are layers to our trauma, and the acceptance of those layers and corresponding seasons of healing serves us well to 1) not assume a silver-bullet, quick-fix pill, and 2) give ourselves credit for the progress we make. Eventually, you do reach the center of the spiral, and you no longer live life with that trauma lens coloring your world.
For those at the beginning of the spiral, just coming to grips with the fact that you may be carrying around a whole bag of I-know-not-what, therapy is a great place to get acquainted with the work and have a neutral party reflect and assist with identifying patterns and origins. It also provides accountability in showing up regularly to do the work. While you may indeed have all the answers in you, if you are unfamiliar with the terrain and have no idea how to work a rig, you are unlikely to get any liquid gold from them hills. Get yourself a foreman (or rather, a “toolpusher,” as apparently they are called in this feeble analogy) to assist.
And while you do ultimately have to decide yourself and be responsible for your healing—please, for the love of all that is holy, don’t think you have to, or likely can, go it all alone. You are not weak for getting help in this process. You are actually wicked smart, resourceful, and hella brave when you do.
There are also so many wonderful, free or low-cost resources out there where you can begin or continue the work yourself. If I could recommend one book, it would be How to Do the Work, by Dr. Nicole LePera, a psychologist who writes candidly about her own breakdown and healing, and her professional experience as a therapist healing trauma patterns. She also gets real about the limitations of traditional psychology, and she does a wonderful job of addressing the body’s role in trauma healing. Many of us are truly cut off from our bodies and breath, except in select moments, and our physiologies can both hold us back from, and assist with, our healing. Nicole’s content on Instagram is also profound yet digestible.
For those of you like myself, who come to a very clear intellectual understanding of our trauma and can indeed talk about it until we’re blue in the face—and yet don’t feel in our heart, body, or behavior released from it—I recommend EMDR. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR for short) is a technique some therapists are trained in to help move traumatic experiences out of the body, using a simple dual-hemisphere brain technique. Similarly, Psych-K is a a technique that I would describe as EMDR meets energy healing, that also identifies limiting beliefs and uses a dual-hemisphere strategy to release them.
I've listed some books and free content from psychologists and healers here that I’ve found helpful. But the most important thing is: Decide you want to heal. Be open to the process. Follow the leads, impulses, and rabbit holes. Take what resonates, move on from what doesn’t. But keep going.
Resources:
How to Do the Work, by Dr. Nicole LePera
Techniques: EMDR, Psych-K
The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
The work of Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No, recent film The Wisdom of Trauma, etc.)
The Completion Process, by Teal Swan
Social:
Dr. Nicole LePera @the.holistic.psychologist
Vienna Pharaon @mindfulmft
Connor Beaton @mantalks
Mark Groves @createthelove
Teal Swan @tealswanofficial
This is the point where, if I could reach through the computer, I would look you in the eyes, or maybe take your hand. I would tell you this: The you on the other side, who is whole, healed, and happy, is deeply worth it. You are deeply worth this work, and the results. You are worth living free of the burden. And while it may seem daunting and overwhelming and like you just really can’t go there, what I can assure you is this: NOT healing our trauma—and continuing to live under its weight, even when you can’t see it, even when you pretend it’s not there or everything is fine—is actually harder and worse than the work itself.
The you on the other side becomes more weightless, grounded, and liberated—and has always been beautifully, radiantly worth it.
Image by Lieke Anna.