Can Trauma Be Healed?

The first thing a lot of people say to me when they're considering therapy is some version of the same sentence.

"I don't want to have to go back through all of it."

And I get that. I really do. The assumption most people carry about doing therapy for their trauma is that it involves sitting in a room, reopening cans of worms that have been carefully closed for years, and then spending weeks wading through the worst moments of your life in forensic detail while using a small forest’s worth of tissues.

It's one of the main reasons people put therapy off. And they’ll put it off for looooong times.Sometimes for years. Sometimes for decades. And, sadly, sometimes forever.

And the pain in the ass for me as a therapist is the thing they need help with is the very thing that makes asking for help feel just too big to contemplate.

So let me say something that might tweak this a little.

You don't have to relive it to heal it.

What trauma actually is

Most people think of trauma as a memory. A bad thing that happened, that bad thing you remember, that bad thing that still bothers you.

And that's kinda true. But it's not quite the full picture.

Trauma is and isn't about the event.

Of course what happened is key information but when it comes to therapy, it’s much more about how your nervous system ‘stored’ the event.

This is why some people can bounce back from things that, to the rest of us, look horribly traumatic while others are stopped in their tracks by something that, to you, doesn’t seem that big a deal.

You see, sometimes, for reasons that are actually quite well understood in neuroscience, certain experiences don't get stored the way normal memories do.

Normal memories have a kind of "filed away" quality to them. You can recall them, they might carry emotion, but they feel like the past. They feel like something that happened, not something that's happening.

However, traumatic memories, when they can’t be processed properly (which can be down to the size of the thing that happens, age, context, what happens afterwards and many other factors), don't always get put away in some neat wee file.

Because the trauma was so great, and because your mind never wants to feel that feeling again, these memories sit in the body and the brain in a way that still feels present tense. Your mind needs them there so you never forget and so that you are always prepared in case it happens again.

You are constantly on edge.Constantly on alert.And over the years, you can become so used to this that now you don’t even notice.

This is why something small and apparently unrelated in the here and now can suddenly produce a reaction that feels completely out of proportion to what's in front of you.

You're not overreacting. Your nervous system is responding to something that hurt you in the past and your mind is terrified it’s all about to happen again.

The way people cope without knowing that's what they're doing

Let’s hop into that a bit more.

When something doesn't feel safe, we find ways around it. We avoid certain situations. We stay in control. We keep busy. We learn what we need to steer clear of when we’re talking to someone, we skip round our uncomfortable bits, we know which environments make us uncomfortable, which combinations of circumstances to never let happen again.

And over time, that just becomes how we live. What I call your ‘normal’.

The big long diversion to avoid pain becomes the normal way and that means we stop seeing it as avoidance. It's been so long since we considered going the other way that it seems bonkers to even consider!

I worked with a woman once who hadn't been to a particular part of her city in eleven years. She wasn’t being a drama queen. And it definitely wasn’t for lack of trying. But this bit of town had, just gradually, quietly, stopped being somewhere she went. She'd built a perfectly functional life around it. You wouldn't have noticed from the outside.She talked as if it was normal.Because to her…it was.

When we started working together, she couldn't connect it to anything specific. It just felt like a weird thing that happened. It was just bit of town she didn’t like.

But then we started looking at why.Interestingly there was no trauma that happened in that part of town.However, and I won’t go into detail here and I’ll trust you to read between the lines, the person that caused her trauma over 30 years prior to her sitting in front of me, used to live there.

And of course she wanted to always avoid the person that caused that pain.Avoiding that area of town was never a preference. It was an eleven year old responding to a sensible need to avoid pain and stay safe.

That’s why it frustrates me when people say they need to be ‘stronger’.

That response is simply not weakness. That's the mind doing its job brilliantly. It was protecting her from something it new was dangerous and her mind had no better strategy than to avoid it.

The cost to her was that it kept protecting her long after the protection is no longer needed.But any then it was normal. So she didn’t really question it.

What good trauma therapy actually does

Good therapy isn't about digging as deep as we can for no reason apart from excavating the past and spreading it out on a table to examine every piece of it.

The goal is never to have you relive these events. The goal is to help you reprocess these events through the eyes of a different version of you.

Those are very different things.

Reliving means you’d need to go back through the experience in a way that re-traumatises rather than heals. And I’ll admit, that does happen in poorly handled therapy (it’s one of the reasons choosing the right therapist really matters). But it is not what well-done trauma work involves.

Reprocessing is something different and much more useful.

This is about helping the nervous system do what it couldn't quite do at the time. Moving your internal experience from "this is happening" into "this happened." Past tense. Filed away. Still part of your history, but no longer running your present.

When that shift happens, and I am fortunate enough to have watched it happen many times, the effects are awesome.

Because it’s not about forgetting. It’s about remembering in a different way because the fear/trauma/anger/sadness/rage/big emotion that was driving the reactions, the avoidance, the vigilance, the triggered responses, has changed. You now see it differently and that changes its relationship to your now. All the fuel for your trauma responses have gone.

You still have the memory. It’s just lost all it’s energy.

The staircase

I have a simple way of explaining this that I use with clients sometimes.

Imagine a single step on your stairs at home just gave way beneath you one day. You didn't fall badly and you didn’t really hurt yourself. But, to get down with the kids, you were shook!In that moment, your brain did exactly what it's supposed to do and logged it in its wee safety file as a hazard.

From then on, every time you use the stairs, you step over that particular step. You do it automatically. You probably don't even think about it anymore. It's just how you use the stairs.

But now imagine that step was fixed just a few days later. No kid on repair, like properly fixed. Solid.

Even knowing that, it is still your mind and body working brilliantly to not quite believe it yet. So what do you do?You keep stepping around it of course.

You're not being irrational. Your nervous system is simply operating on the last information it has and it’s job is to keep you safe at all costs.

Trauma therapy, at its best, is the process of giving your system the updated information.

This is not about forcing someone to stand on the step repeatedly until they’re desensitised ( a brutal, old and outdated therapy that you can still find people practising to this day). This is helping you genuinely understand, at a level deeper than words, that it's been fixed.

It’s over. You’re free to step on the step.The danger isn’t hiding. It’s gone.

A final thought

Look, if you've been carrying something for a long time, and you've been putting off getting help because you're not sure you can face going back through it, I'd honestly implore you to reconsider that assumption.

Not all trauma therapy works the same way. And the version you've been imagining is likely not the version you'd actually experience. It is often beautifully gentle.Freeing.Liberating.

It will change your life.

And the most important first step is just having a conversation about it.Find out what’s possible,No need to commit to anything.

If you’ve got this far then I’d love to help you. It starts with a chat, not a deep dive.Send a quick contact form now and I promise we’ll help you be free.