Tangible Tips for Holistic Healing After Trauma
Trauma, whether chronic (long-term) or acute (one-off incident), can be an incredibly hard experience to heal from.
If you experienced chronic trauma, such as narcissistic abuse, a toxic relationship or work environment, or an abusive upbringing, you likely adopted some less-than-healthy coping mechanisms and habits that can continue to harm your health long after you’ve left the situation.
If you’ve experienced acute trauma, such as a horrific car accident, war, or an assault, the mental and physical damage can replay over and over in your mind and body, preventing you from enjoying life as you once had.
Some common themes in both types of trauma include harmful habits and inflammation throughout your body and brain.
While you should absolutely seek out some sort of therapy to help you move past the trauma, there may be other underlying factors that don’t go away by talking about it.
You may have heard that “the body keeps the score.” You may hold tension in certain areas of your body that just won’t go away even after you’ve left the stressful environment. You may experience chronic inflammation that keeps other illnesses coming back to land more punches.
So what else can you do besides therapy to help your body and mind feel safe again - to get back to the YOU that you know you want to be?
Here are a few tips you can implement into your life to heal the whole.
Re-engage with self care.
Self-care has become a buzzword lately, and usually is associated with spa days, skincare routines, and yoga.
But self-care doesn’t look the same for everyone. One person’s self-care routine could be another’s literal hell-scape.
So what kinds of self-care are helpful for healing when you feel like garbage all around?
Work Out.
This does not have to look like an expensive yoga retreat in Bali.
The key to using working out as a healing mechanism is to find something that you both enjoy, and that forces you to focus on YOU.
One option that I highly recommend is lifting weights.
For the ultimate gains, you can use the mind-body connection to really focus on working one specific muscle group with a movement.
And if meditation doesn’t work for you, working out might get you out of your own head and into your body, and give yourself a break from the ruminating thoughts and confusion that plague survivors.
If you hate lifting weights, find something else that you really enjoy. Zumba, HIIT, pilates, yoga, whatever can get you using your muscles and out of your own head.
There’s another reason why working out helps you heal… it combats insulin resistance.
If you’ve dealt with trauma, you might be eating your feelings. Reaching for the carbs and sweets (*cough* chocolate), leading your blood glucose levels roller-coastering you deeper into despair.
When you eat carb-rich or sugary foods, your blood glucose spikes, then crashes, pushing you to reach for more carbs and sweets, and on goes the cycle until your body becomes insulin resistant.
Working out regularly and building muscles re-sensitizes your body and brain to insulin, allowing you to quit with the rollercoaster and reducing your risk of diabetes and Alzheimer’s.
You don’t have to spend hours in the gym for this benefit. If you’re a parent or caregiver, or you work full-time plus, you definitely don’t have the time to train for hours on end.
Instead, focus on small workout snacks throughout the day. 10-20 squats when you can remember, taking the stairs instead of the elevator or escalator, walking from further in the parking lot than you normally would.
Just make sure you put your mind into the action. Really focus on your body and how it feels, focus on your breathing and your steps. Focus on YOU, and not the ruminating thoughts that are ruining your vibes.
2. Eat more fiber.
When you’re in stress-mode from whatever kind of trauma you’ve experienced, your body is probably circulating excess cortisol, adrenaline, estrogen, and your whole hormonal system is out of balance.
Insoluble fiber - the kind you get from beans, greens, etc. - acts like a magnet that grabs onto the waste, including excess hormones, from your gallbladder so you can excrete it.
If your digestive system doesn’t have enough of this cleaning action, your excess hormones get reabsorbed into your bloodstream and continue to wreak havoc on the rest of your body.
Soluble fiber - things like chia seeds, oats, legumes - help feed the organisms in your microbiome.
If you’re unfamiliar with the importance of the microbiome on your mental health, you should absolutely look further into this.
A brief summary is this: your HPA axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) is the primary communication highway for your body’s stress-management system. Some people take the axis a step further to include the ovaries and thyroid (HPAOT axis). When one organ of the HPAOT axis is dysregulated and overactive, it throws off the rest of the highway, leaving you exhausted, your immune system compromised, and your sleep whacked out. It can also lead to greater, long term issues like autoimmune diseases, heart disease, and mental illnesses.
Where do fiber and your microbiome come into play with that system? Your microbiome consists of trillions of organisms that help digest your food, manage inflammation and your immune response, regulate the hormones that determine your mental health.
Fiber feeds your microbiome organisms, and a diverse microbiome is key to all-around health.
3. Do more of what you love.
If you suffered through chronic trauma, you may have lost your ability or desire to do things you once loved. Maybe you quit drawing or writing, quit working on your career, or maybe you quit enjoying doing nothing at all.
Instead you adapted to dedicating your whole life to survival. Staying busy because you were called lazy for sitting down, being anywhere but “here” because it always involved a fight, foregoing your own desires to please the other person.
You likely adopted a lifestyle that didn’t jive with what you love to do. You probably didn’t even realize that’s what was happening until you were so far detached from what you love, that you may not even have known what you loved anymore.
And if you suffered through a traumatic incident, maybe it ruined what you loved to do. You no longer feel safe doing it. Driving, going out in public, riding your horse, or whatever else was your passion before the accident.
The goal here is to make yourself feel safe to enjoy things again.
Start small and work your way up. Maybe set aside 5 minutes to begin drawing or writing again. Sit down for a few minutes and ease yourself into relaxing. Whatever it is, start for just a few minutes, and continue reminding yourself that you are safe, it is ok to relax into it.
If you want to totally abandon what you previously loved, because the memory of the act is now tainted by your trauma, that is ok too. Start trying other new things that are the opposite of what you loved before.
The moment you start to feel unsafe because those traumatized thoughts come creeping back in, step away. Re-sensitize yourself and make yourself feel space doing the damn thing.
Focus on sleep.
I know, how the heck are you supposed to focus on sleep when you’ve got trauma-induced insomnia and nightmares?
Don’t focus so much on the sleep itself as you should focus on creating a routine and environment that promotes sleep.
How do you do that? Start incorporating little habits that convince your mind it’s time to fall asleep and stay asleep.
Create the environment.
Unless your trauma involves dark spaces, focus on making your sleep space:
Dark - use blackout curtains or use a sleep mask. Turn off all electronics and lights. This signals your brain to produce melatonin - the sleep hormone.
Relaxing - make it cold or warm (whichever you prefer), start some white, brown or pink noise, burn some candles or warm some essential oils. Find what relaxes you the most and incorporate that into your space.
Feeling safe in your environment is essential to healing after trauma. If your body is in a relaxed state, you are more likely to get the rest that you need for your brain to process what you’ve been through and regulate the rest of your bodily systems.
2. Incorporate the right habits.
Start building the right habits that support your circadian rhythm and hormones throughout the night. Here are some gems that really support your sleep system:
Stop looking at a screen at least 1 hour before sleep time.
You can read a book, draw or journal, stare into the abyss like the Grinch, whatever suits you. The extra light, especially the blue light from our phones and tvs, tells our brain that it’s still daytime and we should be awake. Removing the excessive light puts our mind into sleep mode.
If you want to take it a step further, invest in some orange or red lights for your sleep space. Our ancestors wound down their nights looking at or at least being near fires, and our ancestral brains are hardwired to wind down into restorative sleep mode.
Eat enough fat & Protein at a reasonable time before bed.
Try to avoid carbs, sweets, and alcohol. If your hormones are out of whack from emotional eating all day, you have spiked cortisol and adrenaline coursing through your system, your body will be more likely to crash after a few hours - causing you to wake up.
But if your body has some blood glucose-balancing substance to get you through to breakfast, you will be more likely to sleep longer.
This isn’t to say that you should eat a huge meal before bed. But if you find yourself waking up after a couple of hours, try eating some greek yogurt, a handful of nuts, some milk or cheese settling into your nighttime routine.
Tart cherry juice and pistachios have been shown to work wonders for melatonin production, so eat a handful of cherry and pistachio trail mix before bed to help encourage your body to sleep more.
Get morning sunlight.
Most people don’t know this, but the production of our melatonin hormones actually begins in the morning.
In our modern world, most of us don’t get enough sunlight, and insomnia is pretty common. Instead, we spend most of our time indoors with overhead lights and staring at screens with blue lights.
So, we remain wired and tired, and our circadian rhythm is thrown out of whack because of it.
But, if you start your morning looking at the sunrise, well that’s a beautiful way to start the day, right? Not only is that a great start to the day, the red light waves from the sun hits our eyes and tells our brains to begin producing melatonin.
If you want to take it a step further, you can work out outside first thing in the morning. But, if your cortisol levels are too high, this may not be the right option for you. It can leave you feeling fatigued earlier in the day when you can’t sustain the level of stress it can create.
Open your window, get outside, or whatever works for you to get the morning sunshine in your face.
Now, if you live in a far northern or far southern part of the world, there may be points in the year where the sun doesn’t rise until you’re well on with your day. I get it, the PNW goes through “the big dark” every year and it’s always a struggle.
Do the best you can with what you’ve got. If you want to invest in something like a SAD light, absolutely go for it.
Your goal is to not make things more difficult for yourself, but to support yourself until things are brighter.
Build or rebuild healthy relationships within your boundaries.
As humans, we are biologically hardwired to crave intimacy. But if you’ve experienced a trauma, intimacy can feel like the most unsafe thing in the world.
If you survived narcissistic or emotional abuse, for whatever length of time, relationships with other people can feel so daunting. They require a give and take, and that may trigger the time where you gave your all and were only harmed in return.
Engaging in therapy with a licensed therapist who has experience in post-traumatic stress situations, not just talking with a friend, is essential in this area.
We all need love, we all need a shoulder to cry on, but sometimes, we also need to hear things we don’t want to hear, and other times, we need guidance to reframe our thoughts.
Regardless of whatever trauma you’ve endured, there is a strong possibility that you lost some relationships. Maybe someone wasn’t understanding why you’ve changed, and you no longer feel safe sharing your thoughts with them. Maybe someone judged you for going back to that jerk over and over again.
It is so hard to lose someone you love because of your trauma.
While you absolutely shouldn’t feel obligated to rebuild a relationship with someone who abandoned (or worse, further traumatized) you when you needed them the most, rebuilding bridges with those relationships that were important to you is as essential to your healing as the healing itself.
If you lost touch with an old friend - maybe you grew apart, maybe you broke ties because it was too much, or maybe you were so caught up in your own life that the relationship just fell apart - reach out. Work on rebuilding that bridge.
In the same token, building new relationships that support the life you want to lead is also important. Being able to connect with someone who supports the new you, who encourages you to be your best self, and who is a healthy influence in your life can help you heal your inner wounds whether you realize it or not.
Not only is building and rebuilding relationships essential, it can also be such a great source of joy to bring back into your life. The right relationships can help you on your journey to finding your passions and feeling safe in your own body again.
In conclusion, make your life feel safe again.
Healing is damn hard. Some days it can feel truly impossible.
Whether you’re healing from complex, long-term trauma and abuse, or you’re recovering from some truly traumatic event, your goal should be to slowly rebuild a life that makes you feel safe.
Listen to your body and what it is telling you, and go from there.
It takes time, it takes work, but once again feeling safe in your body, your relationships, and the world you want to build for yourself is so worth it.
