Resilience Building Techniques for Healing From Trauma

If you have recently dealt with a traumatic event, you might be worried that you're going to feel lousy indefinitely. While it can certainly take some time to feel fully happy and healthy again, there are many steps you can take to help you move forward. Know that you will indeed be OK again and that you have the power to make your healing journey an effective one.

Trauma is the result of a negative event. It occurs when you feel emotionally or mentally hurt by something that has happened, and it may lead to post-traumatic stress disorder, which is commonly referred to as PTSD.

Examples of traumatic events include the death of someone you love, experiencing abuse, a plane or automobile crash, an extremely difficult relationship or breakup, or a natural disaster like an earthquake or hurricane.

If you feel shocked, saddened, anxious, or otherwise overwhelmed by an occurrence like one of the above, you're probably experiencing trauma. The trauma isn't the event or experience itself but rather your body and mind's response to it. Traumatic stress affects the brain, which makes it crucial to take steps toward recovery and mitigate its negative effects and impacts as much as possible.

Physical Movement

Exercise has been shown to improve symptoms of PTSD. In addition to directly helping you heal, exercise and physical movement also provide your body with much-needed feel-good chemicals like endorphins.

If you don't love working out, that's OK! Take walks, do something fun like bike riding or roller skating, move along to a yoga video, or have a solo dance party. Anything that involves moving your body will help you heal.

Work With Your Feelings

Journaling is a common way to manage stress and move through complex events. Give it a try if it feels like it might be beneficial for you. If it doesn't, it will still be helpful to spend time sitting with your feelings. Do your best to get in touch with what you're feeling, allow yourself to experience it entirely for a few moments, and then notice how it passes.

Feeling your feelings, and accepting them, is key to healing from trauma. You may have some difficult feelings along the way, like anger, and that's OK. It's natural to have a wide variety of emotions, and there's nothing wrong if some of them are new to you.

Practice Self-Care

Self-care reduces stress. Equally important, it feels good. Practice self-care through your healing journey by regularly taking action to do things that feel good and loving for yourself.

Engaging in Therapy

Professional therapy can be a life-changing experience for many healing from trauma. Approaches like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) have shown to be effective. For instance, research indicates that CBT can reduce symptoms of PTSD by 60% to 80% for many individuals.

Practicing Mindfulness

Incorporating mindfulness into your routine can significantly aid in trauma recovery. Mindfulness encourages living in the moment, helping individuals process emotions without feeling overwhelmed. A recent study found that mindfulness techniques can reduce anxiety levels by as much as 30% in trauma survivors.

Hypnotherapy is a powerful tool for change and can help us understand why we feel and behave the way we do and support us to develop new ways of thinking. Cognitive Hypnotherapy can be beneficial for clients who want to release negative or limiting beliefs identifying the triggers that started. Using one or more of a variety of techniques that are tailored to specific issues and best suited to help eliminate stress triggers. 

The integration of hypnotherapy is more effective than using NLP alone. The self-awareness that the integrative approach offers is a successful way to quickly eliminate negative thoughts, emotions and limiting beliefs allowing the client to generate a more positive future, improve self-image build self-esteem increase determination identify helpful thought patterns and set healthy boundaries in relationships take responsibility for self growth.