Introduction
This blog post is about my holistic approach to trauma and healing. In it, I share my point of view on what trauma isn’t and is, the effects of hurtful, life-denying threats to your life, symptoms produced by the effects of being wounded, and the path to healing and recovering from your trauma.
What Trauma Is: A Normal, Natural Response to a Wound
First, understand that in my holistic approach to trauma and healing, trauma isn’t a mental disorder. Calling it a mental disorder pathologizes it and views trauma as a disease. Trauma isn’t a disease. It’s a normal, natural, health-promoting response to your human spirit being wounded. It benefits from a holistic approach.
What wounds your human spirit? Your spirit is wounded by hurtful, life-denying threats to your life. They can happen at any age. Examples of hurtful, life-denying experiences include but aren’t limited to—
- Emotional and verbal abuse and neglect, such as being harshly criticized, held in contempt, yelled at, threatened, and ignored.
- Physical abuse and neglect, such as being slapped, beaten, raped, grounded, put in isolation, and robbed of personal possessions.
- Mental abuse and neglect, such as being told your opinions don’t matter, you’re wrong, stupid, worthless, and unlovable.
- Relational abuse and neglect, such as being abandoned, betrayed, gaslit, held in contempt, lied to, and falsely accused of wrongdoing.
Effects of Trauma on Your Human Spirit, Body, Mind, and Relationships
In my holistic approach to trauma, the hurtful effects of life-denying threats to your life wound your spirit. Your human spirit is what makes and keeps you alive. It’s the seat of your aspirations toward life, health, and the happiness of realizing your dream and joy. Your spirit is also the seat of your instincts, emotions, wordless inner knowing, and character.
When your spirit is wounded by abuse, neglect, or both, it’s weakened. When it’s weakened, your aspirations and instincts also weaken. Your emotions either get stirred up or numbed out. Your inner wordless knowing is cloudy. And your character changes, you’re just not your usual self.
As for your body and mind, they’re weakened too. Your body has less energy and becomes prone to illnesses and injuries. And your mind’s thoughts are less clear and conflicted, your memory is impaired, and you’re vulnerable to imagining bad things happening that aren’t real. What you imagine are fantasies, not realities.
Besides your spirit, body, and mind being weakened, so are your relationships. You’re more likely to either withdraw from others or become hyper-social. Both are ineffective strategies for trying to feel better. They don’t work and tend to make matters worse.
Symptoms Produced By The Effects of Trauma
Holistically, common symptoms for a wounded spiritbodymind and relationship include, but aren’t limited to the following symptoms of trauma—
- Your spirit stirring up feelings of sadness, loneliness, disappointment, depression, anxiety, paranoia, panic, and/or anger.
- Your body producing fatigue, headaches, tense muscles, rapid or pounding heartbeats, stomach aches, heartburn, high blood pressure, low or hyper libido, erectile problems, missed periods, difficulty falling asleep, early waking, and increased illnesses and injuries.
- Mental confusion, misunderstanding, suspicion, tunnel vision, uncertainty, forgetfulness, imagining bad things happening, and fantasy thoughts.
- Diminished quality of relationships with yourself and others, engaging in self-harm, increased disagreements and arguments, cutting yourself off from others, isolating, being overly social, less communication with others, running away, separating, and divorcing.
NOTE: All of the these symptoms of trauma are normal, natural responses to having a wounded human spirit. Instead of being problems to avoid, eliminate, or numb with medications or other substances, they are your friends. That’s right, symptoms of trauma are your friends. They’re like the check engine light on your car dashboard. They’re alerting you about a problem with the engine—your human spirit. It needs your attention and help so it can heal and recover.
The Path to Healing and Recovering from Your Trauma
The path to healing and recovery is a journey. The time the journey takes depends on how wounded you are.
How many wounding, hurtful, life-denying experiences of abuse and/or neglect have you experienced in your life so far? Many from childhood to now? A few? One? How wounding were those hurtful, life-denying experiences? What have you done so far that has already helped you resolve some of your emotional wounds?
Here’s what my holistic approach to trauma and healing looks like for you :
An online 30-minute initial consult to meet each other, learn more about each other, and make sure we’re a good fit. That said, if we learn that we’re not a good fit, I’ll help you find someone who is.
When we’re a good fit, we schedule your first appointment, and you complete your intake forms. My holistic approach to trauma and healing includes four phases. The four phases are Comforting, Healing, Realizing, and Faring Well. Let’s look at each phase of holistic healing.
Comforting Phase
The Comforting Phase is about us getting better acquainted, you being fully heard, understood, reassured, validated, and empathized with. It’s three 90-minute sessions that cover your current stresses, doing some questionnaires, hearing your life story, and providing a summary and customized care plan just for you. This is the shortest phase.
Healing Phase
The Healing Phase is about understanding the sources of your distress and learning strategies that help you heal and recover. It is the longest phase. The length of this phase depends on what needs to be healed. Healing can take fifteen or so sessions for one wounding experience, and up to ten or more years of work for multiple wounding experiences from childhood until now.
Realizing Phase
The Realizing Phase begins once you’ve made enough progress to know the life-affirming desires of your heart—your human spirit. When you know the life-affirming desires of your heart, you can engage in realizing your dream and joy. That’s what you’re here to do. When you engage in realizing your dream and joy, you make a positive contribution to others and make the whole world more wonderful! This phase usually only takes a few sessions.
Faring Well Phase
Faring Well is the fourth and final phase of the process. It’s the shortest phase. We reflect on the journey of healing and recovery you’ve been on and acknowledge that you’re ready to fare well on your own. I present a list of practices to keep doing to prevent relapse and to retain all you’ve accomplished.
Some clients fare well and need no more sessions. Other clients prefer to meet three or four times a year for a while. Still other clients choose to have monthly check-in sessions about what’s been going well and what hasn’t. Sometimes they include reminders of key practices to maintain.
If you like what you learned from this post or have questions, please share a comment and tell others about it. If you’d like to schedule a FREE 30-Minute Online Initial Consult, CLICK HERE. I look forward to meeting you and learning how I can help.