Now that I’m Safe, What Do I Do? Healing from Trauma: Part II

December 8th, 2009
By Susanne M. Dillmann, Psy.D., Post Traumatic Stress / Trauma Topic Expert Contributor

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Once you have established physical and emotional safety, it is possible to begin remembering and mourning the traumatic event. In other words it is now possible to address the trauma story.

Remembering the trauma begins by placing the event into your life history. No longer is the event pushed under the proverbial rug or thought of as your defining life experience. Rather, the traumatic event is given a time and place in your life. Reviewing your life before the traumatic event, analyzing and understanding the circumstances that led up to the traumatic event and looking at your life after the event is pivotal to the remembering. Recalling the reactions of significant others, including those reactions/experiences that were wounding or even re-traumatizing is also necessary. These secondary wounding experiences are acknowledged, grieved over and worked through. Doing this work allows your personal meaning of the trauma to come to the surface.

After creating this narrative timeline or sketch of your life the next step is to reconstruct the traumatic event: transforming the trauma memory from a frozen moment of terror to a memory that has words, a sense of time and reveals your feelings and interpretations of the event. Reconstructing the event uses any and all memory, no matter how fragmented, detailed or seemingly random they are. Whatever memory you as the survivor have is what is worked with. This work is done one small piece of memory or information at a time. It is critical that the pace of this work does not lead to you feeling disempowered or spiraling downward. A competent trauma therapist will work with you to determine the best pace for you and will allow you to have a say about this pace. The end result for most survivors is that their trauma story is no longer one of humiliation and shame. Rather it is one of virtue and dignity.

Once the traumatic event is remembered and the memory is connected to words, a sense of time as well as emotions, that which was lost must be mourned. Trauma may or may not result in physical losses, but it always results in psychological losses. Emotionally connecting to your losses is a courageous act and is fundamental to the mourning process. The act of connecting to your emotions feels scary. Part of this fear is because acknowledging what was lost confirms the loss and requires you to claim the new you. This work can feel endless but this phase of healing cannot be skipped nor can it be rushed. The amount of time spent in this phase is different for every individual. Survivors will know that they are nearing the end when “it occurs to the survivor that perhaps the trauma is not the most important, or even the most interesting, part of her life story… [she] reclaims her own history and feels renewed hope and energy for engagement with life. Time starts to move again. . . . The traumatic experience truly belongs to the past. At this point, the survivor faces the tasks of rebuilding her life in the present and pursuing her aspirations for the future.” *

This emotional work should not be done without the guidance of a trained professional, who can help you through your healing. As with all of my articles, the information in this article is intended to educate and is not meant as a substitution for individual therapy.

References:

* Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

 

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©Copyright 2009 by Susanne M. Dillmann, Psy.D., therapist in Escondido, CA. All Rights Reserved.

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