Childhood TRAUMA & your Healing Process

What does the word Trauma mean to you?

I used to think of trauma in the context of refugees, war, assault, tragedy, the big life events that stop you in your tracks, leaving you with gaping wounds that you cannot see, and partly because they are invisible to your eye, cannot be truly healed.

And with that view of what trauma is, I definitely did not feel that I fell into that category of being traumatized. 

It felt insulting to others who had suffered so much more, that I would use such a huge word about myself and my life.  

However, as with so many things in LIFE, I now know, think and feel very differently about what trauma is, how it is created, and how ‘small’ the cause may have been, seen through our adult eyes, and yet how devastating the consequences of it are still in our today’s.

And once I accepted a different truth about trauma, I was able to intuitively create a process of deep healing that has changed my LIFE, and if you choose to follow it, my process will change your LIFE too.

And I say ‘intuitively’, because none of us are supposed to live in pain or distress, with hurt to your hearts that no-one else can see, but that bring you to your emotional knees.

You are designed to heal, to recover, to live in LOVE,  you just don’t know the process of how, and fear the pain of trying and ‘failing’. 

It is in your design to heal that your intutive knowing exists, waiting for you to access, accept, trust and act. 

The truth about Trauma is, that it is the response to a deeply distressing or disturbing event that overwhelms an individual’s ability to cope, causes feelings of helplessness, diminishes their sense of self and their ability to feel a full range of emotions and experiences.

 And whilst there is no definitive ‘list’ of what causes trauma, some of the circumstances typically involve the loss of control, betrayal, abuse of power, helplessness, pain, confusion and/or loss.

 And just in the awareness of those two paragraphs alone, I believe that you can, with gentle investigation, identify some of your LIFE trauma’s as well.

In this blog, I am talking about Childhood Trauma, and here’s ’s an example of trauma you may recognise, because so much of your pain, starts in your much younger years.

As a child you had less resources, less emotional resilience, less awareness of they ‘why’s’ of others words and actions.

 You were vulnerable, a tender little shoot of life that expected (not hoped) to receive love, care and support, and sadly, far too often, didn’t receive some or all of those.

 Not always because of deliberate neglect, not because you were not loved, but because your caregivers, peers, etc, also came into this life expecting the same, and it wasn’t delivered on.   

 Maybe you know the phrase, “Hurt people, hurt people”?  It is never more true than in this context.

 And because you didn’t know or understand the world around you, you blamed YOU for the neglects. 

 The natural assumption was that if someone didn’t seem to love or like you, YOU were the problem. 

 YOU were not good enough, and you could not see behind the veil of their words and actions to the truth, that they didn’t good enough, and it had nothing to do with you.

 All so terribly sad.

 My son’s young life was blighted by my lack of love for me, which filtered down into his heart as my lack of love for him. And my God, he was then and always will be my heartbeat, and he didn’t even know it.

Thankfully, my healing journey has become his, and together, we have worked through the mess I made of our lives to find a place of understanding, compassion and forgiveness.

My obvious to me traumas came from the breakdown of my parents marriage, the death of my mother, being isolated at school, and each one of these, overwhelmed my emotions and froze me in moments of time that stopped my personal growth.

Those events became part of me in that they resulted in me being fearful of relationships, of success, because I didn’t believe I was worthy of love, and of the potential pain of losses that I knew could hit me at any time.

 My drinking wasn’t necessarily the result of my trauma, it was however the method of comfort I used through not healing myself.  That is my truth.

 I now know that trauma isn’t who I was, or who you are, and the scars of the wounds it creates, those frozen moments in time, can be healed, and does not have to be hard, or intrusive or to take years of talking to get the healing you deserve.

 Here’s the healing process I created and use, please try it on YOU.

The HEALING Process

• Make the decision you are committed to healing – not thinking about or hoping to heal, committed to being Happy, Healthy, Healed & Whole again. 
• Create space daily to heal. Put aside up to 20 minutes (that’s the first act of commitment you make), to do the gentle, self-loving ‘work’ of healing.
• Engage with YOU, about where you want to be, and what stops you from taking the steps. 
• Every minute you spend on getting to know yourself with acceptance for a past you cannot change, with compassion and forgiveness for who / you at the time of your trauma, allows you to grow into who you truly were born to be, happy, healthy, healed and whole
• Get to know YOU at a deeper level, by asking non-judgmental questions, and giving yourself the time and grace to truly answer them.
• Every time an “I don’t know” comes up, know that you DO know, you just need to question gently further. 
• Don’t stop at surface level answers….always go deeper….there is nothing in you that hurts you, only your denying yourself the healing only you can deliver.
• When you have found your deepest level answers, (and none of them will cause you pain, there is nothing in you, about you that hurts you)
• Ask yourself one question

“What do I now know, that if I had known it then, would allow me to let go of the feelings of hurt”

• Take your answers, feel into the truth of them, and go back to your younger wounded self, and comfort her with you new perspective.

 And then LET GO with grace and peace. 

I love RITUALS of letting go.  These are the full stops of your trauma, the ‘physical’ emotional statements of letting go of hurt and letting in of love and healing.

• Write a letter to your younger self with your new learnings, or to the person that wounded you.  Write your heart out, seal it with love, and (safely) burn it.
• Visualise putting your newly understood trauma in to the shape of a beautiful bird, held gently in your hands, and release it upwards with a prayer of gratitude for what you have learnt and forgiveness, as you watch it fly away.

 And my ultimate top tip for true, deep, healing is to JOURNAL

Journaling in HEALING

Journaling is magical way of helping your unpack emtional truamas, because writing helps you process your feelings on a specific subject, keeping you on track so that your mind doesn’t ‘wander off’, and allowing you to express your painful thoughts and feelings honestly and privately. 

It can be difficult for you to make sense and remember events in a way that doesn’t cause greater confusion, so writing out what you think and feel, brings clarity, and that alone makes you feel better.

Ultimately, journaling is a simple, process through which you can express and release thoughts and emotions.

When your brain becomes overwhelmed with attempting to process and store stress and other traumatic situations – it can take a huge toll on your emotional wellbeing.

It gives you a precious release, a space in which you can relieve your body and brain of carrying the weight of your heavy emotions and thoughts.

One of the most important aspects of journaling, for me, is the ability to be completely honest without judgment. I am then able to go back and reflect on some of the things I’ve written and process these events without the overload of stressful feelings taking over, with greater self-awareness that have allowed me to recognise and so let go of old patterns of painful thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

Here’s the science…..journaling is so powerful because it uses both your left and right hand brain.  

This left hand or your brain is responsible for your rational and analytical thinking.

 The right brain is creative, emotional, and intuitive.

So when the left side of your brain is occupied with the act of writing, the right side of your brain can access emotions and our intuitive thoughts. This is a recipe for beautiful and healing creativity.

The bottom line is that healing is a choice, a conscious choice you can make at any time, and so change your LIFE.

If you need support on your healing journey, please contact me (HERE), and let’s talk.

You can have the happy, healthy, HEALED and whole LIFE you deserve.

You can have the Joy and LOVE of LIFE

And there is a simple process, that will free you from everything you feel holds you back, it will heal your heart, it will take you back to LOVE.

 Be kind and gentle with yourself

Sonia x