5 Critical Ways To Heal From Emotional Trauma

Whether it’s from a battlefield, an unstable childhood, or an abusive event, we’ve all been traumatized at one point or another. It’s a fact of life.

What matters the most is how we go about healing from emotional trauma and living wholeheartedly without letting traumatic events from our past define us.

What is trauma?

Trauma is "an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster".

Trauma can be caused by so much more — breakups, injuries, and deaths are also traumatic events. Even being bullied or extremely embarrassing moments can be traumatic. Anything that causes a severe emotional response and affects your psyche thereafter is basically a trauma.

There are various types of trauma. Just like physical trauma is generally a wound or injury that leaves a scar, emotional trauma is a mental injury that leaves an internal scar.

Common short-term responses to traumatic events are shock and denial, while long-term symptoms of trauma can range from flashbacks, nightmares, isolation, insomnia, emotional outbursts, depression, and even fatigue and nausea.

These are all normal responses to being traumatized, the only problem is if these responses persist without dealing with the underlying trauma, they can wreak havoc on your everyday life and make it impossible to move on. So, it’s important to learn how to heal from the emotional pain of trauma and go on to live your life, wholeheartedly.

What happens to your brain when you go through trauma?

When we say trauma causes internal scars, it's not a joke. Trauma can actually change your brain and affects three parts — the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex. In fact, studies have shown post-traumatic stress disorder can even change the size of your brain!

When you experience a trauma, you go into fight, flight, or freeze mode, which is caused by an overproduction of the stress hormone cortisol. This excess cortisol actually rewires your brain’s circuitry, which results in emotional and psychological distress.

Every time you relive your trauma or are "triggered", you experience this overproduction of cortisol. The excess cortisol causes you to be in a state of high alert (i.e. extreme sensitivity, jumpiness, hyper-awareness, and trembling).

Here are 5 critical ways to heal from emotional trauma:

1. Accept your trauma and be willing to heal.

The first step to any healing or recovery process is acceptance. As we mentioned, denial is a common symptom of emotional trauma as a coping mechanism, because if you don’t think you’ve been traumatized, then it’s no big deal right? Wrong. You will still experience the debilitating responses to trauma, whether you’re in denial about it or not, so you might as well accept it and begin to heal.

It’s okay to have gone through trauma, and guess what? We all have or will at some point in our lives! It’s almost impossible to go through life without experiencing trauma, so don’t worry, it’s not any sort of reflection on you as a person! Nobody would ever shame you for having cancer, why would you be ashamed for being traumatized?

Trauma is even more common than cancer, and as with cancer, not your fault. Don’t give into your ego saying something is wrong with you for having trauma, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you, it’s normal! The responses you may experience as a result of trauma are just that — responses, symptoms, neither the responses nor the trauma define you. Your trauma is not who you are.

It may seem like a daunting process to heal your trauma before you’ve started, but a great motivator is the hope and priceless reward of feeling better and getting your life back. Trauma can also lead to serious future health problems if not dealt with and processed properly, and who wants that?

Love yourself enough to go through the healing process because you deserve happiness at the end of your path. Trauma is your truth, and it is OK! It hasn't taken anything away from you, you are a whole person.

2. Stabilize yourself.

Regaining your sense of safety in the world is very important to healing from emotional trauma and living wholeheartedly. This step may look different for everyone, depending on what makes you feel safe and what your idea of stability is. But, a support system is the most common way people feel safe, which can include friends, family, therapists, and professional help, even your pet.

The key is to allow those closest to you to support you and be there for you while you heal. Another way most people feel grounded and stable is by taking the time to connect with nature. You can check both of these boxes by bonding with your pet, and that’s probably why pets are so therapeutic — they’re part of nature!

Nature has a very balanced and high-frequency vibration to calm the mind and warm the heart. The purity, simplicity, and divinity of nature are very grounding and great for meditation and mind-clearing.

Our communities and society can be very overwhelming by presenting triggers and general stress in our lives. It’s always helpful to step away from it and take some time to tap into the therapeutic properties of nature.

And even when you can’t get out of the city, remember you yourself are nature, tap into the divine within you through meditation and you can experience the same soothing and grounding feeling. Allow yourself to reset with calm surroundings and loving, supporting people (and pets).

See the beauty in nature and people around you and begin to trust the universe again, because overall, it’s got your back!

3. Take time to mourn, then purge.

Probably the most therapeutic tip, let it out! Healing from trauma doesn’t mean brushing it under the rug and trying not to think about it. To truly heal from emotional trauma, it’s important to face it and let yourself experience all of the emotions it brings up for you.

Purge yourself of the negativity and only leave what’s productive and positive. Cry out your sadness, scream out any shame, punch out your anger at a boxing class, and face and accept your fear.

Purify yourself by letting out all the emotional responses you have pent up. Sometimes many of the long-term responses you have to trauma are actually a result of holding in your emotions more so than the trauma itself.

Exercise and physical activities are an incredibly therapeutic way to heal from trauma for this very reason. They’re a great outlet for letting out emotions and channeling negative ones into something positive. How fun is it to kick a ball and imagine it’s someone’s head who has upset you? The best!

Now, the goal isn’t necessarily to relive the trauma, but it most certainly is also not to escape the uncomfortable emotions it brings up. The goal is a healthy middle ground that allows you to heal and process the trauma, to bleed it out so to speak.

Aside from cleansing the pent-up emotions caused by trauma, it’s also important to mourn what you may have lost as a result of the trauma, whether it’s a certain quality of life, an actual person in the case of death, or even peace of mind and sleep.

Mourn it, feel it, and let it out once and for all so you can move forward from it. And take your time, mourning and grieving are long processes to get through and that’s also normal. Have patience and be kind to yourself.

4. Process your feelings and regain empowerment.

After you’ve allowed yourself to let out your pent-up emotions surrounding the trauma, it’s time to look at the trauma itself from a balanced and logical place to pick it apart and strip it down to something you aren’t attached to anymore. For this tip, it’s very important to have a therapist you trust and feel comfortable with in order to help you analyze the trauma and the how's, why’s, and what now’s of it.

A professional can help you put the trauma into context and process it in a healthy and constructive manner, allowing you to empower yourself by detaching from it. The goal here is to see the trauma as something that doesn’t control you and your emotions anymore, to realize you are bigger and stronger than the trauma. To be able to confidently declare your trauma is something that happened to you, it is not a part of you, and it does not define you.

Other activities that can help with this are meditation and reflection, as well as creative activities. These activities help you step back and look at what happened what it means for you, and even how to move forward from it. Creative outlets and activities are also good.

This step is all about taking the power back from your trauma by moving on from it, and realizing your trauma is something outside and separate from you, a moment in time when it’s not part of you or who you are. You can leave your trauma in the past and move on to brighter days because it’s not attached to you anymore!

5. Reconnect, find balance and live healthily from here on out.

This last tip is all about how to maintain a healthy and wholehearted lifestyle after the bulk of the trauma-healing process is done. While it’s important to do this throughout the process, an important factor in moving on and not being pulled back into the darkness of past trauma is having a stable, balanced, and structured lifestyle that includes healthy habits, a healthy support system, and social life, and a healthy work-life balance.