The 3-Step Trauma Roadmap Used By Fully-Healed People Who've Finally Found Peace
Rise above your story.
Tatsiana Volkava | Canva Not everyone has experienced true trauma, but almost everyone has pain in their past. Too often, we get suck in that pain and allow it to dictate our future path.
Karena Kilcoyne can relate. She spent years discovering how to rise above her story, so you can rise above yours. Kilcoyne's national best seller, Rise Above the Story, Free Yourself From Past Trauma and Create the Life You Want, helps people recover from trauma by changing the stories we tell ourselves about abandonment and self-worth.
After years of successful work as a criminal defense attorney, Karena still felt empty and robbed of joy. So she decided it was time to take a look at how to help people recover and change their lives so she could do so herself — and it worked! She decided to share this information with the world, including in a fascinating conversation with Andrea Miller on the Getting Open podcast.
Here's the 3-step trauma roadmap anyone can use to finally find peace
1. Acknowledge your story
We all have stories, and the story we tell ourselves is the story we end up living. Often, people go through life unaware of the story they tell themselves. This directly impacts the choices they make and the relationships they attract or repel.
We create false narratives to survive traumatic experiences. But once survive, the stories we created continue to direct our choices. We need to acknowledge these stories and their impact before we can recover.
"Your story is your brain's emotional interpretation of who you are as a result of what you experienced," warns Kilcoyne. "My untrue story was that I was unlovable because I had two parents who didn't love me, and because the two people who were supposed to love me didn't love me, I was therefore unlovable. So that is the untrue story. And that's the awareness that we're creating."
Once you acknowledge your story, you can accept how it works within you. This may be painful, but it's a crucial part of the healing process — and don't worry, it doesn't last forever. Soon you move on to step two and eventual freedom.
2. Release your story
The story a wounded child creates is powerful for survival, but harmful if habitualized. The powerless victim mode of childhood survival becomes a daily procedure to drain our sense of self and energy.
By acknowledging the story and its impact, we can understand how our narrative holds us back. The acknowledgment allows us a chance to grieve the loss, and opens a way to forgive, if at least for the role we played in ourselves.
Karena Kilcoyne explained, "You get so good at pushing it all down that you don't know how to feel it the way you need to feel it, or the way you should be feeling it to release the energy. I allow myself the space and time to feel it. And then I thank the emotion for being there and release it. I wait until I feel it dissipate, or I can feel it kind of leaving my body. And then I go about my business."
So thank the emotion, and the "past you" who used that emotion to survive tough situations. Only then can you truly release this story and let it go.
3. Rise above your story
Rising above is the most challenging. We can acknowledge how we were harmed, we can forgive ourselves and others for their roles in our harm. Yet finding the ways being harmed benefited us always seems so weird and feels misdirected, uncomfortable, and contrary.
To counter that, Karena Kilcoyne says, "You cannot find deep, true healing if you are carrying around a heart full of shame, grief, resentment, and rage. The key to finally rising with the story is finding authentic love for yourself. And so many of us have had trauma, it takes a long time."
When we rise above, we recognize how our old story may be influencing us today and then make the active choice to not allow it to overshadow our good judgement, maturity and positive experiences. We allow our current self to take the reins, so to speak, and to make different choices that rise above the past.
While these steps may seem obvious, when you are being held back by past trauma, they feel anything but that. The good news is that the more you practice these steps, the more reflexive they become. Soon enough, you start to feel the healed part of you speaking up and the old, wounded past growing quiet. That's when happiness can truly begin.
Will Curtis is YourTango's expert editor. Will has over 14 years of experience as an editor covering relationships, spirituality, and human interest topics.
