Can you make trauma go away?
“Can you really heal from trauma?”
I get asked that question quite often, and I understand why.
When you’ve been impacted by some type of trauma, you’re most likely feeling the impact of it in your day to day life. In your relationships, things don’t feel good because maybe you’re constantly preoccupied with the fear of rejection, being abandoned, so you people please as a solution. At your work, maybe you’re at the edge of burning out because you’re taking on way more than you should and not properly setting boundaries with your co-workers. During the day, maybe you get flashbacks of random unpleasant memories of the past, or of the trauma incident. You feel those heavy emotions and you hear yourself saying all kinds of nasty words. “Idiot. Stupid. What’s wrong with you?” At night, you have difficulty sleeping and maybe you don’t really get good quality sleep. You wake up tired, yearning to sleep more, but responsibilities of adulthood call your name.
When your life looks like this every single day, I get why you feel desperate to “get healed” so that your life can look and feel much different.
And so the answer I give is often this: Your trauma doesn’t just go away, it’s impossible. But you can certainly grow around it so that the trauma doesn’t take the driver seat in your life. It’s constant work. It’s actually life-long work. Instead of using the word “healed”, let’s use the word “healing.”
What I mean by that is this:
When something horrific happens to you and you are left alone without any real support, you are left traumatized. That’s what being “traumatized” means. It’s not necessarily the event that occurs that defines the trauma, it’s the aftermath of it. Think of it this way in 2 different case scenarios: Let’s say you got into an accident, and you got a deep cut on your arm. You rush to the emergency room, and the nurses and the doctors will do everything they can to diagnose and treat that cut. They might have to sew it up, patch it, and give you antibiotics afterwards. After this treatment, you slowly but surely heal, and maybe in several months, you can barely see the scar (if you’re lucky). You’re okay!
Here's case scenario 2: You got into an accident, and you got a deep cut on your arm. You are completely alone, and because you don’t have health insurance and don’t have financial support, you decide NOT to go to the emergency room. You don’t even tell your family or friends what happened, so you’re totally alone. You come home, feel the deep wound on your arm and do your best to patch it up with the emergency kit at home. One, two, three days go by, and you realize that you are still feeling that searing pain. You can’t even sleep throughout the night because the pain keeps you up. As a matter of fact, the pain is getting worse. You start noticing yellow-green pus filling up the cut and it’s becoming excruciatingly painful. You’re infected. Because you don’t have money or insurance, you try to “maintain” this pain with ibuprofen and changing the patch every day. Some days it feels like it’s getting better and you can get by. But there are more days than not where you are reminded of this wound on your arm through that nagging and stabbing pain.
This is exactly what trauma is.
Something happened to you. There were wounds (emotional/mental/physical). That wound continues to spread and exist because you didn’t have the proper support and help you needed at that time. And before you know it- it’s become a part of you and you live with it, and you definitely feel it. You learn to “live around it”, but it doesn’t feel good.
So can you treat it? Short answer is yes. Absolutely you can – through therapy and medication, you can get that treatment and learn to lessen the impact of the trauma in your body and your mind. Yes, you can find relief.
Will it truly go away? – Short answer is no. But with treatment, coping tools, and hard work, you will grow, and eventually your growth will be bigger than the trauma. One day, that trauma looks and feels much smaller than it used to be. You will have more wisdom, awareness, knowledge, experience, and space inside yourself that allows you to deal with it with compassion when it comes up. Some days, that trauma will inevitably get activated because of a different life circumstances/phase of life that you find yourself in. Maybe you’re getting married, you’re having your first baby, you’re parenting a toddler, you got a promotion at work, etc. That trauma might’ve not shown its head previously, but it might show up in the next phase of your life. The hope is that you will have so much space inside of you that when that trauma gets triggered and flames up once again, it’s just a small ember flaring up, and not a whole bonfire that swallows up and takes up every space inside of you.
It's hard, life-long work. But I promise you, you can get to a better place. You just have to take that first step in acknowledging it and seeking help.
