Ask A Therapist: What does healing from trauma look like - With Gabriela Ucrós
Trauma refers to an event or series of events that overwhelmed our capacity to mentally, emotionally, and physically cope with or process an experience.
Trauma survivors are often immersed in intrusive sensations, thoughts, and emotions, as a result of remaining stuck in a trauma response. They become hypervigilant about their surroundings, avoid hard conversations, or shut down with depression or fatigue. We can’t talk our way out of our trauma; talking about our distress and narrating the traumatic events that occurred is often insufficient for trauma survivors to fully and permanently recover.
So, what does healing from trauma look like?
Since symptoms are as physical as they are psychological, psychosomatic interventions, meaning body-based interventions, are crucial for trauma recovery. In the journey to recovery, trauma survivors will come to understand that they are their own medicine.
In somatic therapy, our approach is to help the client build new neural pathways and behaviors so they develop new ways of responding to their environment without remaining trapped in their trauma response and the patterns from the past.
We can breakdown the therapeutic process and the healing journey into three phases:
Establishing safety and stability, helping the client build dual attention, meaning they are able to go into a traumatic memory while experiencing themselves embodied. Helping the client be in the present moment by building somatic awareness.
Going into the discomfort in the body, going through the uncomfortable sensations in a regulated way. Helping the client surrender, bringing attention to the inner world in a way that doesn’t feel threatening. Empowering them in their choices, and helping them depend on, deepen and amplify their sensations by honoring the intelligence of their body.
Integration of the changes into the sense of self, new ways of engaging in the world. Moving with authenticity and freedom into the world.
The therapeutic process can oscillate between steps one and two for a while. The pendulation between resourcing and feeling discomfort is key in this journey, the process is never linear. Healing from trauma looks like having nervous system flexibility. It looks like going through normal life and having minor distresses and having your body give you feedback on the danger, allowing you to recover quickly, recalibrate, and go into a stage of rest, without getting stuck into a trauma response.
Healing from trauma is understanding that the discomfort in your body is a wake-up call. Being able to move through the discomfort to resolve the tension naturally is understanding that trauma is held in the core of the body. It can often come out in tears, in recreating movements that couldn't happen while the trauma was being experienced; in being able to reach out for connection when you couldn't, and in using your voice when you were silenced.
Avoiding the body allows us to avoid the pain, which is part of our human experience. Attending and befriending the body feels very vulnerable, but it allows us to:
Build awareness.
Give and receive feedback about sensations.
Make meaning about emotions.
Bear witness to the sensations by being curious.
The goal is to ultimately be able to update the story we are telling the world about ourselves.
Interested in working with Gabriela? Book a free 30-minute consultation with our therapist matchmaker and we will see if Gabriela is the best fit for you! She offers EMDR Therapy, Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, Couples Therapy and Individual Therapy. Consultations are a great way to get to know our practice, policies, and see if we have a therapist on staff who would be a good therapeutic match. Consultations for therapy are for California residents only.
These blogs talk more about the basics of EMDR:
You can read more about Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy here:
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