Trauma recovery coaching

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 Traumatic experiences and trauma memories change our perspective is so many ways. It changes the way we view the world around us and how we interact with the world and people around us. It impacts our perceptions of others, and ourselves. It becomes very limiting and it steals our ambition, motivation and desire to move forward in life and with our objectives and interferes with our purpose. When we view the world through the trauma lens, we see and remember painful memories. We hold onto anger toward events and people who have hurt us, betrayed us and caused us to feel unhappy, painful things in our lives. Trauma undermines and destroys our trust in people and things around us. It can cause us to lose trust in our own thoughts and feelings about things we are trying to accomplish and move toward. Our self-esteem falls apart into little pieces leaving shattered remains of a once confident and ambitious self-determined personality. Trauma undermines our confidence and can lead to deficiencies in self-love and in trusting our own perceptions, looking at the world as unsafe, standing on unsettled ground. Trauma can skew of values system as we begin to question and decern what’s real and what’s not, what’s right and what’s wrong and what is worth out time moving forward. 

Trauma causes a variety of mental health related issues as well. It can lead to depression, increased anxiety, BPD, PTSD with dissociation, causing us to engage in unsafe ways to process this pain such as self-injury, suicidal behaviors, impulsive behaviors, sexually risky and unsafe behaviors and sometimes, worse, it can cause people to consider and complete suicide. When we begin to identify the mental health issues around trauma, it becomes so much more difficult to heal and move forward, but living a life worth living, finding value in a meaningful existence is still possible, despite these conditions. 

When we hold onto our anger and mistrust, it interferes with our purpose because we get stuck in the anger and resentment, causing us to remain stuck and unable to move forward. We become consumed by the anger and the memories that cause us to focus on the hate, rather than healing and moving forward in productive meaningful ways. Anger and resentment steal our peace and cause us to perseverate on the bad memories rather than seeing potential and finding forgiveness. Living a meaningful and productive life after trauma is possible. We have to break the chains of the trauma and trauma memories that bind, and find a new way to view, process and deal with these memories so we can move forward in productive and meaningful ways.

Can you imagine for a moment what it might be like to live a meaningful and satisfying life after trauma? 

Life after trauma is possible! Healing and recovering from trauma and traumatic life experiences is a complicated and very difficult process but it is necessary and very much a possibility in your life. When we talk about living a vastly different life from what we have been living, and looking through the trauma lens, we must begin by learning exactly how trauma affects us and how these experiences have changed our lives and altered our path on life’s journey.

The first step we need to actively engage in, is self-forgiveness and reestablish self-love. When we go through traumatic experiences, we immediately want to blame someone, something and somehow find a way to internalize this experience in efforts to limit or minimize the amount of pain that we experience as a result. Sadly, we almost always blame ourselves for thigs that were mostly out of our control, or about things that were perpetrated onto us by others who had bad intentions toward us, or things that happened as a result of a connection to someone in our lives. 

Sometimes the intention was to harm us, other times it just happened as many things tend to do in life, but but either way, we got hurt and the events left profoundly deep emotional scars. Invariably, most of us immediately begin to blame ourselves for whatever happened to us, as if we allowed it, or asked for it to happen, or that we were not able to stop it. Once we begin to understand that we were not responsible for what someone else did to us, we can then begin to reallocate the blame, redirect the anger away from ourselves and onto the correct person or people or situation. We can begin to let go of months, years or even decades of self-loathing, self-hatred and reveres years of being unkind to ourselves. 

 
The second step is to learn how to effectively carry the weight of what we’ve been thorough and break it down into manageable pieces. Getting into therapy is a good thing to do at this point, with someone who is trauma informed and work the long journey through the process of addressing the trauma.  

 
The third step is to learn how to forgive the person or people whom have inflicted all of this pain. We need to learn how to forgive, let go of the anger and make a conscious choice to confront the resentment that has grown over the years and held us down for so long. The anger that we’ve been harboring toward ourselves and others has gotten in the way us moving forward and even being able to see the very path forward. It distracts us from finding and maintaining our internal peace. Anger and resentment become the stumbling blocks to success and prosperity. 

 
The fourth step is to reconciling your past and your experiences with your values and morality, measure it up against our beliefs system and foundational perspective. It’s about beginning to challenge are core beliefs, adjust them so that we can begin moving in more intentional ways to achieve a better and more meaningful outcome. Its about understanding our attachment styles and how our attachment style has evolved and changed over time as a result of the trauma we’ve endured. Finding forgiveness is hard and trying to understand how these things could have been allowed to happen is a difficult concept to understand. It has to be about rewriting the narrative, from negative experiences to triumph and strength, perseverance leading to true happiness, genuine internal peace and a prosperous and productive life. It requires us to rebuild trust in things, systems and in people. 

The short answer is this; in our work together, we are going to identify the trauma memories and the triggers that are interfering with your life journey and identify how they are holding you back and getting in the way of achieving a more peaceful, meaningful and fulfilling life. We are going take some and explore ways in which the course and direction of our lives have been stunted and altered, and how our attachment to the pain has predicted and determined a lot of the shortcomings that we’ve experienced along the way in our lifelong journey. We are going to learn to identify and deal with the triggers in our life as they happen and learn how to counter them, deal with them, let go of them and move forward around them, and stop letting them stop us in our tracks. 

We are then going to learn how to rebuild trust in several different ways and learn how to trust again. We are going to learn how to trust ourselves and also begin to rebuild trust in others, and the world around us. We are going to have deep and meaningful conversations around forgiveness; forgiveness for ourselves and then forgiveness for others, letting ourselves off the hook for things that we were connected to but did not cause, that left such deep and painful scars inside of us.

We are going to face the pain head on, and take back our control over life events that stole our peace and positivity. We are going to begin to rewriter our narrative, close the old chapter and begin anew. We are going to take appropriate ownership of what we need too and effective and appropriately allocate the blame correctly onto the ones that hurt us, stop taking accountability for things that were out of our control and things that we could not have changed in anyway due to circumstances. We are going to learn how to find healing and acceptance in the things we’ve been through and we are going to learn how to get back on track and learn how to be kind to ourselves. When we begin to understand our trauma memories and put them into context, we will begin to understand that we are not defined by our trauma but rather we can define them and how they are going to affect us moving forward. We all have the power to take charge and control our lives despite our trauma history. 

The first step in this process is to find a highly trained trauma therapist to help us make sense of the events that overwhelmed our senses and our ability to cope with the event. Once we begin to put the pieces together then we can begin to make it all make sense to us. This is the most difficult part apart dealing with trauma memories and the events that created the trauma for us to begin with. 

When we can look at our trauma truthfully and honestly, with grace and understanding we can begin to heal… We can begin to forgive ourselves for being in situations where we had little to no control over someone else’s bad and harmful behaviors. We can begin to forgive ourselves as we begin to shift the narrative from it being our fault to actually blaming the person who hurt us. Blaming ourselves drags us so far down into the darkness and self-loathing that we cannot often see the way out.

An extremely important part of the healing journey is to address and deal with our resulting anger and resentment that has taken root in us due to the trauma experience. We get angry at everyone, even the people closest to us, who never did anything too us, and for a lot of really valid reasons. We want to blame someone, we want to hold someone accountable, we want to make it make sense to us that we got so profoundly hurt by someone. This anger comes to roost because we experience the pain that trauma causes. We understand on some very deep levels that this was such a huge trust violation and we lose faith and trust in others around us. We get mad at the person who hurt us, we get mad at people who are only trying to help, the people who still care and didn’t actually do anything to hurt us, but we can take control and find better, healthier and more productive ways of dealing with and processing this anger. 

In the healing process, coming to terms with the anger, the resentment, processing our feelings around the events that caused us to feel such profound pain is going to feel like the weight of the world has been lifted. We will suddenly realize how incredible our lives can be. Once we are free from judgment and pain, we can begin to look forward with a whole new perspective. A vision that includes a clear and decisive plan, coupled with motivation and endurance that we’ve never felt before. Our joy and desires to go after and achieve our goals, meeting our objectives becomes so focused and energized that nothing can stop us. With a clear focus we can begin to develop the practical steps needed to meet and exceed our own expectations. When we let go of anger, we are free to feel differently, we are free to love again, to trust again and to let go of fear and sadness. We are no longer stuck in this place between ambivalence and effectiveness. We no longer wish to make excuses as to why we can’t, but rather adopt and adapt to a new life philosophy of “I can and I will”! The barriers fall away and the limits are removed from our path, allowing us to move forward unabated by tragedy and sorrow, but reside in success and peace. We can make the choice to live differently, outside of the shadows that once bound us, breaking free, opening the door to living a meaningful, fulfilling and prosperous life free of all of the trappings of yesterday.