How to Heal Trauma

Written by Jennifer Aldoretta, founder of Groove

There’s a common belief that we must relive our pain and traumas in order to heal and integrate them. That we have to pour out our heart to a therapist, digging up and sharing every painstaking detail about our deepest, most intimate wounds.

Luckily, I’ve found that this belief is a complete fallacy. There is a much gentler way to move through and integrate our pain.

Sure, there are segments of psychotherapy and trauma healing that do involve discussing or writing about our specific traumas and “reliving” them in order to, over time, reduce their triggering effects or to change the way we think about them.

For some people, there is a great deal of value in those modalities. However, there is evidence that reliving or rehashing these painful experiences may actually re-traumatize us…which is exactly the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve with trauma healing work.

Plus, what these modalities fail to account for is that our pain does not live solely within our memory, or our mind. Trauma is not just a thing of the past. The pain of trauma shows up in myriad ways within the present moment — mentally, emotionally, AND physically. Oftentimes without us even realizing that this is what’s happening.

So staying grounded in the present moment — and in our present experience — rather than trying to go back and re-experience the past, is a powerful way to find true healing from our painful traumas.

Scientists studied inter-generational trauma in mice

There was an interesting study done regarding inter-generational trauma in 2013. Mice were exposed to a specific scent and then given a small electric shock. Over time, they began to associate this scent with the pain of the shock — even showing a trauma response when they were exposed ONLY to the scent and not the shock.

The really interesting thing is that the offspring of these mice also exhibited a trauma response to the scent...even though they carried no actual memory of the smell or of the trauma. Not only that, but their offspring’s offspring (their grand-mice) were also highly sensitive to this particular smell and showed heightened anxiety and stress in its presence.

That’s three generations of mice affected because of a single trauma.

Even though this was simply a mouse study, it suggests that we do not have to carry the memory of a traumatic event in our mind in order to experience a trauma response. There’s something else going on here.

In reality, the memory of trauma resides, in very large part, not within our mind, but within the physical body. Our body carries the memory of trauma just like our mind does. This coincides with what I’ve seen in my work.

And, in my experience, focusing trauma healing efforts on the body yields the greatest results.

When the stress cycle is completed, the pain of trauma lifts

As I discussed in a previous post, the stress response is a cycle, like many other things in nature. Trauma is created when, for some reason, the stress cycle gets halted or stopped in the middle and does not complete (meaning the experience is not fully processed). 

Without realizing it, we’ve created a culture that does not find it “socially acceptable” to fully release trauma — through a shaking response, an authentic emotional release, or any other type of discharge of energy. We’ve been taught to keep it together and stop crying and just move on. So the stress energy spins and spins and spins inside of our bodies, creating trauma.

If we can release the trapped trauma energy, then the triggers, the behaviors, the painful emotions, the Shadow characteristics all begin to melt away.

Focus on the present moment — not on the past — to heal trauma.

All of the trauma healing modalities I’ve seen that are most helpful for people do this one thing really, really well: they focus on your present experience...grounded in the present moment. They do not harp on the past.

In the next post, I discuss some amazing trauma healing methods and techniques that do just this. Ones that you can explore on your own, if you feel called to do so.

Happy healing.