We're cruising along through life and stuff happens and sometimes we get hurt.
How to recover from emotional trauma? Let's take that on today.
In my book I
titled one of the chapters surprise because I think this is a principle of
life. You go along expecting that something's going to happen and then
something totally different happens instead and you're surprised by life
circumstance. Things happen all the time, stuff happens on a daily basis and in
all of that stuff sometimes we get hurt, that causes emotional trauma. So what do
you do to heal from emotional trauma? I've come up with a four-step process
that I think is going to help us to get through this. The first thing is to
realize that you are a human being and human beings have very typical reactions
to certain kinds of events so let's call the first one talk. Alright step 1, talk.
Share your story, find some way to talk about what it is that has happened to
you so whatever it is, maybe it's a breakup,
maybe it's the death of a loved one, maybe it's someone abused you or beat
you up somehow, maybe, it could be anything but it causes emotional trauma,
a divorce, a bankruptcy, these surprises that happen in life and leave you with
some emotional trauma. You have to tell the story. Some people do this with
friends and family and that's a really great place to start. You may also want
to consider hiring a coach, visiting with a therapist, getting a counselor, someone
in a professional setting that you could talk to to share your story and to get
it out, just say it. There's other ways to do this too through journaling and video
records, blogging and vlogging, all of those kinds of things are legitimate
ways to tell your story as well, there's just an innate human need to do it. You
know, going back to some of my clinic background when I was learning how to be
a psychologist, I got some specific training on post-traumatic stress and
how to deal with that. You know what the number one treatment? The number one
intervention for a post-traumatic stress problem,
it's debriefing. That's just a fancy psychological word that means talk about
it, tell the story. You need to be able to tell that story. Okay, now number two, feel.
Number one, let's talk. Number two, feel. Allow yourself to feel whatever
you're going to feel. This is a little scary to some people because it's not very
pleasant sometimes when you start to feel the feelings that are associated
with an emotionally traumatic event in your life. In fact, everything inside of
you is probably telling you to avoid feeling it. Go ahead and feel it. Just
this past week, I attended two funerals of people in my neighborhood that I've
known for quite some time, some people don't even want to go to the funeral, you
know, whatever the funeral is for your particular trauma, if someone dies, the
funeral represents an event that some people want to avoid because they don't
want to feel what they're going to feel when they go there. I'm here to tell you,
you got to let yourself feel it. This will make it easier.. You're having a
normal reaction to an abnormal event. Other people have experienced these
things all the time frequently, this happened but not to you,
right? That's the abnormal part, this doesn't normally happen to you. Whatever
you're feeling though is a normal reaction to that abnormal event that has
occurred in your life so give yourself permission to just feel it, whatever
you're feeling, go ahead and feel it and it's not going to kill you, it'll seem in
the moment that this is going to go on and on and on. I have a colleague who made
his entire career off of two words, feelings change, and they do, this is
going to pass so rather than resisting the feeling or doing things to a
avoid putting yourself in a position where you're going to feel it, like
attending the funeral, simply allow yourself to feel it, plan for it, take
some tissues if you need to, just feel whatever you're going to feel, it's an
important part of your healing. That brings us to number three. Remember, I
told you I was going to give you four. Now we've already got talk, feel, now number
three, self care. I know I shouldn't even have to say this but you got to take
care of yourself. A lot of times when we experience an emotionally traumatizing
event, we kind of forget to eat, to sleep, to exercise, to take care of ourself in
the way that's going to allow us to do some proper healing. The physical body
that you live in include your brain and your emotional experience is very
strongly affected by how you're doing in this physical body. Take care of yourself
so make sure you're getting enough sleep, make sure you're doing regular exercise
even if you don't feel like it, this is emotional mood management that we're
talking about. Get enough sleep, regular exercise, diet, pay attention to what
you're eating. If you're putting a whole bunch of garbage through your system, if
you don't have the right kind of fuel on board, then you're not going to be
functioning at the optimal level and you need that in order to do some of the
emotional healing that's going to come after the trauma so take care of
yourself, find times to just be quiet and on your own. We call us in the industry,
we call it mindfulness and it's supported by things like meditation or
yoga or exercise, a time when you can shut everything else out for just a few
minutes and center on who you are and why you are. One quick way to do this is
to simply pay attention to your breathing, focus on your breathing for a
few minutes, allow yourself to just be common,
focus on nothing else except the in and the out of your breathing. This is all
about self care and that's step number three, take care of yourself. Okay now
step four is a little different, I'm going to label this one file. File I .don't
mean go get a rasp and start hacking away at it, I mean put it away in a place
that makes sense. When you file something and you put it away in a place where you
can either do something with it later or you can find it if you need to, here's
why I think filing is important as a part of our emotional healing, you'll
hear this sometimes, if you've been through an emotionally traumatizing
event, let's say that it's the death of a loved one and someone comes
up to you and says, I can't imagine anybody actually saying this but I think
some people do, oh you should be over this by now. Come on, just pull yourself
together, you should be over this by now. I don't think so. Some things we
don't even get over in the traditional way of how, you know, we think about that
phrase, get over it. I don't think we do. You lose a loved one, someone dies, how
are you supposed to get over that? This is a person that meant so much to you
and filled up a part of your life that is not replaceable, right? I don't think
you're going to get over it so what I want to encourage you to do is to file it, put
it somewhere, find the right place for it, it's really that instead of getting over
something, we're accommodating it into our life, into our new normal, we're going to
find a place to put it and do something with it that's going to be healthy. You
don't want to forget about that person, you don't want to totally get over it,
you want to put it in the right place and it might be that you find ways to
record your memories for example or things that were meaningful for you
about whatever the traumatic experience was, what you learned from it,
what you're grateful for that came as a result of it and these things can be
done in the context of personal development coaching or therapy, you can
also do some journaling and find ways to pull these ideas down in a way that it
helps you to file it in a place that's going to be helpful in the future.
So we've got our four steps, talk, that's number one. You got to be able to tell a
story. Number two, feel. Allow yourself to feel whatever
you're going to feel, you're never wrong about that, you're having a normal
reaction to an abnormal event. Number three, self-care. Take care of yourself,
nobody else has that primary responsibility so you make sure you're
doing it, make sure you get in your sleep and your diet and your exercise in your
mindful time, that's huge. And number four, file. File it away where you can do the
right things with it, you don't have to get over this, let's just find a way to
accommodate it. There you have it, four simple steps to help us recover from
emotional trauma. Will you share that with someone who could use it today?