Trauma Recovery

It’s hard to move forward – when stuck in the past.

As a coach, I have seen the extraordinary and significant impact that trauma can have on women and their lives. It is essential to understand that trauma can impact women differently. Some women may experience symptoms for weeks or months, while others may continue to struggle for years or even decades.

I haven’t met anyone who has escaped social, familial, or environmental trauma. Some women have experienced hurt and reached adulthood with only some surface scars. Others may be carrying deep wounding from their past or were the victims of generational trauma. Trauma can take many forms, from experiencing an emotionally abusive parent or being the victim or witness of violence in the family of origin to being the victim of violence or sexual violence.

You feel powerless and separate.

Regardless of its cause, the effects of trauma can be long-lasting and far-reaching, especially for women. Trauma can shatter a woman’s sense of safety and security, causing her to feel overwhelmed, anxious, afraid, and powerless. Such feelings can lead to various physical, emotional, and psychological insecurities and dependencies.

It’s hard to unstick oneself without awareness and understanding of the impact of trauma. The inability to process and understand these events keep you stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. In other words, those parts are still stuck in the past, responding to that traumatic event. Most of the time, we can have a disposition toward recreating these traumatic experiences because of these internal emotional and psychological patterns.

Recognizing your trauma response is essential.

In my practice, I regularly witness the grip of trauma on the women with whom I work. Sometimes, they come to me and want help with feelings of stuckness. They don’t know how to move forward in their life. Often, after the initial conversation, we discover they have had traumatic experiences in the past. Those experiences caused a trauma response, and they don’t know how to move out.

Recognizing you’re in a trauma response is the first important step. The need for control and lack of control are other aspects of trauma that can impact your life.

You can find yourself overly controlling your life, people, and environment, or the loss of control, lack of boundaries, structure, and directionlessness, avoiding intimacy are undeniably the impact of trauma. The dynamics of power, authority, and love in your childhood can deeply impact your psyche as children. Can we have power and also be loved? Can we have love and also exercise our authority? I have discovered that these two powerful forces of power and love are conflicted in women.

Suppose you were the victim of an adult abusing their power and violating your emotional safety and integrity. That experience forced you to subconsciously develop a defensive mechanism to protect yourself from the anxiety and the unacceptable, intolerable thoughts and feelings you had to experience at the time.

Twisting reality to cope with daily living…

The second layer of trauma lies in the fact that for us to survive, we need to distort reality in ways that we can cope with the situation.

We use protective mechanisms to defuse the pain and pressure. Those mechanisms may involve people-pleasing tendencies, forgetfulness toward our needs and wants, isolation, denial, emotional and psychological withdrawal, repression, projection, etc. Those mechanisms can last into adulthood and get triggered when we find ourselves in new experiences we had held at bay.

Here’s an example.

One of my clients struggled to build equal friendships with other women, and her old tendencies would propel her to act pleasingly and lose her voice and power in these connections. She kept feeling dissatisfied for not being able to be herself and build relationships that would also support her.

After examining her sense of the world and understanding her emotionally, it became clear that she had some unresolved trauma in her relationship with her mother. She had taken on a defense mechanism to protect herself from feeling neglected and hurt by her mother. To release this pattern, she had to become aware of her relationship with her mother and how it had impacted her sense of self. Eventually, she understood there was nothing wrong with her and that her mother was depressed and incapable of caring for her.

The distortion that had taken place in her mind and the protective defense mechanism couldn’t question her mother’s love and the neglect she had experienced as a child because she was so dependent on it at the time. As an adult, this is possible. The healing was profound as she started with minor changes in her behavior until she had forgotten that this was one of the issues she had brought to our coaching sessions.

These coping mechanisms have become part of our personality, and we exercise these patterns until we realize we are hitting our heads against a wall. At this point, people start looking for help because they feel stuck or out of the sheer shock and despair of having experienced the wall repeatedly.

The past is not your future; become who you really are.

Women must receive the support and resources to heal and reclaim their lives after experiencing trauma. The right tools can help you address trauma. My approach is to build on the fact that while trauma needs to be addressed and released, there are developmental milestones we might have missed because of it.

We must replace the mental and behavioral mechanisms that help us manage trauma, stress, pain, and lack of safety with powerful skills and mental and emotional development.

If you’re a woman struggling with the effects of trauma, it is essential to seek help. I am a trauma survivor and know firsthand the many gifts in your pain. In our work together, you will get to unpack these gifts when you find a way to process the pain with the right help. You will start experiencing a sense of aliveness and more flow. You will reconnect to the creative energy you might have lost due to trauma. Another benefit to releasing trauma is that it allows us to build emotional intimacy with others and feel safer in our connections.

With my support, you can recover to self-expression, love, and confidence by offering a process that will hold the experiences, develop healthy strategies, and regain a sense of agency and autonomy. Call me today, and I will help you move forward. You have value, worth, and substance beyond measure.