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One of the greatest challenges with trauma is how it hijacks our perspective in the moment. It’s like a time machine, constantly jerking us back into the past at the slightest trigger. We end up consistently reliving the worst moments of our lives.

This becomes a major barrier in healing our trauma.

To understand how this happens, let’s look at what I will call, the trauma curve:

When we first experience a traumatic event, our emotion is elevated to a level much higher than our level of tolerance. We may shut down or react in a way to avoid any more distress.

The challenge with this reaction is that we don’t stay with the emotion to a natural resolution and reduction in distress (blue dotted line). We stay stuck in the trauma. So, when a new distressing experience happens and emotions rise, our mind and chemistry travel back in time to the initial trauma. 

Instead of experiencing the situation as it is, we are torn from the present and forced to relive the intense emotions marinated in cortisol and adrenalin.

In order to heal our mind, body, and spirit from the initial trauma, we will need to remember the experience, sit with the discomfort of it, recognizing that we are no longer in that unsafe situation, challenge the thinking we have about ourselves and the situation, and then feel the reduction of the intensity of emotion to the point of normal functioning.

But here’s the real challenge of that; sitting with the discomfort.

I don’t know anyone who LIKES emotional discomfort. Who really WANTS to revisit the pain. 

Yet healing from our trauma requires us to do so.

Trauma Triggers

Despite the fact that we all want to avoid the discomfort, we never fully can. Within our memory of the traumatic experience will be a minefield of emotional triggers. Triggers are topics, people, places, smells, sounds, etc. that spark our minds like 1.21 gigawatts hitting a Delorian equipped with a flux capacitor. It sends us right back to experience as if we were living it again.

Our physical bodies react. This reaction is an early survival instinct that our early ancestors depended on for the perpetuation of the species. Our bodies use the same response to stress and memory of stress. In a high-stress situation, it will pump us full of norepinephrine and cortisol to help us react to danger. Only, we aren’t actually in danger. Our bodies aren’t in the past. Only our minds.

I have a close friend who was sexually abused by an older peer in an orange and yellow camper on the side of their house when she was a little girl. For many years, any time she saw a yellow or orange camper her heart rate would soar and she would feel a spike of anxiety.  The trigger still stung like a poison dart out of the blue even though many years had passed.

Yet this chemically induced fight or flight (or freeze) response requires action. We are wired to respond to the chemicals. Without conscious thought, we react to the perceived danger. We are reinforcing the beliefs and worldviews we developed at the time of our trauma.

Beliefs and Worldviews

One of the most dangerous impacts of traumatic experiences is how we end up thinking about ourselves and the world around us. Often, this is subconscious. It isn’t always an active thought or choice. As long as we harbor those beliefs either consciously or subconsciously, we become a victim of them.

When I start doing deeper trauma work with a client and have identified a challenging memory, I will ask them, “What is the negative belief you have about yourself when you think about that memory?”

What I’m exploring is the interpretive experience—the thing that solidified the event into a traumatic memory.

These beliefs varied but manifest in common themes. Francine Shapiro outlines four categories in her work on EMDR therapy. They are:

Once we pinpoint the negative belief the next question is, “What would you rather believe about yourself?” I’m looking for a target. A goal to move toward. Something that can be rooted in hope. 

Hope that things can be different. Hope that you can control some of the outcomes in your life.

An important thing to understand about beliefs and worldviews: they aren’t facts. We may hold to them like they are, but doing so only makes change harder. The truth is that we believe many untrue things every day.

For example, I was working with a young man recently who had the belief, “I’m never going to make any friends.” As I explored that belief with him, it became clear to me that he already had made friends. The problem was deeper. He wanted to have closer, more meaningful relationships. However, we discovered that his belief that he couldn’t make friends actually caused him to push people away and keep things more shallow. Once he was able to see this, he was able to state what he would rather believe about himself. “I can and will make friends.”

We all have limiting and false beliefs. When we become aware and open our minds to this fact, we can change the beliefs to be what we would rather believe about ourselves. This is real power.

I have found that sometimes our tendency is to push back on healthier, positive beliefs because we simply don’t believe they are true. Yet most, if not all of our negative self-beliefs are not grounded in fact either. They are firmly rooted in emotion and even planted there by others who caused our trauma in the first place. 

When we understand this, we can realize that we choose all of our beliefs. Armed with that knowledge we can break through our barriers of self-doubt and mistrust to accept the beliefs that when viewed through the filter of trauma seem untrue. Why not consciously choose what you believe? You get to write your own narrative. You get to choose what you plant in yourself.

You can choose a script that isn’t defined by your past.

Recognize You Are In the Present

This statement may sound weird. The present is the only place we can be. However, how often is our mind instead focused on the past or the future?

Remember the trauma curve? The big challenge with trauma is time-traveling. 

One of the first steps to overcoming our traumatic responses is to stop the time-travel by noticing the facts about the present. Be aware, mindfully, that you are not in the same danger as you were in the traumatic event.

A war veteran walking down the street will be triggered by a car backfiring. They may experience flashbacks to being shot at, bullets ripping through the air and possibly killing fellow soldiers. That was REAL danger. The car backfiring is not. 

Bringing yourself back to the moment and being fully present is the key. Ask yourself, “am I actually in danger, or am I just remembering a time that I was?” Then root yourself in the present moment. Pay attention to the facts. Breathe.

Allow that awareness to shift to something good in the environment to foster gratitude in the mind. The soldier may focus on a moment of sunshine, or the fact that he’s on his way to enjoy a movie with his family. Fill the mind with the good of the present moment.

When we slow down and notice the present we can change our body chemistry. Train your body that it doesn’t need to react to danger like it did in the past. Don’t let the past hijack your present. Live in the now.

Sit In The Discomfort to Move Beyond It

No one really likes to be uncomfortable. Our bodies are actually designed to protect ourselves from it. Yet, we need to be able to differentiate between physical pain and emotional discomfort. Holding our hand on a hot stove is foolish. Keeping a rock in your shoe on a hike is just lazy. However, emotional discomfort is different.

A key to emotional resilience is learning to not run from any emotion that feels bad. All that does is lower our tolerance for discomfort.

I’m not saying you need to be an emotional masochist. But training yourself to be fully present with your discomfort allows you to fully move beyond it. This requires you to be an objective observer of your own experience. Notice the sensations and thoughts without judgment.

It’s the judgment that makes things feel impossible to manage.

“This is too hard.” “Everyone hates me.” “I don’t have any control.”

Mindfulness in the discomfort sounds more like; “My heart is beating faster. My hands feel clammy. I feel scared.”

Sitting with those feelings and observations builds tolerance for them. We see and experience that we can handle hard things. It takes the power away from the trauma and puts it firmly back in your control. This concept is called “radical self-acceptance”.

When we explore our emotions we can go deeper by increasing our curiosity. Once we feel the initial emotion we can ask ourself, “Is there anything else?” Often, with that openness, we will be able to recognize a deeper emotion. Following this practice we can drill down and discover that the initial emotional response wasn’t the driving force for our trauma. This diligent presence and noting of emotion can open doors to insight and healing.

Power is found in presence.

You Are Your Present Moment

Getting past your past will help you heal. Time travel is retraumatizing. It doesn’t allow for growth and change. It damages our relationship with ourselves now, and in the future.

Key to this process are the steps we have discussed in this article:

Don’t let your past define your present.

Let your present define your past.

[This is the second post in the trauma series. You can read the first post, Building the Framework of Healing, HERE.]

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5 Responses

  1. Very clear and insightful. Good amount of detail but still easy to understand. Learned a lot that I didn’t know before.

  3. I have spent a lot of time in the radical self acceptance mode during mindfulness and it has been very painful and very rewarding.

  4. Nathan – this is great information and you have blessed my life and helped me a ton with the ability to “Sit in the Discomfort.” I love your articles and your insights. Keep up the great work.