How Trauma Therapy Guides You Through the 3 Stages of Healing from Trauma
If you've experienced trauma, you know the road to recovery can be long and difficult. Trauma can shatter a person's sense of empowerment and ability to connect with others. While you likely won't forget what happened, trauma therapy can help you can regain a sense of control, empowerment, and connection in the world.
At Taproot Psychology, we know what a heavy burden trauma survivors must bear. As trauma therapists, we work with clients to build back trust, collaboration, cooperation, and reconnection. We are honoured to walk alongside them and help them heal. In this blog, we discuss how trauma therapy helps guide you through the three stages of recovery from trauma.
What Are the 3 Stages of Recovery From Trauma?
1. Stabilisation
In the first phase, stabilisation, you as the survivor learn how to reestablish safety within your body and the world around you. After a traumatic event, a survivor's fight-or-flight system often becomes highly sensitised. This means the nervous system is on constant high alert, and your body and brain feel unsafe.
The most important part of this phase is to acknowledge, understand, and regulate your emotions. You will likely feel more fear as a result of your trauma. During the stabilisation phase you work to soothe that fear by regulating your nervous system. This can look like focusing on somatic cues, learning coping skills to manage your emotions, and learning how to deal with posttraumatic thoughts and beliefs.
During this phase, it's important to establish basic control over your body and environment. This means taking care of yourself. You'll focus on attending to your basic health needs, such as eating properly, getting enough sleep, and exercising. It's also crucial to make sure you're living in a safe environment. Some trauma survivors need help acquiring things like safe housing and financial security.
If you decide to work with a trauma therapist, they will wholly support you throughout this first phase of healing. They will guide you through healthy coping skills and help you find the resources you need. They will help you learn ways to regulate your emotions and beliefs. The stabilisation phase takes time, but it's crucial in getting you to feel safe again in your body, mind, and environment.
2. Processing
Once safety has been established, it's time to reintegrate the traumatic event into the survivor's life. This is called processing, and it's the second stage of recovery from trauma. During this phase, you will process the memory of the trauma by retelling it in your own words. The main work of this phase is to reclaim your history.
By retelling the truama in your own words, it stops being something that continually haunts you from beneath the surface. Instead, you get to choose to claim it as part of your life. You get to choose how to move forward with the trauma, instead of being held captive by it. Although it might feel scary to confront your trauma, this phase is very empowering and cathartic when handled with care and guided by a trained trauma therapist.
This phase is often shaped by grief. True grieiving can only occur after bodily safety is established. Otherwise, the fight for survival is competing with the natural process of grieving. While it may feel like too heavy a burden to bear, grief is part of processing any difficult life event. It can feel like it will never end once it begins, but know that with time and support, it won't last forever.
Other difficult emotions are likely to come up during the processing phase as well, such as guilt and shame. A trauma therapist will help you work through every difficult emotion that arises and hold space for all you've endured. Eventually, however, you will feel more hopeful and energised about life. You will begin to want to engage and connect more.
It may take time to get through this phase of healing and out the other side, and that's okay. There's no timeline to follow when it comes to the stages of processing trauma. Your therapist will offer allyship, care, and professional guidance, but only you can decide when and whether to revisit traumatic memories.
3. Reclaiming life
During the third phase, you will begin reengaging with your life and reestablishing healthy, safe relationships. Humans are not meant for isolation, and reconnecting with others is an imperative element of healing from trauma. You may have to learn how to establish boundaries, be vulnerable with loved ones, and work on trust and openness.
While you're reclaiming your life, you will have to figure out how to reengage with the people and things that are important to you in the world. Your values may have shifted or feel in flux since the start of your trauma recovery journey. You may seek changes in career, relationships, or some other big life factor. This is all okay and normal. The main goal of this phase is for you to feel like you're moving forward in the world, empowered and capable and supported.
You Don't Have to Cope With the Stages of Processing Trauma Alone. Therapy Can Help.
Healing from trauma can take a long time, and it requires consistent support and care. Many trauma survivors also don't realise how much they've been impacted. Sometimes, a trauma can have occurred several years in the past and still be affecting us in ways we don't understand.
Wherever you're at in the stages of recovery from trauma, your pace is okay. Your feelings are okay. Your anger, grief, joy, or fear are okay. It may seem like healing is far away, but know that you'll get there in time.
This is why working with a trained trauma therapist is so important. It can be the key to fully healing from trauma. A trauma therapist will help take you through these stages of healing so you don't have to walk them alone. They will support you every step of the way with resources, coping skills, and space-holding for the trauma you've endured. They will guide you in several different brain and body-based therapy modalities to help you feel safe and reprocess your trauma, such as EMDR therapy.
You deserve to have someone in your corner, helping you through the darkness and out toward the light. We'll guide you through the stages of healing from trauma with care and expertise.
We at Taproot Psychology are here to help. Together, we will help you work through your trauma and reclaim your life. We offer both talking therapy and EMDR therapy for trauma. Contact us to set up a free consultation to see how trauma therapy at Taproot Psychology could be right for you.