Hello, friend! ✿

What follows is a list of everything I have done, changed or implemented, with the goal of healing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Keep in mind that this has been a years-long journey. I say that I started actively healing in 2021, but that doesn’t mean nothing was done before then. It also doesn’t mean the healing process has been linear, or that I’ve been fully aware of the extent of my PTSD since 2021. Quite the opposite, actually.

This is not a simple disorder. There is both acute post traumatic stress, and complex post traumatic stress. The ‘complex’ part implies that the trauma was prolonged, a long-term situation that was traumatizing.

I’m still charting the borders of it in my own life, trying to find out how far it reaches. How far back in my memories can I see its’ shape? How much of who I am has been affected by it?

I don’t have all the answers. I’m still discovering areas of myself that I didn’t know were affected, and probably will for years to come.

I like to imagine it as a forest in my mind. The trees are all separate, yes, but they touch each other, grow next to each other for so long that sometimes it’s hard to see where one branch ends and another begins. Although some tower far above the others, each tree is a part of the forest.

The trees are of course a metaphor for traumatic events. Some events are more significant than others, but they all contribute to this thing that becomes post traumatic stress.

When you have PTSD, your body and nervous system are stuck in trauma response - fight, flight, freeze or fawn (and it’s very possible for one person to experience a mix of the four, at any given time).

You are hyper-vigilant, on edge, never fully relaxed, because your body thinks you’re still under threat and therefore need to be ready to react at all times.

It’s exhausting, to put it mildly.

Staying in this state for months, years, decades - it takes a toll on you. It also changes you. We aren’t meant to continue being in this state after the threat has passed and we survived it. But the body is intelligent, and it learns. It has all these mechanisms to protect us and keep us safe from harm.

If x lead to y in the past, then the same will likely be true in the future. Solution: avoid x in order to avoid y. Right? But no, because life isn’t that simple.

If one person hurt you, that is no guarantee that the next person will also hurt you. In fact, we have to treat each new person who enters our lives as exactly that; a new person. This is not the same person who hurt you before, and it wouldn’t be logical to treat them as such. But the body is not always logical. And to add to the problem, this new person might also hurt you. It’s a possibility. So what is the solution, then? Avoid all people, old and new? (brain says yes! therapist says no.)

The solution is this: we learn to accept the risk that comes with each new person you let into your life, and with each “old” person you give another chance to.

We learn to trust ourselves, our discernment and gut feelings about others (but our discernment might need to be re-calibrated before we can really trust it). It’s a process, and not an easy one.

The goal of healing is to get your mind and body unstuck - too deeply understand that we are not there anymore, that we are in the present. The threat that still haunts our bodies have long since passed and it is not necessary to continue living as if we are right in the middle of it.

Of course, it’s not enough to simply understand these things logically. You can tell yourself that you’re safe now all you want, but if your body is stuck in trauma (or, if you prefer: you have trauma stuck in your body), you need other methods of communication that your body understands.

We need to re-create the security we had within ourselves pre-trauma, or create it from scratch if no such security ever existed within us.

Put simply, we need to rebuild.

The saying “time heals all wounds” is not very accurate when it comes to things like PTSD. Emotional hurt is one thing, trauma is another. With trauma, healing usually takes more direct effort than simply waiting.

It’s like being stuck in a hole - we need to first make ourselves a ladder, a way to get out, and then we need to climb the steps and haul ourselves out of there.

Giving it time won’t change much, except maybe getting used to the situation. We are remarkable creatures in that we can get used to almost anything. Almost anything can be our “normal”.

But it’s not necessary to live stuck in a trauma response. It is possible to make ourselves a ladder and get out, to keep on living.

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⊹ The first thing I remember doing was learning emotional regulation skills. I had never even heard the term, didn’t know what it meant. I can’t remember how I came across it, only that I did - and it made me realize that these were not skills I possessed.

When you have PTSD - the unregulated, unhealed version of it - your emotions are often right under the surface at all times. When something sets you off, you react very easily, and very strongly. Crying, yelling, leaving suddenly - having reactions that to others seem out of proportion (but to you, they feel very appropriate in the circumstances). You could have a very low tolerance for cutting people off. Minor disturbances or unpredictable situations could be met with intense anxiety that sometimes manifests as anger, such as verbally attacking someone who showed up at your house unannounced - or even hiding from them. I’ve personally done both, on more than one occasion.

It might seem ridiculous, but not everyone has the ability to respond differently. You don’t have the skills you were never taught, skills you didn’t even realize existed. That’s not your fault and it wasn’t your responsibility when you were younger.

But as an adult, you do have a responsibility to at least try to identify the areas that could use some work, both for yourself and for the people around you. To stop the pain from festering and spreading any more than necessary.

If you have PTSD and you don’t possess emotional regulation skills, that’s a recipe for bad situations. But having the skills is only part of the battle - we need to become less dysregulated to begin with, so that our baseline reactivity is lower. This way, we can tolerate more before our emotional responses start getting out of control.

I try not to use words like ‘control’ when talking about emotions, because the goal is not to control or repress your feelings.

The goal is to be a secure, well-regulated person who can handle the regular everyday situations of life, and be generally happy with the way you handle them.

No one likes feeling out of control. No one likes feeling unable to handle their own emotions and how those emotions come out. So the goal is having healthy coping skills and confidence in yourself to be able to use them.

If you drive, do you remember when you first started learning? How it felt like the car was driving you, not the other way around? It was like you were just on a ride that you had little to no control over. We can think of our emotions the same way. As a dysregulated person without emotional regulation skills, the car is driving you. The goal is for you to be the driver in control of steering the car, and stopping when you want to.

We want to be able to manage our emotions, instead of being managed by them.

So how do we do this? This is a whole blog post of its’ own, and I promise I’ll come back to it in more detail in the future. But I will try to summarize: when something happens that causes a strong emotional reaction in us, we want to respond, not react. Reacting happens on instinct, and with PTSD, this instinct becomes intensified. Your brain and body means well, it’s just trying to keep you safe.

But letting your dysregulated self take the wheel in these situations does more harm than good.

Even though giving in to your instincts may feel right in the moment, we are not in control.

When we slow down and take a moment to process what is happening, and what our response to the situation is, that is a way to take back control rather than giving in to our dyregulated instincts.

When you have PTSD, it often feels like there is no time to do that. There is an almost unbearable urgency within us to react immediately, and going against that feels wrong. But it isn’t, and we need to remember that.

Taking this pause before responding is not about pushing your strong feelings down, or forcing yourself to feel differently than you do. It’s about respecting ourselves enough to properly check in with ourselves about how we feel, and expressing those feelings in a way we can stand behind, even when the upset has passed.

It’s about staying true to ourselves - who we are and who we want to be.

This leads to many positive outcomes; we stay in control, we stay true to ourselves, we can be satisfied with how we handled the situation and be proud of ourselves for it, we haven’t unnecessarily hurt another person, we haven’t done or said anything we’re ashamed of afterwards, we haven’t burned any bridges or destroyed material things.

This feeling you get from handling situations that provoke strong emotions well, stacks. It builds confidence in yourself because it shows you that you are capable. And over time, with the help of emotional regulation skills, as well as other strategies mentioned in this post, we train our brains to become less reactive, more self-assured.

Even if a situation feels out of control, we are in control of ourselves, and that’s a good place to start.

It’s also a good practice to check in with yourself after the strong emotions have passed, and ask yourself “Am I happy with how I handled that? Why or why not? What was it that triggered me? Do I wish I had done anything differently?”.

Try to use it as a learning experience. Be a scientist studying yourself. If something didn’t go so well, then we try again next time. It’s okay to be a work in progress. All of this gets easier with practice.

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⊹ Implementing daily nervous system regulation exercises. If I could only mention one thing, only give one piece of advice, it would be this. Doing nervous system regulation exercises is the most impactful thing I’ve done, apart from EMDR therapy. It’s also both the easiest and cheapest thing I’ve done, because it can be done from the couch and it’s free!

I plan to make a video demonstrating some of the exercises I do, but in the meantime, there are many resources to be found online or in books.

I’ll explain a few of them to you right now. Try, if you’d like.

Sit or stand with your back straight. Without moving your head, look as far as you can to the left, as if you’re trying to see something in the corner of your eye. You should feel a gentle stretch in your eyes. Hold for 10-30 seconds. Then look all the way to the right, and hold that for a bit again.

That’s it, you’re done.

Here’s another one:

Put your arms in the shape of an X against your body - right hand touching left shoulder, left hand touching right shoulder. Stroke your own arms, moving downwards from shoulder to elbow, and when you reach the elbow, go up to the shoulders and start again. Do this for 30 seconds (or longer if you’d like).

You can also, while in the same pose, tap your arms with your hands, alternating sides. So start in that x position, slide your hands about halfway down your upper arms, and then tap your left arm, then your right arm, back and forth for a while.

How do you know if it “worked”?

Yawning is a good sign. Feeling more relaxed and present in your body/the moment is a good sign. But, this is the kind of thing that works even if you don’t feel any different initially. That is true for a lot of the methods we use to heal from trauma. These are techniques that you can’t try once before declaring that it doesn’t work for you, you need to give it time to actually do its’ job.

My body had been stuck in trauma for so many years, it wasn’t realistic to think that I could get out of it in a short amount of time. That was something I knew from the beginning.

When I first started doing these daily exercises, it took at least a few weeks, maybe even a month, before I noticed anything. I never yawned, never felt calmer, nothing. But I had a routine that took about 3 minutes, and I would do it 1-3 times a day, every day.

Over time I noticed the really big effects, that from only implementing this one thing into my life, I was feeling so much more regulated and secure. After ten months, I had made more progress just from this one thing, than from everything else I had done up until that point combined.

Here’s another exercise to try:

Have you ever seen an animal after they’ve been in a chase? They shake their limbs and their whole bodies, like they’re shaking something off. This works for humans too! You’re basically shaking off the stress, and returning to a state of rest. It tells our bodies that we’re not being chased anymore and there’s no need to stay on high alert.

Remember to allow whatever feelings may come up during these exercises. Try not to create a story to go along with them - the “why” isn’t always important. It’s okay to cry without trying to analyze why you’re crying.

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⊹ Reconnecting with my body through touch, movement and sensory experiences. There are several contributing factors to why I got disconnected from my body in the first place.

Trauma that affects the body directly, such as rape, is naturally going to make you feel disconnected from it (this is a self-protective mechanism). You can also start to feel like your body isn’t your own, because it was taken from you in this way.

(Side note: I choose to use the word ‘rape’. This is done intentionally, because terms like ‘SA’ or ‘sexual assault’ softens it, hides it in a way, making it easier to stomach. But these things should not be easy to stomach. By calling something what it is, we give it the importance it deserves. I am sorry if reading this word is difficult for you. But I will continue to do what feels right to me.)

Being autistic is another factor, because the body is where the sensory things are. Being too aware of your body can be really, really uncomfortable, and it can be easier to just disconnect and live mostly inside your head.

But when we live like this, we miss important messages from our bodies, such as not being able to tell when we’re sick or in pain until it gets really bad.

We also miss the good feelings that our bodies can bring us.

For years, I thought I was happy living in my head. I would joke about wanting to be a brain in a jar, or a computer. But now that I embody myself more fully, I can see that I had closed myself off to so much of life by living this way.

I also didn’t understand until recent years that a large part of why I felt so uncomfortable when I tried to be more aware and in my body, was because of trauma. Trauma and PTSD can absolutely manifest as physical symptoms that often feel vague and unexplainable.

So, that in combination with “this is just what my normal is” because you’re so used to living like that = “my body is just an uncomfortable place to be”.

Learning to listen to and respect the needs of your body is important. Your body is like an old friend who has always been there for you, but maybe you’ve grown apart and need to reconnect.

Listen to what your body has experienced in your time apart. Respect its’ needs and wishes.

Doing so can heal more than this disconnection, it can help heal the part of you that needed more care from others in the past. The part that needed to be listened to, hugged, fed, comforted. You now have the power to give that to yourself, both physically and emotionally.

*Dipping your feet in a freezing mountain river can be very grounding.*

Here are some things you can do to reconnect with your body:

humming (the vibrations stimulate the vagus nerve and is good for nervous system regulation too)
dancing (especially the kind where you’re just letting your body move how it wants to)
gentle stretches or yoga
hugging yourself, touching yourself with kindness
check-ins during the day to see how you feel physically (am I thirsty? are my shoulders tight? am I comfortable?)
breathing exercises, or just breathing deeply (breathe “with the stomach”)
exercise is also a great tool for healing and reconnecting with the body. Certain kinds of exercise (like aerobic and strength training) often make me cry. I see it as a good and useful thing, knowing that this type of movement unlocks something and is an outlet for these emotions that are stored in me. Other kinds of exercise (like walking), I see more as a tool for processing emotions (often subconsciously) and general well-being.

I would also like to talk about massage for a moment. A couple years ago I started massaging my face a few times a week, and it lead to an interesting discovery. I grind my teeth at night and thought maybe massaging the facial muscles could help, or at least relieve some tension. I watched some tutorials, but came up with my own routine based on what felt right for me.

My technique would be to use my knuckles and different parts of my hands to massage, and when I found a sore spot, I would stay there until the pain let go, which would usually take around 30 seconds. So I would count the seconds and breathe my way through the physical pain, reminding myself that it will dissipate soon.

At first, it physically hurt so much that I could barely stand it. I was just touching my face, there was no logical reason why it should hurt so much. But it did, and it felt like there was more than physical pain there.

When I was massaging my face, especially in the beginning, I often cried. It felt confusing because I had no “reason” to cry, and I wasn’t exactly crying from the physical pain either.

Something was being brought to the surface, something that had been buried for a long time.

Sometimes I could vaguely tell what it was, when the pain was coming from. Like, “this pain is a memory of this time when I felt so rejected by my father”. No matter what it was, even if it had no memory attached to it, only the hurt feeling, I would accept it.

Of course I felt silly at first, crying over “nothing”, but I instinctively knew this release was a good thing.

As a concept, this is something that would have seemed completely ridiculous and pseudo-scientific to me four years ago. But now that I have experienced it for myself, and read the accounts of other people who have also experienced it, not to mention the scientific literature, it doesn’t seem so far fetched anymore. It seems perfectly reasonable that trauma and repressed feelings can affect us in this way.

Maybe there were times when it wasn’t safe to process those feelings, or to express them, so they got stored deep inside instead. Maybe you didn’t know how to deal with them at all. Maybe you were in survival mode, and processing those feelings “the right way” just wasn’t an option - it gets subconsciously put off for later, for a time when it is safe.

I still massage my face, but rarely cry anymore when I do. For the most part, it feels like what needed to be released has been released, and now it’s more about maintenance and prevention. My focus has been mostly on the face, neck, chest and shoulders, but I plan to incorporate the rest of the body too, and it will be interesting to see what comes up when I do. Maybe I’ll massage my calf and burst into tears. Who knows.

For years, I was carrying so much pain in my body. Tight, sore muscles. Knots. Trauma and emotional pain, stored as physical pain, trapped with nowhere to go.

This is why the techniques that release this built-up pain are so important for healing.

It unburdens us, makes us free to comfortably inhabit our bodies and be more aware of its’ signals. It helps us to reconnect with ourselves, without this veil of hurt in between.

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⊹ Feeling my feelings. When an uncomfortable feeling comes up, what do you do? Ignore it and move on with whatever you were doing? Distract yourself with tv, food, drugs, gaming, sex, shopping, the presence of other people?

If we have never been taught how to feel and process our feelings, they can seem frightening. Too big, out of control. Many people have a fear of their feelings overwhelming them if they try to feel them, or let them out.

But it’s not so scary or overwhelming if you know how to handle them, and what to expect.

See, most feelings don’t last very long, and this can be a very helpful fact to remember when we are in the throes of a turbulent one.

What about repressed emotions, how do you know if you have them? Well, do you feel as if you’re carrying a heavy burden? Do you have unexplained physical pain, as mentioned in the previous point? Do you sometimes have emotional reactions that don’t make sense to you?

Has your laughter ever turned to crying? Not crying from laughter, but an actual shift into sadness? What about suddenly having an urge to cry when you’re singing?

I’ve experienced both many times, and it was so perplexing that I had to do some research to figure out why this was happening.

The answer I came to was that it was due to repressed emotions finally making their way to the surface after all this time. My intelligent body, seeing an opportunity for release. Maybe it’s the vibrations of laughter or song doing it, or maybe it’s the specific frequencies of sound my body is producing, maybe it’s some other aspect of it. I’m not sure, but as interesting as it may be to figure out, we don’t need to know why something works in order to accept that it does.

The best thing we can do to help ourselves is to allow this release to happen, to try not to repress those feelings again.

When something would come to the surface in this way, it was my instinct to push it down. I would think “this is no time to be crying, there is no reason to cry now”. After all, I had just been laughing because of something funny, or singing, often highly immersed, not thinking about anything sad at all.

I internally reprimanded myself for not having the “correct” displays of emotion, even when I was alone and no one could see me. I tried to correct my own behaviour so that this wouldn’t happen in front of other people. Sometimes it still did, but I hid it every time, quickly wiped my tears or played it off. Sometimes I bit my tongue hard to force myself not to cry.

The problem is, I was too focused on whether or not I had a good enough reason to be crying in that moment. And more often than not, the answer I gave myself was no.

I’ve mentioned the ‘story’ before, but let me clarify what it means.

Most of us want to make sense of our feelings. We crave answers, patterns, predictability - a logic to how our minds work. (And there is logic to it, but sometimes not in the way we expect.)

If we start to cry, seemingly out of nowhere, our first response is often to create a story to go around it.

“I’m crying because I’m overwhelmed because I have all these tasks to do and it’s too much…” or, “there has been a lot of stressful situations lately, it makes sense that I would be crying”.

Or, a less helpful version; “I have no reason to cry, I just need to pull myself together, I’m being ridiculous”.

When a feeling arises, we often judge how “okay” it is for us to be feeling it in that moment. How much of a “right” we have to be feeling it.

There are several reasons, beyond simply wanting our minds to make sense to us, for why we do this. Social conditioning, such as feeling pressure to behave appropriately in the eyes of society, is a big one. What our family and peers expect of us (or at least what we think they expect of us). Wanting to be seen as good, acceptable, normal. A fear of being seen as unstable, too weird, childish.

Many of us were conditioned to think and act this way based on how our parents and other adults in our lives responded to us when we were growing up.

Most parents these days have a more well-balanced approach to their children’s emotional expressions, but it’s only a few decades since it was perfectly acceptable to reprimand your crying child because they have “nothing to be crying about”. “You have no reason to be upset, so stop it!”.

Sound familiar? If it does, I’m sorry, and you’re not alone.

When this is the pattern of your formative years, of course you would grow up to be someone who judges themselves (and perhaps others) in this way too. It isn’t your fault that you do this, you were unknowingly trained to. But it’s important to remember that this is not, and never was, a healthy strategy for dealing with feelings, no matter if they belong to you or someone else.

You might have a belief that judging our feelings in this way is correct, and that anything else is a delusion, a way of lying to ourselves to avoid facing reality. But that’s the training talking - those thoughts are very unlikely to be your own true opinion on the matter.

The truth is, if you are feeling something, then you have a reason to be feeling it. It’s never for “no reason” - not when you were 6, and not now. Some of the most impactful healing work we can do, lies in allowing our feelings to be felt.

How to feel a feeling:

“What am I feeling?” Identify roughly what you are feeling. How specific you want to be in naming the feeling is up to you. It can be as simple as ‘sad’ or as complex as ‘alienated’ (you can look at a feelings chart online if you need to - it can be helpful if you’re struggling to put your finger on what it is you’re feeling).
Note that there is no why here, simply what.
“Where am I feeling it in my body?” Is your chest tight? Is there a coldness anywhere, like an icicle plunged through you? Does it feel like your stomach is doing backflips? Are your limbs heavy? Do your fists want to clench? Is there restlessness somewhere in your body?
“How big is the feeling?” How intensely are you feeling it? Is it huge, all-encompassing? Are you burning with it? Is it swallowing you? Or is it small, quiet, almost like it’s afraid to come out or be seen? Is the feeling like a loud yell, or a quiet whimper?
“Sit with it”. This is often the most daunting part, the part we want to avoid when the feeling is unpleasant - but often you will find that it was surprisingly easy when it’s over. Usually, it only takes about 30 seconds or a minute for the feeling to dissipate, and we are capable of enduring an unpleasant feeling at that dosage.
Try to focus on the physical feeling in your body. Let it be, don’t try to push it away or to be done with it. Just let it be, and see if you can feel around the contours of it.
This gets easier with practice, so don’t feel bad if you don’t “get it” or don’t think you’re doing it right the first few times. Just keep trying.
For example, when I feel rejected, my chest aches. I sit with this ache, not forcing myself to do anything, but instead gently redirecting my focus back to the feeling, if it strays. Sometimes I cry while feeling the pain of the aching, and I do so without judgment. Without coming up with any story, any reasons or narrative.
It doesn’t matter if the narrative is true or not, because it’s not necessary.
“Listen.” Be open to what the feeling is telling you. This is not the same as creating a story, because we aren’t doing any brainstorming or logical evaluations of why we might be feeling something. If we continue from my example of feeling rejected, the point is to listen to the rejected part of you.
What is she saying?

Usually, it only takes about 30 seconds for the feeling to dissipate, and at that point I do another little check-in with myself to see if I’m okay now.

(These steps can be moved around, according to what works for you. You don’t have to follow all the advice given, hold on to what is helpful for you and let go of the rest.)

It might sound simple, and it actually is pretty simple. But that doesn’t always make it easy. Sometimes we are dealing with feelings that keep returning, maybe many times a day, and we have to repeat the process.

Something like grief is of course also more complex and requires more time, we can’t expect it to be a one-time process.

The most important point here is that oftentimes we think that our strong emotions that seem to suddenly take over us, will be the most difficult to process - but this is not necessarily true.

The emotion just needs to be felt, and heard, and then you will often find that it will leave you in peace.

The ideal would be to feel our feelings as they arise, as well as allowing our repressed/unprocessed emotions to come up whenever they naturally do.

That being said, please forgive yourself if you aren’t able to do this exactly how you wish to every time.

We cannot expect ourselves to do something perfectly every time, just because we know the steps to take.

We should be mindful of perfection traps in healing - healing is not supposed to be just another thing to excel at through discipline and rigorous regimens. If we notice ourselves becoming extremely disappointed by setbacks, small “failures” or fluctuations, this is a sign to slow down a bit, loosen the reins and give ourselves permission to be a person.

You are just a person. It’s okay to not always reach the goals you set for yourself - that is not the same as failure. Just try again next time.

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⊹ EMDR therapy. This is such a weird and seemingly “unlikely to do anything” type of therapy, but I’ve had amazing success with it, and so have many others. If you have the financial means and can find a practitioner, it’s worth a try.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. During treatment, it’s like you are in a regular talk therapy session, but your therapist will also implement the EMDR technique.

There are a few different ways to do this - some use a projector with blinking lights, some use audio, some use their fingers as a target for the patient to focus on.

No matter the technique, the point is bilateral stimulation (stimulation that works on both sides of the body/brain, either alternating or simultaneously), while the patient talks about the trauma and focuses on the sensations that come up in the body.

Pain, anger, sadness, fear - and the thoughts that accompany them. The therapist guides you as you work yourself through the experience, and the whole thing feels very safe and structured, even though it’s difficult emotional work you’re doing.

*On the way home from an EMDR session. I usually pull over to cry at least twice.*

EMDR feels like having your brain scrambled. At first, in the days and weeks afterwards, there's all these loose pieces floating around - everything's shaken up and it's chaos.

Then the pieces start falling into place, but in different places than they used to be. Like your mind is a puzzle, and it's beginning to resemble the picture on the box a bit more. And you feel different, you've been changed, but into a truer version of yourself.

In shedding the trauma, there is room for your soul to stretch out and take up the space that was yours to take up all along.

It’s the hardest therapy I’ve ever done, but it’s also the most rewarding. I’ve been doing EMDR regularly for less than a year and I’m not finished yet. But so far, the experience has been very healing.

It has helped me reconnect with my past selves, the versions of me that went through different traumas - it’s like I built a bridge to them, and there is no longer a hard separation between us.

I no longer feel disconnected and critical of her. Instead, I’m by her side in our memories, just as she is by my side here in the present.

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⊹ Working on releasing the guilt and shame I have been carrying around with me for years. This is some of the most healing work we can do, but it requires much confidence and self-respect. It requires us to truly believe that we deserve better, that the things that happened to us were not our fault.

People who have been through trauma often blame themselves. We think about what we could have done differently, we justify what was done to us, how it was our responsibility and our fault. This is true whether the trauma comes from a traffic accident or domestic abuse.

The difference is that with something like an accident, you might obsess over what you wish you did differently, but with complex trauma from something like an abusive upbringing or relationship, it changes your brain in a way that deeply affects your sense of self.

You tend to think that you deserved what happened to you, in some way. “Well, I wasn’t easy to deal with, so…”

We also tend to take on the shame of what someone did to us, as if we are the person who did it. (Or at least, as if we caused it to happen.)

We carry shame that isn’t ours to carry.

It’s not our shame! It’s someone else’s! How crazy and unfair is it that we walk around for years, maybe decades, carrying this shame that was never ours to bear?

*A person who isn’t responsible for what happened to her.*

So, how do we let go of the guilt and shame? I’m still a work in progress myself, and I don’t have all the answers. Even with the knowledge I do have, this is something I’m still working through most days.

Kindness helps, both towards yourself and others.

EMDR has helped a lot, because it redirected the painful feelings away from me and towards the event itself.

It also helped me realize that the things that happened to me wasn’t my fault, and that the people who hurt me did so because of their own issues that actually have very little to do with me - it takes away the personal aspect to it, the belief that this happened because I am me, and if I had been better, it would not have happened.

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⊹ Using my free will in order to communicate to my body that I’m not trapped. That I have autonomy and can do as I please. For example: drive to the coast, just because you feel like it (spontaneous roadtrips are so good for healing and I will stand by this!).

Get something pierced, or dye your hair. Go sit outside for a while. Lay down on the ground, no one can stop you. Even better if it’s raining! Go on a hike in the middle of the night and watch the sun rise.

Do little things that you want to do, just because you want to do them.

It’s not harming anyone, it’s a healthy use of free will, and a good reminder that you have autonomy.

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⊹ Intentionally slowing down. This is one I still struggle a lot with, but it’s also one of the most healing things. A common symptom of PTSD is feeling like you’re always rushing or running out of time.

But purposefully doing things slowly, like drinking your morning coffee and really paying attention to it, is a good antidote. Or when you’re making dinner, planting something in your garden, doing your skincare routine, showering - intentionally slow down and put your love and attention into each step.

When you’re on a hike, take a moment to just stop and look around. Maybe try to identify some plants. Take longer than you planned. Dilly-dally, on purpose. No one will be mad at you. And if they are, that’s their problem. It’s okay.

When we slow down, we communicate to our bodies that we are safe.

Slowing down with purpose can also be very healing for people who have been rushed a lot by others, or had unpredictable people around you that made you be “on guard” all the time.

One of my people-pleasing traits is to take as little time as possible to do something, so that I’m not inconveniencing others. I’m always trying to avoid doing anything that can be criticized. But in doing this, I’m hurting myself because I constantly feel like I have to be fast, and then I feel like a failure and an inconvenience every time I take longer than planned to do something (which happens a lot!).

Instead, I’m training my brain to be okay with slowing down more. I practice doing things calmly instead of rushing, and I show myself that there is no negative consequence to doing this - no one will be mad at me, and if they are, I can handle it.

I am an adult and I can speak up for myself. I can choose not to tolerate certain behaviour from others. I can choose who to surround myself with. This is something I can control.

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⊹ Spending time in nature. This is one of the most important things, but I don’t even know how to talk about it. At this point, I feel so deeply entwined with it that I don’t know where nature ends and I begin. It is a part of me, and I am a part of it. That’s true for all of us, but sometimes we forget and need help remembering again.

What I will say is this:

Connect with nature in any way that feels good and right for you. Don’t worry about what you “should” be doing. Driving somewhere nice, getting out of the car, going into the woods and sitting on a rock for five minutes before going home again, is a perfectly fine thing to do.

As is camping out on a mountaintop, if that’s what you want to do.

*Rainy day drive to look at some nice trees.*

The whole point is to not put pressure on yourself to be outdoorsy or a “nature person” in one specific way. You’re already a nature person - you’re human, it comes with the territory.

But it can be immensely helpful to remember that nature is always there for you when you need it, like an old friend whose door is always open.

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⊹ Spending time with animals. When I lived without pets, there was always a quietness, a specific loneliness that can only be filled by animal companions. For years, I rented apartments that didn’t allow pets, and in any case, I couldn’t have afforded to care for them.

But then, my situation changed and I got a cat (who then promptly went and multiplied herself, giving me five little companions to care for), and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I had been on shaky ground for months, and it was like everything suddenly calmed and stabilised.

It’s healthy to care for another being, to have something outside of yourself to give love to. Beings to bond with, to be a family with.

It saved me when people were synonymous with danger.

If you can’t have pets, get plants. I’m serious. If you’re struggling with taking care of yourself, get something low-maintenance, like a Pothos or Zamioculcas.

It will help your mental health to have another living thing around to talk to and give some water to. And it helps build confidence in yourself when you successfully take care of something (which is why we want to go for the super easy plants at first)!

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⊹ Socializing in comfortable doses. As an autistic hermit who thrives on alone time, what is comfortable to me might be very different than for you. But the message remains the same, I think.

If you have trauma that is triggered by people in any way, spending time with safe people in a comfortable setting where you feel in control enough to let go and enjoy yourself, at least somewhat, is extremely helpful. We want to show our brains that not every person will hurt us, and that most people are in fact good and kind and wish us well.

Most people can be trusted not to harm us.

Another tip is to use random social encounters as a healing tool. Engage in some chit chat with a service worker. Compliment a stranger, or really savour it if a stranger compliments you. Try to be especially open to the people who are already engaging with you - you know, that cashier who really acknowledges your presence, that co-worker or random encounter who naturally seems to be open to you, their words flowing easily and their interest towards you clear.

Sometimes, if we have locked ourselves away from other people for a long time, it takes some time to come out of our shell again and dip our toes back into the pool of humanity.

We can forget how to even notice if other people seem open to us or not, because we are not open to them, and we see everyone else as being just as closed off.

But these small moments can be so helpful.

Every time you walk away from a pleasant social interaction, no matter how short, really try to savour it. Tell yourself that it was a pleasant moment.

With time, these moments will find you more and more. And slowly, we build a more realistic view of the world, and of people.

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⊹ Reminding myself that I’m a person. It might sound silly, but it’s helped me a lot. I’m just a person, and everyone else is too. Every person needs and deserves to be loved, and that includes me because I am a person too.

I don’t need to expect more from myself than I would expect from any other person.

I don’t need to be perfect, I can just be a person. That’s an incredibly freeing thought.

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⊹ Meditating and practicing mindfulness. Yes it works, and yes it can be challenging. It usually takes me a good fifteen minutes to quiet my thoughts enough that I actually feel like I’m meditating “properly”, but once I reach that place, it feels like I could stay like that forever. It’s great, and it feels great afterwards too, but I’m often too impatient and distractable to get there in the first place.

Meditation is especially helpful for emotional regulation (you can often feel the effects for days afterwards!) and to calm an anxious or overly active mind.

Mindfulness is more related to my earlier point about slowing down. It’s a tool that helps you be in the moment, and anything that helps you to be in this moment, right now, is good when you’re trying to heal from past trauma.

A small tip to help you stay in the moment: Touch things around you - things that are in the present with you right now. Touch your own body (many find touching the feet to be especially grounding), touch trees and plants as you pass them on a walk, touch the armrest of the couch you’re sitting on.

This helps with derealization too, which is a common PTSD symptom where the world feels kind of unreal or detached.

When I was struggling a lot with derealization, touching the tall grasses I walked past in my neighbourhood really helped.

Healing doesn’t always have to be some Herculean task - small, simple things can offer just as much relief.

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⊹ Taking gentle risks. Doing things I would have deemed ‘too scary’ and not even tried a few years ago. Doing little things that challenge or scare me - just enough to feel a sense of achievement and progress, but not so challenging that it becomes too much.

What I mean by ‘gentle risk’ is something you logically know carries very little risk with it - it’s not actually dangerous, even if you might feel scared by it.

Something like swimming in a lake even though you’re slightly uncomfortable with the murky bottom. Going to a café, or going to see a movie by yourself. Driving somewhere you’ve never been before, bonus points if it’s alone. Posting something honest on social media. Showing someone a side of you that you usually keep to yourself. Singing karaoke. Disagreeing with someone about something small, instead of pretending to have the same opinion as them.

(You get it. It’s not about putting ourselves in any actual danger, just expanding our comfort zones, bit by bit, until suddenly one day you find yourself living a life you didn’t think possible and doing things you didn’t think you were strong enough to do. But you are strong enough, I promise.)

When you’ve experienced traumatic things and been stuck in those experiences for a while, your comfort zone (your safe zone) becomes very small.

You subconsciously try to be in control of your surroundings as much as possible, and anything too uncontrollable is deemed ‘unsafe’ in your mind.

A few years ago, I suddenly became very afraid of driving in slippery road conditions. Things like ice, snow or rain coating the road would make my anxiety spike.

This is not something I had been afraid of previously; I trusted myself to be a competent driver who makes good choices, and that was enough. I’ve always been careful while driving, but not actively anxious. So when that suddenly changed, it surprised me.

I remember wondering why I was suddenly so scared when I hadn’t been before, and wondering if this was how it’s going to be from now on (spoiler alert: it wasn’t permanent).

I would hyperventilate, cry and have panic attacks. If my boyfriend was in the car with me, I would apologize twenty times and say I don’t know why I’m like this, but I’m really scared.

I felt embarrassed and ridiculous afterwards, which contributed to the long list of things I was often reprimanding myself for. All the ways in which I’m not good enough, everything about me that’s ridiculous and needs to change (or else I would be 'unacceptable’).

I tried so hard to stop being afraid, but I was trying by force. Honestly, I could have saved myself the effort. It’s like angrily shouting at yourself to stop being afraid - all it accomplishes is making you feel bad for being afraid in the first place. It’s just another thing to add to the list of things you need to “fix”.

To heal the parts of you that are scared, you need compassion (especially self-compassion, but compassion from other people helps to validate your feelings and experiences, and is important too).

No one ever healed by being angry at themselves. No one ever healed by forcing themselves to be different, be better, right now.

We heal by allowing. Allow your feelings to come up and allow them to be heard and felt. Allowing yourself to be a person, with everything that entails.

This phase of driving anxiety makes perfect sense to me now, from my vantage point in the future. My nervous system was on constant alert and it was simply trying to keep me safe. This meant preventing more bad things from happening and avoiding anything too unpredictable, because ‘unpredictable’ means the risk can’t be calculated beforehand.

So then, it’s better to overestimate, rather than underestimate the risk, right?

Even though I generally feel a lot more safe and secure within myself than I did back then, I still deal with these occasional spikes. The anxiety can come on hard and fast, the edges of my vision almost blackening, or it can be like a small worried voice in the back of my mind, asking “are we sure this is safe?”.

Either way, now I see it for what it is (most of the time, at least): My nervous system overestimating the risk, miscalculating the danger I’m in. And when it does, I thank my body for trying to keep me safe, and gently tell it that it’s okay and we’re safe.

(Lately, when I’ve been in a situation that actually could be dangerous and I get that kind of anxiety spike, I have again thanked my body, but then told it that I need my full concentration to get through this right now. Just as gently as I would otherwise. But just “I know you’re scared, but we need to focus on getting out of this situation right now, and panicking would not be helpful”. And it’s worked! I was actually surprised to find out that was something I could ask of myself.)

One of the hardest parts of recovery, is accepting and being okay with the risks that come with living.

Going to the mall by yourself isn’t dangerous, but: you can get injured or die in traffic on the way there. You can get caught in a mass-shooting at the mall. You can run into the ex that abused you. You can have a flashback out of nowhere that leaves you gasping for breath in the mall bathroom (trust me, I’ve been there).

Living well means accepting the risks of everyday life and still choosing to live the way you want. It means accepting that life can be scary, the unknown is scary, and that’s okay.

It’s natural to feel this way, but we know how to handle those feelings.

We can thank our bodies for trying so hard to keep us safe, and we can allow any emotion that comes. You need to cry a little bit? That’s okay. You need to move around to get some of the anxious energy out? No problem.

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One of the most painful, but necessary truths we can realize as adults, is that we need to save ourselves. Other people can help us, but they can’t do the work for us. They can’t fix us, and spending your whole life waiting to be saved by someone else is just breaking your own heart in the end.

We need to become the person we would have needed when we were young, fragile, afraid. Doing so is the ultimate act of self-love, self-compassion and self-respect. By working to become this person, we are telling ourselves “you matter and you deserve better”.

Doing this work also has a profound effect on everything we touch, everything we leave behind. We are healing not only ourselves, but our families. We have the power to become a strong, gleaming link in the chain that binds us all together.

Healing spreads. Love spreads.

As you can probably see by now, the methods to healing are as interwoven as the trauma itself. It all goes together, everything contributes. Just as there is a network of trauma, there is a network of healing.

Healing can be visualized much the same way as trauma - like a forest of trees with touching branches. Every small act of healing contributes, like a fresh sapling. Every big act of healing is like a tree growing tall, strong and healthy, its’ branches stretching out to touch the surrounding, smaller trees too.

Healing can come from some pretty unlikely places, and we have to be open to some pretty strange methods. (But, it is only strange when we don’t know how and why it works.)

You don’t have to make trauma your special interest in order to heal (I’ve already done that for you). That was a joke. But you seriously don’t have to. That’s why masterposts like this one exists - for you.

Maybe you don’t have the time or ability to sift through vast amounts of information in the hopes of finding some way forward. Maybe you’re desperate and don’t know where to start.

No matter who you are and why you’re reading this, I truly hope there is something here that will help you.

You are not alone.

I promise you, there are both strangers and loved ones rooting for your recovery. Wishing for you to rediscover your light. Wanting you to join us out here in the world.

You belong, just as much as anyone else. I hope you feel that soon, if you don’t right now.

Everything I’ve done to heal from PTSD (so far)

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