Healing from Trauma: Healthy Strategies for Recovery
Updated: 2 days ago
The brain and body often have difficulty processing a traumatic event. The process can be painful, and it's tempting to find ways to bury feelings instead of working through them. Unfortunately, painful memories that are buried have a way of creeping back to the surface, sometimes exploding.
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Moving on and healing from trauma is an essential part of living a fulfilling life. It can also be extremely challenging. Fortunately, there are some steps you can take toward recovery. Let's look at some healthy strategies for recovering from trauma.
Take Time for Yourself
Self-care is always important, but it's even more necessary when going through stressful or challenging situations. In fact, it's one of the first things you should focus on when going through something particularly hard.
Unfortunately, self-care is also often one of the first things to disappear when someone experiences trauma. It can be easy to dismiss your own wants and needs because they don't feel worth the effort or like something you deserve. This couldn't be further from the truth. Make sure you're making time for yourself to focus on your needs.
Practice Mindfulness
After experiencing a traumatic event, it's easy to find yourself living in the past. In fact, a lot of anxiety actually stems from worry about past or future events that haven't even occurred yet. Practicing mindfulness is a great way to stay grounded and help bring the body and mind back to the present moment in time.
Don't knock it until you try it! Here are just a few of the different ways you can practice mindfulness:
Deep breathing
Meditation
Yoga
Eat a Well-Balanced Diet
When you eat well, you feel well. Eating a healthy and well-balanced diet filled with proteins, healthy fats, and carbs can help ensure that your body and brain are functioning to the best of their abilities.
During times of stress, cravings for sweet treats or fast food are common. While most things are fine in moderation, it's important to be mindful of how you're fueling your body. Make sure you're giving it what it needs so that it can perform and make it through your day-to-day tasks and responsibilities.
Prioritize Your Sleep
Sleeping problems can occur after experiencing a traumatic event. A person may experience flashbacks, nightmares, or difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep throughout the night.
Sleep is essential for helping you recover after each day so that you can make it through the next one. Try aiming for at least eight hours of sleep each night. You can help yourself with this by creating and sticking to a routine where you try falling asleep at the same time each night and waking up around the same time each morning.
Avoid Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
It's important to learn more about healthy strategies for recovery, but it can be equally as important to recognize and avoid unhealthy strategies. Unhealthy coping mechanisms like alcohol, drugs, gambling, driving recklessly, or unsafe sex may seem like great ways to dismiss uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, but that's all they do.
These are only temporary solutions to a much larger issue. If you continue to cope in unhealthy ways, the impact of trauma can worsen over time. This ends up only delaying recovery.
Lean on Safe Connection
Trauma often makes people want to withdraw, and some alone time is healthy. But healing tends to happen in connection. Reaching out to one or two people who feel steady and kind, such as a trusted friend, a family member or a support group, can remind your nervous system that you aren't facing this alone. You don't need to share the whole story. Sometimes simply being near someone safe is enough.
Move Your Body Gently
Trauma affects the body as well as the mind. Gentle movement, like walking, stretching or spending time outdoors, can help release built-up tension and bring you back to the present moment. Choose what feels good rather than what feels like a workout, and ease off if anything feels overwhelming.
Create Small Anchors of Safety
When life has felt unpredictable, small anchors can help your body learn that it's safe to relax. That might be a morning cup of tea, a favorite playlist, a few slow breaths before bed or a walk at the same time each day. You can read more about why structure helps in our post on why routine is important in healing trauma. Start small. One steady habit often does more than an ambitious plan you can't keep up.
Be Patient With Your Own Pace
Healing isn't linear. Some days you may feel steady, and on others a reminder can bring everything rushing back. That doesn't mean you're failing or starting over. Setbacks are a normal part of recovery, and meeting them with kindness tends to help more than self-criticism.
Signs You May Need More Support
Self-care strategies can be a good foundation, but they aren't always enough on their own. Consider reaching out to a professional if:
Flashbacks, nightmares or intrusive memories are happening often.
You are avoiding people, places or responsibilities because of what happened.
You feel numb, constantly on edge or unable to sleep for weeks at a time.
You are leaning on alcohol, drugs or other risky behaviors to get through the day.
Your relationships, work or daily routines are suffering.
How Trauma Therapy Can Help
A trauma-informed therapist helps you move at a pace your body can handle, and you never have to retell everything before you're ready. Depending on your needs, therapy might include grounding skills, EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Brainspotting or trauma-focused CBT. Learn more about EMDR therapy and our PTSD and trauma therapy services, or read our post on complex PTSD if your experiences were ongoing.
Cameron Carr, LPC Associate (she/her), offers trauma-informed, neurodivergent- and LGBTQIA+-affirming therapy for adolescents, young adults and adults, drawing on approaches like IFS/parts work, Brainspotting, TF-CBT, ACT and somatic tools. She is accepting new clients and has sliding scale openings, so reach out for rates. She sees clients in person in Downtown Austin and virtually across Texas. Read her post on complex relational trauma or use our contact form to get started.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 any time.
Seek Professional Support
Recovering after a traumatic event isn't something that happens overnight. Even if the traumatic event took place within a few minutes, it takes a lot longer to process and release all of those feelings, thoughts, emotions, and memories. If you're still struggling to recover fully after a traumatic event, we're here to help. Reach out today to see how a trauma therapist can help you implement healthy strategies for recovery.
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