Healing Trauma
Let’s continue our healing journey with the end in mind. Knowing your end goals is essential for trauma healing. Each step towards your goals has its own value. One question I ask my clients is what does it look like when your trauma and all issues are resolved? I’m here to give a working tool to focus your efforts and increase the chances of achieving your goals.
Hello, my name is Hong Jeong, licensed therapist based in Los Angeles, CA. Due to COVID -19, it has been a challenging time to do our healing. Today, we’re continuing our trauma and it’s our last virtual therapy session on how to overcome childhood trauma. That is to say, we’re putting all the skills together. Alright, first things first, let’s review our progress. In our last session, we’ve talked about loving kindness meditation. I’ve prepared 3 questions to help you process and digest your progress.
Let’s review!
#1. How would you describe your mood in the past week on a scale of 0 to 10 (0 being the most unpleasant and 10 being the most pleasant you can feel)?
#2. What emotional and physical change did you notice when engaging in loving kindness meditation?
#3 Can you tell me at least 2-3 trauma triggers that have been lessened or better manageable?
Self-awareness transforms trauma into teachable experiences
The essence of trauma healing is observing what you’re experiencing physically, emotionally, and cognitively. We do not want to push away and resist our inner experience because what we resist persists. One of the challenging components is accepting our inner experience as it is without changing or judging it. I’m still struggling with this. My mind is conditioned to automatically judge and evaluate my inner experience and reject or avoid it if it’s a negative or unpleasant experience. I’d like to call it “survival instinct.” Let’s say I put my hand on the hot stove and got burned. From this negative experience, I’ve learned to check or just avoid any stoves. In order to reduce emotional reactions, let’s schedule daily trips into our self-awareness. To freeze our wandering mind, it is important to put things on our calendar.
Trauma recovery with Mind Mapping & SMART Goals
Let’s put our awareness practice on the calendar. Today, we’re putting all the skills together by using 2 tools: Mind Map and Smart Goals. First of all, a mind map is a tool for the brain that captures our fleeting thoughts. When we see our thoughts on a piece of paper, it’s much easier to organize them. So please have a pen and paper in handy for learning this tool. Mind maps can be done in many different ways. We’re creating a mind map for trauma healing today.
The idea behind mind maps is developing associations from the central theme. It can be many associations from one particular theme. The first association from the central theme is called “subtopic” and from there, it gets to details of each subtopic. Let’s say my central theme is Health. My subtopics can be healthy foods, exercising, meditations, and time management. Then, I can go in-dept with each subtopic. Healthy foods can include taking vitamins, reducing carbs, eating veggies, and so on.
Alright, let’s make a mind map for trauma healing. So our central theme is trauma healing. The subtopics are changes you want to see in your life. Say a miracle happens and all the problems in your life are solved just like that. When you wake up the next morning, how are you going to discover that miracle happened? What changes are you going to notice?
For example, the subtopics for trauma healing include better relationships with others, improved decision-making skills, less anxiety and depression, assertiveness skills, improved quality of sleep, less worrying, and so on. Now we’re going to develop steps for each subtopic. Here I’d like to borrow the concepts from SMART goals. When it comes to trauma, we often find ourselves reactive rather than being proactive. When we’re reactive, we tend to rush through our feelings and thoughts, which can intensify trauma symptoms. The key in trauma healing is gradual and deliberate exposure to our feelings and thoughts. We do not want to pour water on hot oil. We just want to let the temperature of hot oil settle down. SMART goals can help you with that. SMART goal is a very strategic tool to help you take deliberate steps towards your goals. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, and Relevant.
Now with each subtopic, let’s think about deliberate steps. One of the changes affected by my own trauma healing journey is less anxiety. One of the deliberate steps I took was practicing loving kindness meditation 2 times a day before and after work over the span of 6 months. Another deliberate step was having 2-3 sessions per month with a therapist to process 2-3 triggers a month and practice “watch the mind-train” twice a week over the span of 1 year.
It would be helpful to incorporate those skills we learned in our previous sessions into your SMART steps. This way, we can see each step as an opportunity to practice and sharpen our skills. So pause the video and give yourself enough to develop steps for each subtopic.
Healing is a personal journey and there is no right or wrong way of doing your healing. I believe that having a system in place can be helpful because we can go back to our old habits. While our healing journey can be challenging, using Mind maps and SMART steps can organize the process and provide structure. We might feel better or worse in the healing process. One thing that’s important to you is that the little things we do for trauma healing will bring you positive energy into your life.
Take care of yourself and do your healing every day.
If you need assistance with letting go of your childhood trauma, please schedule a 20 minute free consultation with me.