What Does Healing from Childhood Trauma Look and Feel Like?
- Fortitude Psychological Therapy
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
To understand what healing from childhood trauma looks and feels like, we need to explore what happens before, during, and after taking those first courageous steps on your healing journey.
What Does Healing from Childhood Trauma Look and Feel Like?
1. Before Healing from Childhood Trauma
Before healing from childhood trauma, life can feel very messy. When it comes to dealing with their problems, often people don’t know where to start, so they remain stuck in the negative cycles that keep things going.
‘Feeling broken on the inside’ is also common. You might feel like you’re carrying things nobody knows about. There’s a heaviness, like mental or emotional baggage, from things that happened in the past. Some people describe a sensation that’s more like a disconnect or an emptiness, as if there’s a part of them that didn’t have the chance to develop and grow.
It can feel like your emotions are in charge, as if you don’t have any control over them. You’re often at the mercy of your mood and easily overwhelmed by your feelings. Dissociation and/or dysregulation can be an issue because your window of tolerance is likely to have been impacted by your experiences. This can spill over into other areas of your life, making things like relationships very difficult.
2. During Your Healing Journey
Everybody’s healing journey is different, but something I notice often is self-criticism starting to shift so it’s no longer someone’s default response.
A strong inner critic may never fully go away but being able to recognise that the critical voice inside of you isn’t telling the truth about who you are is extremely powerful. Usually, being able to see ourselves in a healthier way allows us to have better relationships and make better choices for ourselves.
Another thing I see is people identifying specific things in their life that they want to do differently. This could be about how they respond to themselves and their own emotions, how they behave in relationships, or how they parent their children. Whatever it is, healing involves them noticing unhelpful patterns of behaviour and starting to change these patterns. Some people call this ‘cycle breaking’.
Read Will Things Get Worse Before They Get Better? to learn more.
3. After Healing from Childhood Trauma
In my opinion, based on both my experience as a human and as a therapist, we are never fully done with healing.
However, we can become a version of ourselves that is able to survive difficult things in a gentle way. We can become more accepting of our flaws and our emotional responses, so when life gets tough, it no longer feels like the end of the world. It feels like things something we can cope with.
It’s not that this version of you doesn’t have emotions anymore. Emotions are a normal, natural part of being human. What shifts is your ability to recognise the emotion, label it, understand where it might be coming from, and delve into the toolbox of strategies we’ve put in place to help you cope. Sometimes, this is as simple as acknowledging how you feel and responding in a compassionate way.
Embarking on a healing journey can be very empowering. Even when things aren’t perfect, you’ll be better able to hold and withstand whatever storms life throws at you.
Freedom Beyond Trauma
If this article speaks to you, if you’re someone who learned early on to hold it together, hide your emotions, and stay strong while feeling overwhelmed and self-critical inside, I created my self-paced course, Freedom Beyond Trauma, just for you.
You can also subscribe to The Trauma Toolbox to receive my insights and expertise straight to your inbox every month. Finally, I share lots of support via Instagram.
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