After suffering from a traumatic event, your world can feel like everything is topsy-turvey and you don’t know how to set things right. Other than seeking professional help you learn how to deal with trauma, here are a few things you can do to help yourself heal.

Have you experienced a significantly stressful or upsetting event that has left you feeling helpless and emotionally despondent and depressed?

Then you may be suffering from an emotional or psychological trauma. Psychological trauma can disturb your emotions, fill your mind with painful memories, and cause you anxiety that just won’t disappear.

This trauma you’ve experienced can also make it difficult to trust people. You feel people may not have good intentions. You feel disconnected from others, and at times feel completely numb.

It can seem like you’ll never feel better and overcome your emotional state. But you are not alone.

And there is there is help out there to teach you how to deal with trauma. Other people have been where you are today.

While recovering from a trauma won’t happen overnight, it can be overcome by practicing proven strategies day by day.

You can get control back of your emotions again and get your life back. You will heal your mind and return to the happy life you once lived.

And it doesn’t matter whether the trauma is recent or if it’s something you have decided to face that happened many years ago. By following these healing strategies you’re on your way to recovery.

The Healing Process: Learn How to Deal with Trauma

Follow these suggestions that have helped people heal from psychological and emotional trauma.

What Exactly Is Psychological Trauma?

Psychological trauma is derived from an extremely stressful event. It threatens your very existence and makes you feel trapped in your world. Trauma shatters a person’s sense of security and safety.

It can make someone feel fearful and afraid of everyone around them. The emotional experience makes one feel frightened, helpless and hopeless that they can get to the other side of their trauma.

The symptoms of trauma can last from a few days to a few years if they are not addressed. They begin to disappear once you process and understand the painful event.

However, sometimes when you feel okay, haunting memories can trickle in. A visit to the setting of the event or the anniversary of the occasion can trigger these painful memories.

Causes of Psychological or Emotional Trauma

A psychological or emotional trauma can be caused by a variety of events:

• Accidents
• Tragic deaths of Loved Ones
• Near-death experiences
• Violent assaults
• Natural disasters
• Terrorism
• Shootings

These events usually happen once. Other traumatic events can occur more than once. These can begin in childhood and include child neglect, domestic violence, rape, and bullying.

Other instances of trauma include a sudden death or illness of a loved one, a breakup from a romantic relationship, or an experience where someone was intentionally cruel or humiliating.

Although usually not as impactful, we can experience traumatic emotional stress from watching the negative news like terrorist attacks, bombings, plane crashes, shootings and job loss over and over again.

Being plagued by these horrific stories affects our central nervous system and our emotions resulting in traumatic stress.

How to Heal

Follow these tips to help accelerate the healing process.

1. Resist Isolating

After you experience a trauma, people tend to want to hide away from other people. They feel withdrawn and don’t want to face their friends, family, and neighbors.

It’s important to note that isolation feeds fear. The best thing to do when you feel like isolating is to pick up the phone and call someone or take a walk outside and connect with people.

Connecting with others will help the healing process. But isolating will impede the healing. A sense of comfort comes when others accept you and engage with you.

2. Seek out Support

It’s important to find one person to share your feelings with one person. Don’t bottle them up inside.

Find someone who is not judgmental and is a good listener. Talk to a friend, family member or counselor. Stay away from negative people.

3. Reunite with Old Friends

If you have estranged relationships with people who were once good friends who were a positive influence in your life, reconnect with them. You may feel happy you did.

4. Get Involved in Social Activities

Join social activities of things with others who share a common interest. Some examples can be writing, art, photography, stamp collecting, and a book group. It’s important to do activities that are outside your traumatic experience.

5. Join a Trauma Survivors Support Group

Feeling like you are not alone can be comforting. It can help you realize there are others who have similar experiences.

You might also find solace in helping someone else who suffers a trauma. This group can serve as a source of inspiration and help you fight isolation.

6. Meet New Friends

Joining a class or a club is a great way to make new friends. You can meet new people and find common ground with people who share your interests.

Make friends with neighbors, enroll in a class in a local college or connect with your alumni association if you are a college graduate.

7. Treat Yourself to Things That Help You Relax

Do something nice for your health and well-being like treating yourself to massage therapy. Studies have shown that massage therapy not only helps the chronic pain but helps emotional well-being as well.

Other activities could be yoga, Tai Chi or mindful meditation. Find something that you feel comfortable with.

8. Seek Professional Help

A good way to release the painful emotions, vivid memories and uncomfortable feelings you may have been trying to escape is to seek professional treatment to help you heal from the psychological or emotional trauma you experienced.

A professional can help you cope with powerful emotions and teach you strategies to trust others in society.

A trauma professional may specialize in a therapeutic approach or use a combination of therapies in their practice like the three below.

Resolutions Therapy

A new therapy that helps people who suffer from trauma is called resolutions therapy. This therapy focuses on getting to the root of the problem. It concentrates on both emotional and psychological aspects of the mind

Somatic Experiencing Therapy

When dealing with the traumatic event, Somatic Experiencing Therapy centers on sensations you feel in your body rather than placing emphasis on your memories related to the traumatic event you experienced.

Techniques used in somatic experiencing include crying and shaking. Therapists believe these help individuals release feelings of trauma through a physical release.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive behavioral therapy is a school of therapy that centers on your thoughts.

Cognitive helps individuals analyze and evaluate the thoughts and provides actionable steps to help them overcome the memories, thoughts, and feelings associated with the trauma.

Final Thoughts on How to Deal with Trauma

There is a way to heal from psychological and emotional trauma. While it takes a little time, every day you can get closer to taking back control over your life again so you live a happy and healthy life and learn how to deal with trauma.

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