It’s never easy to experience a trauma. Whether it’s something you went through as a child or later in life, the effects of trauma can often feel controlling, overwhelming, and suffocating.
While there’s no “easy” trauma to deal with, it’s especially hard to heal from family trauma.
Your family is supposed to be a source of comfort and stability, but that isn’t the case for everyone.
Whether you experienced a one-time traumatic event in your family or something that repeated for years, it’s never too late to begin the healing process.
However, you might be asking yourself how you can start, and what you can do to overcome everything from intrusive thoughts to feeling unsafe and scared.
While healing might not be easy and can take a long time, recovery is possible. Let’s look at the most effective ways to begin healing so you can move forward into the next chapter of your life.
Acknowledge Your Emotions
It’s not uncommon for people who have experienced family trauma to suppress their emotions or try to “avoid” them. However, emotions will always demand to be felt. Eventually, they’ll come to the surface. When you’ve bottled them up for years, they’ll even be stronger than they would have been in the past.
To start healing from your trauma, you must acknowledge what happened and how it caused you to feel. It’s not easy to dig into the past, especially when you’ve worked so hard to “forget” about what happened.
However, you can’t move forward without getting to the root of the issue.
Once you acknowledge your emotions, you can start processing them and eventually become more familiar and comfortable with them over time.
Set Healthy Boundaries
Even if the trauma you experienced happened long ago, it’s still essential to set healthy boundaries with your family.
If one person caused the trauma, it might be beneficial for your well-being to remove them from your life, or stay away from them completely. They could trigger your emotions more than you might realize.
If the trauma continued for years, it’s important to set boundaries with everyone in your family. While it can be difficult, it helps you to prioritize your mental well-being. You’ll feel safer and more secure if you have boundaries in place, and you’ll even be more likely to seek out help.
Find Support
Speaking of seeking out help, it’s the best thing you can do when you’re trying to heal from family trauma.
It’s not uncommon for trauma survivors to have taken on shame or guilt about what happened. However, you have no reason to feel shame. Seeking the right support will help you realize that.
One-on-one therapy is an effective option for overcoming a traumatic past. Trauma survivors have endured more than most and may live in a state of reactivity. A trauma therapist helps a client heal from this. A trauma therapist knows that past trauma can make one vigilant and even create a skewed negative meaning about interactions with a partner. Trauma survivors had no one to help them deal with the past threat, but a therapist can help a client hold their old pain and through a safe, supportive, loving relationship, help them heal so they feel safe enough trust in future relationships.
A therapist will also help with coping mechanisms you can use to deal with trauma symptoms. In the end, they can also give you the support, skills, and guidance you need to move forward and start a healthy new chapter in life.
If you’ve experienced family trauma at any age and you’re ready to start the healing process, feel free to contact me at 561/866-6607 or elizbocaraton@gmail.com.