Most trauma treatments, and folk psychology applications thereof, are such pisstakes.
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Either they revolve around perpetuating the frozen emotionality that keeps people traumatized by overtalking shit, or they retraumatize by grotesque behaviouristic applications of force.
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Whether it's essentializing someone's natural experience of trauma as a disorder and "medicating" it (God, fuck the APA, for so many reasons), or just throwing people straight back into freeze responses without any way to release trapped feelings, it's all just bullshit.
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Healing from trauma is often difficult, but remarkably straightforward. There are feelings trapped behind knotted emotions. You need to feel them.
The feelings got trapped because you felt hopeless in the face of the traumatic event. Your body wanted to react, but couldn't.
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Maybe you had abusive parents. Maybe you got trapped in a 20 car pileup on the freeway and thought you were going to die.
Maybe you received terrible news you were powerless to alter. Regardless, you got a physiological freeze response. One that never fully ended.
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There are methods by which to unfreeze, to let those trapped feelings of the moment out.
All of them revolve around feeling what's there, but at an intensity you can handle. You may shake, cry, scream or even collapse. But with it comes freedom.
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There is nothing wrong with you for having traumas. You are not sick, crazy, weak or even abnormal.
Maybe you were raised abusively and taught to suppress key survival feelings (it me), maybe you were just actually powerless in the face of malice or misfortune. Not your fault.
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Either way, trigger warnings and struggle porn are cute and all, but that is NOT how to heal from trauma.
What you need is to regain a sense of agency in the face of something that left you feeling powerless & frozen. And there are healthy ways to do that!
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Also, there is often subtle fear of just living your life that builds around trauma.
A full range of feeling is triggering, so you stunt yourself to avoid those memories.
Healing from trauma isn't just about functioning at acceptable levels. It's a way to reclaim your aliveness.
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Hilariously, the most effective therapeutic methods are essentially straight rips from Yoga, with some scientific rigour added.
One of the ways in which yoga can be dangerous is that you can retraumatize yourself by misapplied teachings if you aren't careful. I did!
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If you keep on cutting through, you eventually come out in into a deep, abiding freedom.
You feel more clearly, and you learn how to take a trauma memory to pieces and free yourself of it.
But it involves a lot of "am I going completely crazy?" to get there. And you might, too!
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These methods are arduous, but that's why they work for some of us some of the time.
Those who were so thoroughly broken that we didn't know how to live without taking the whole engine apart first.
Consider therapy. With a therapist who understands how *embodied trauma* works.
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