What is trauma and how we heal from it?

May 10, 2023 4 min read

What is Trauma?

When we think of trauma, we often picture catastrophic events: earthquakes, assaults, abuse, violence, or neglect. While these can certainly cause trauma, the essence of trauma is not the event itself. Trauma is the disruption—the breakdown of our physical, emotional, and spiritual growth.

Instead of thriving, we’re left surviving. Our energy, talents, and potential are consumed by the constant struggle just to stay afloat. We become stuck.

Trauma is that time when we feel overwhelmed.It’s a disconnection—from ourselves, from others, and from life.

How Trauma Manifests

To cope with trauma, the self often fragments into different parts. These parts take on extreme roles to protect us, but they can also cause inner conflict:

• A Scared Part may numb the pain with food, substances, shopping, social media, or sleep.

• A Fighting Part may lash out at others or ourselves, criticizing, shaming, and competing.

• A Frozen Part may withdraw, self-sabotage, or cling to codependent patterns.

The most harmful fight of all is the fight within ourselves—between these parts that are doing their best to cope.

Trauma is not just what happens to us; it’s how our system responds to survive.

Healing from Trauma

Healing doesn’t always require reliving or talking about the traumatic incident. In fact, forcing yourself to revisit unprocessed trauma can be re-traumatizing.

Instead, healing begins with validation:"This happened to me. I survived. Now it’s time to thrive."

Grieving the Losses

Trauma often brings profound losses—of safety, connection, trust, or time. Grieving these losses takes patience. Society pushes us to “move on” quickly, but healing asks for space to process the pain.

A part of you may want to move on, but another part might still be frozen in grief, waiting to be seen. Healing begins by creating space for these parts to express their pain and to be acknowledged.

A Client’s Story: Maggie

Maggie came to therapy with one goal: to stop binge eating. She felt ashamed of her behavior, which she believed caused her low self-esteem. However, our work together revealed something deeper.

Maggie: "I want to eat healthy, but every night I binge and hate myself for it. I’m so gross. That’s why I don’t have real friends or a girlfriend."

Here, two parts were in conflict:

1. The Perfectionist Part, who demanded perfection and shamed her for binge eating.

2. The Comforting Part, who used food to soothe her loneliness and pain.

The real cause of Maggie’s low self-esteem wasn’t the binge eating—it was the shaming from the perfectionist part. This created a vicious cycle: the more her perfectionist shamed her, the more the comforting part binged to numb the pain of rejection and abandonment.

Uncovering the Root Cause

Through therapy, Maggie discovered that the comforting part was a younger version of herself—a 7-year-old girl who felt alone, emotionally starved, and disconnected. Her parents, though loving, were often busy working and unable to provide the emotional connection she needed. Food became her solace.

Maggie learned to reparent this younger part, offering it validation and connection instead of shame. When the part felt the urge to binge, she would check in:"I see you. What do you really need?"

Often, the answer wasn’t food—it was comfort, love, and attention.

The Transformation

Over time, Maggie stopped binge eating—not because she forced herself to, but because she addressed the root cause of her behavior: disconnection. She joined the gym, started yoga, and even began dating again. She still has cravings at times, but now she approaches them with awareness and compassion.

The difference is this: she no longer fights or shames her parts. Instead, she allows them to coexist, creating space for healing.

In a Nutshell: How We Heal

Healing from trauma requires:

1. Observation: Becoming aware of the parts of yourself that are hurting or in conflict.

2. Compassion: Accepting these parts without judgment or shame.

3. Connection: Reparenting and reconnecting with these parts, offering them the love and validation they need.

4. Integration: Creating space for all parts to coexist in harmony.

Trauma fragments us, but healing makes us whole. With patience, bravery, and support, it is possible to move from surviving to thriving.