7 Ways to Heal From Trauma Without Going to Therapy

7 Ways to Heal From Trauma Without Going to Therapy

Therapy is a lot of work. And it’s expensive. Cost and therapist availability can be a barrier to accessing quality treatment. Then, once you’re working with a therapist, the process can be confusing and triggering. Fortunately, there’s a lot that you can do to heal from trauma without going to therapy.

Whether you’re looking to do as much as you can on your own before considering a therapist or want to augment your therapy to get the most out of your sessions, here are seven things that you can do on your own to make progress toward your trauma recovery goals.

How to heal from trauma

In order to know how to heal trauma without going to therapy, it can be helpful to understand what is necessary to heal trauma in the first place.

In order to heal trauma, you need:

1. Education. In order to heal from trauma it will be helpful to understand what is happening in your body and why it’s happening.
2. Turn shame into self-compassion. Trauma can leave you feeling like there’s something wrong with you. People who heal from trauma are able to turn that shame into self-understanding and self-compassion.
3. Safe social connection. Trauma occurs from painful past learning in relationships. People who heal from trauma find it beneficial to find people who are safe, healthy, and supportive.
4. Neuroception. This is the ability to detect safety in the environment around you even when you feel threatened. Trauma can cause benign situations to feel threatening. Part of healing from trauma will include beginning to detect safety even when your body feels threatened.
5. Interoception. This is the ability to detect your body’s threat response. It goes hand-in-hand with neuroception because you need to detect when your body is under threat in order to start to train it that it’s safe.
6. Build skills to interrupt the threat response. People who heal from trauma have a toolkit to draw from to interrupt their threat response. The toolkit doesn’t need to be big or complicated, it only needs to contain the essential skills that work for you. These are skills that you can implement in three seconds or less as you’re going about your day.
7. In vivo exposure. This is a fancy way of saying that people who recover from trauma have opportunities to practice their skills in a variety of stressful situations. You don’t need to go out of your way to find stressful situations, you just need to practice staying in a calm body while going about life.

For about 50%-60% of trauma survivors, this is enough. The other 40-50% of the population will benefit from trauma processing with a therapist; however, there is a lot that you can do on your own to help move treatment along before you get to this point.

Now that you have a brief overview of what is needed in order to recover from trauma. Let’s talk about which of these things you can do on your own and which would benefit with the help of a therapist.

Of course, a therapist can help with each of these things. However, most things you can do on your own so that you can get the most out of treatment. In order to tease these things out, let’s go over each step and talk in more depth about what you can do on your own and when to seek help of a therapist.

1. Learn About Trauma

In order to heal from trauma it will be important to get a firm understanding of what has happened to you in the first place. This includes having an owner’s manual for your nervous system.

The nervous system is your body’s internal communication system between brain and body. When you have been traumatized, you detect threat in the environment that isn’t actually there. You hear a certain tone of voice, see certain body language, hear certain sounds, smell certain aromas, or have certain feelings in your body and it reminds your body of something painful that happened in the past.

Your body sends you into fight or flight mode before you’re consciously aware of a threat. If you can’t fight back or flee then your body goes into a depression and/or dissociates, making it difficult to engage in life.

When you’re having a threat response, your logic and reasoning goes offline and you can’t solve problems. You may have flashbacks as your body tries to recall memories. This is your body trying to heal.

What you can do on your own

As you learn about trauma, you can go into more depth about all of this. Those who recover from trauma find it extremely helpful to understand why their body does what it does.

You can learn more by reading or watching the work of

Bessel van der Kolk

Peter Levine

James Gordon

Gabor Mate

Steven Porges

Janina Fisher

I would recommend starting with Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score.

How a trauma therapist can help

A therapist can review your symptoms and give you information catered to your unique experience. However, if you have already done some research on your own, then you can come in prepared to ask questions for your unique situation. This can save you time and money on your healing journey.

Plus, when you’re already self-educated about trauma, you become an agent in your healing. You are the leader and your therapist is your support person. This can do wonders for helping you to rebuild the trust with yourself that is so often lost as a result of trauma.

2. Turn Shame into Self-Compassion

The second step of trauma recovery is turning shame into self-compassion. Trauma-survivors can feel like something is wrong with them. They can feel like they are bad.

Self-education about trauma can really help turn shame into self-compassion. Instead of feeling like something is wrong with you, you can start to feel like something wrong happened to you.

You can fighting against your body, you can become an ally and a change agent for your body. Instead of trying to push painful sensations down (which totally makes sense!) you can become curious about what’s going on.

In short, you can stop having a threat response to your threat response.

What you can do on your own

Brene Brown said that you need three things to exponentially increase shame: secrecy, silence, and judgment. However, if you douse it with empathy, it can’t survive. Here’s how you can start to break the shame cycle on your own.

• Acknowledge what you’re feeling. Google search for a list of emotions and identify every single emotion that you’re feeling right now.

• Talk with someone you trust about how you’re feeling. If needed, coach them on what you need in order to feel validated and supported.

• Journal about it. Write about what you went through. Wrap it up with what positive lessons you have learned about yourself.

• Give yourself affirmations like, “Even though I feel really bad right now, I still love and accept myself.”

• Attend to polarized parts of yourself. Shame can be complicated when a part of you recognizes that you feel shame but another part of you feels bad about feeling shame. Learning to look at both parts of yourself with compassion can help. This type of polarization can be addressed with a resource like Bonnie J. Weiss’ Self Therapy Workbook: An Exercise Book for the IFS Process.

• Learn as much as you can about trauma. This helps to destigmatize why your body responds the way it does.

How a trauma therapist can help

A trauma therapist can help you douse your shame with empathy. It can be difficulty o feel empathy on your own, especially if you have never experienced from someone else before. A therapist can help you feel empathy for the first time. Then, over time, you will be able to feel that empathy toward yourself.

Therapists are trained to empathize with clients, validate your experience, and listen with compassion. A therapist who is trained in Internal Family Systems Therapy can help you attend to polarized parts of you so that you can find your own way toward self-compassion.

3. Make safe social connections

People are wounded in relationships and people heal in relationships. Trauma is a brain injury that occurs when there has been painful social learning.

In order to heal from trauma, it will be important to surround yourself with people who can support you with empathy. It will also be important separate yourself from people who are actively injuring you. In order to surround yourself with positive social connections you will need to:

• Learn what healthy relationships look like
• Learn how to effectively advocate for yourself
• Learn how to set boundaries
• Discern when a relationship is not safe for you
• Make a plan to get out of unsafe relationships
• Grieve lost relationships

What you can do on your own

In order to start making safe social connections on your own I recommend that you start by learning the tools of a healthy relationship. Here are some resources to get you started.

I would recommend starting with the work of Dr. John Gottman. Dr. Gottman is a researcher at the University of Washington who has been studying martial relationships and intimate partnerships for decades. He has written several books about what makes relationships last. I would recommend starting with 7 Principles for Making Marriage Work. You can also find numerous articles and videos by googling his name.

I also recommend the work of Sue Johnson who talks about attachment in relationships. While John Gottman talks about tools, Sue Johnson talks about the underlying need that each of us has to feel connected with our spouse or partner. We need to feel as though the other person is there for us and like we are their first go-to in times of need and excitement. I recommend starting with the book Hold Me Tight. You might also benefit from An Emotionally Focused Workbook for Couples by Veronica Kallos-Lilly and Jennifer Fitzgerald.

To learn to set boundaries, I recommend learning about codependency. Start with Melody Beattie’s books. You could start with Codependent No More. 

These books can also help you learn to set boundaries:

• Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab is a practical every-day guide to the art of setting boundaries.
• Boundaries by Henry Cloud and John Townsend is a book written for individuals of Christian faiths. The authors also have another book, Boundaries in Marriage which is all about setting boundaries in your marriage.
• Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson PsyD is a book for individuals who want to heal from distant, rejecting, and self-involved parents.

Discern when a relationship is not safe for you

• Patrick Teahan LICSW talks about childhood trauma recovery and he has a YouTube channel where he role plays what toxic parent-adult child relationships look like and what healthy relationships look like. Find his channel at https://www.youtube.com/@patrickteahanlicswtherapy
• Lundy Bancroft wrote a number of books that help women to discern whether their husbands or partners are being abusive.

Get out of unsafe relationships

• Washington 211 is a resource that anyone can use to find any resource they need in Washington. I used to give this number out when I worked for a crisis help line. It was the exact system that we used to help people get connected with resources. Simply dial 211 or go to https://wa211.org/.

How a trauma therapist can help

If you have never experienced a healthy relationship, it can be difficult to discern what one feels like. A therapist is someone who is trained to engage in a healthy dynamic with you. Many people feel seen, believed, and valued for the first time with a therapist.

Therapy can also be a place where you can practice your skills. There may be times when you need to be vulnerable with your therapist and tell them that something about the relationship isn’t working for you. You can build confidence in your ability to advocate for yourself and set boundaries when you practice with your therapist and experience good, healthy results.

A therapist can also provide coaching. They can model language and role play scenarios with you. There have been many times when I have channeled the words and the energy of my therapist when navigating difficult conversations in my life.

4. Learn to Detect Safety in Your Environment Even When You Feel Threatened

It can be helpful to lean on others to help you discern safety. As you heal from trauma, this will help you to know whether a situation is safe or unsafe. However, you don’t necessarily have to do this with a therapist.

What you can do on your own

You can learn to detect safety in your environment by leaning on others to test your reality. You can ask for honest feedback. When you are in a safe relationship you can ask the person whether they are feeling threatened. Sometimes when we realize that others are not threatened like we are, we can realize that the situation is safe.

Another way to do this on your own is by checking your thoughts. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy workbooks will have exercises to help you do this. The Feeling Good Handbook has good exercises.

Once you realize that you’re safe, check in with your body and notice what it feels like when you’re not in danger.

How a trauma therapist can help

Therapists know that trauma survivors often cannot detect safety until someone helps them. This becomes one of the roles of the therapist.

5. Learn how to detect your body’s threat response

Have you ever noticed that your muscles tighten when you feel stressed? This is your body’s threat response. And if you’ve experienced trauma then my guess is that your muscles are constricted more often than not. In order to relax this threat response, you will need the ability to detect that it’s happening in the first place. The ability to notice what’s happening in your body is known as interoception and there is a lot that you can do on your own to improve this skill.

What you can do on your own

Trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk has found that yoga can help with interoception. He now recommends it as an evidence-based treatment for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. When you engage in yoga, you are bringing your awareness into your body and improving your interoception.

In addition to yoga, you can practice interoception through relaxation. Here are some exercises to get you started.

Body scan. Scan your body from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. As you scan, notice any muscles that feel tight. Relax those muscles.

Pelvic Floor Relaxation. If you relax these muscles, then they will simultaneously relax all muscles in the body at one. These are the only muscles that can do this. With your finger, find your pelvic bones and your sitting bones. Imagine that there is a rectangle drawn between these four points. The area inside the rectangle is the area that you are going to relax. As you count to 20, imagine that this rectangle is expanding while you relax the muscles inside the rectangle. Notice any relaxation that you feel in your body.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation. If you have been tensing your muscles for a long time, it can be difficult to feel the difference between relaxation and tension. This exercise helps you to feel the difference. Tense and relax parts of your body. Notice what it feels like when you tense the muscles and then notice what it feels like when you relax the muscles. Once you have relaxed all parts of your body, squeeze all muscles at once and then release them, imagining that a wave of relaxation is washing over your body. Notice and memorize this feeling.

Once you have successfully experienced what it feels like to relax, practice checking in with your body periodically throughout the day. If your muscles are tense, quickly use your favorite exercise to release the tension. Notice the difference between tension and relaxation.

Remember to check with a doctor if you have concern about your ability to engage in yoga or to tighten and relax muscles.

How a trauma therapist can help

If you find it difficult to notice the difference between tension and relaxation then a therapist can help. Your therapist will work with you to find strategies that custom fit your needs. Sometimes there are also mental blocks to relaxation. Your therapist can help you to clear these.

6. Learn skills to interrupt your body’s threat response

Once you can notice when your body is under threat and you have a strategy that helps you to interrupt it, you can start to interrupt your body’s threat response throughout the day.

What you can do on your own

Take your favorite strategy and then shorten it to three seconds or less. For example, if you are able to relax your whole body using the pelvic floor relaxation technique, then practice condensing the technique to three seconds or less. 

How a trauma therapist can help

Your therapist can show you even more strategies that can help. You will have someone to check in with and to reflect back your progress.

7. In vivo exposure

In vivo exposure means facing threatening situations in real life while practicing staying in a calm body. You don’t have to go out of your way to find these situations and you should not be putting yourself in harm’s way to do so. The idea is to simply go about life while checking in with your body and keeping your body relaxed.

What you can do on your own

Start by going about your daily routine while practicing checking in with your body. If you notice tension, release it. Say to yourself, “I’m having a threat response” and then release your muscles.

Next, if you have anything in your life that you want to be able to do but have been avoiding because of overwhelming emotions, start doing those things! Make a list of the things that you want to be able to do. Break them down into concrete steps. Then order them from the least frightening to the most frightening. Start with the things that are less frightening and practice keeping yourself in a calm body. Notice what that’s like. Were you able to do it? As you do this, you can expect to build more confidence in your ability to take on harder tasks.

How a Trauma Therapist Can Help

A therapist can help you identify the tasks that you want to take on. Your therapist will be there as a support person who can reflect back your progress and help you when you get stuck.

Conclusion

As you can see, there is a lot that you can do to heal your trauma on your own. These steps are enough for at least half of trauma survivors. If you are still having trauma symptoms, then a therapist can help you process painful memories using a trauma therapy like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing or Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Even if this becomes necessary, there is still much that you can do on your own in order to help your progress along. And even if you decide to work with a therapist through each of these steps, your time and money will be used much more efficiently.

If you want to go even deeper into your self-healing journey, check out Emotions Made Simple. It’s a self-help course designed to help people make sense of overwhelming emotions and take massive action toward their goals. There are many skills that can help with trauma. Learn more about it here.

Thank you for trusting me with this part of your healing journey.

The information in this post is general information for educational purposes only. While Sheena Kaas Mudaliar, MA; LMHC is a licensed mental health counselor, the information on this site is not intended to be a substitute for therapy or psychological advice. The information provided does not constitute the formation of a therapist-client relationship.