Dealing With Your Trauma is Self-Care
By dealing with it, we don’t mean putting on a happy face and pretending everything is okay: doing the hard work is crucial to true self-care. If you’ve experienced trauma, check out Phoenix, a community founded by Melissa Barker as a place for survivors of sexual trauma to come together to heal. Find other supportive community by downloading the Quilt app and signing up for a conversation today!
by Melissa Barker
January 2020.
Let that sink in for a minute. A new year, a new decade, a new month.
I spent the better half of December 2019 leaning into places of reflection and self-exploration, asking myself some deeper questions, and getting curious about my answers. This was partly fueled by exhaustion, and partly fueled by an “ah-ha” moment where I realized I needed to practice what I preach.
A question I often get is how do you do what you do and still heal? And the only way I ever know how to answer this is to be real — what I do is hard, but it also lights me up in a way I have never experienced before in a “job”. I am a survivor of sexual trauma and I am building a company (Phoenix) that seeks to make trauma healing more accessible to survivors. I continuously live in two spaces: healing and problem-solving.
So when Quilt asked me the question: “What are the fundamentals of trauma healing?” I took pause before jumping to an answer, which, if you know me isn’t something I do often. I am a founder that executes, for better or worse; pausing isn’t necessarily in my “founder DNA.”
After taking some intentional time for pause I came up with a few grounding practices to implement in healing trauma.
Start where you are.
This may sound easy, but it’s way harder than it seems. When we have trauma, our body is going to do all that it can to push past it. This is an act of survival.
One way I have mastered this form of bypassing trauma healing is to get so busy I can’t even begin to feel into where I am. I fill my schedule to the brim and outperform myself daily. I run days that are transactional, mechanical, all by design. Executing becomes my only goal and I am a master at this one.
But here’s the catch—at some point along this path you can no longer outrun your trauma. At some point it will find you. I know this all too well.
When that happens here is what I can offer you: meet yourself where you are from a place of self-compassion and love. Healing is the bravest and hardest work you will ever do and the very act of saying “okay, I am going to meet myself here” is worthy of celebration.
Move slowly.
When you find yourself in the space of healing move slowly and take it easy.
On the outset it is hard to see the scars I carry. I occupy a body that has not always been seen nor treated as my own, living with a diagnosis of PTSD from the compounded trauma I have endured in my life.
At times the very acting of breathing can be hard—especially when my body is signaling to me that I am not safe while my mind is replays moments of trauma. This is normal and nothing is wrong with you if you are here or find yourself here over and over again. This is all part of healing — it is incredibly messy and nonlinear. So, move slow, there is no race here to be won and this journey is 100% uniquely yours.
Take up space in your own healing.
It has taken years for me to unravel the pieces of my own story, to take a brave hard look at it and acknowledge that I deserve to live a full life, not one shadowed by fear. Learning to take up space in my own healing journey has served as a way for me to go deeper in my healing but it is a practice I have to return to constantly.
For me I hold strong to my daily practices of moving my body. Cycling is my movement of choice; each time I get on the bike is a moment that I am actively giving back to myself, taking up space for my healing to happen. Through each twist and turn, moment of joy and challenge, accomplishment and failure, I have come to intimately know my own capacities for tremendous power and fragility, for doubt and radiant optimism.
Sometimes I cry in cycling class. With my head hung low, body working, sweat dripping down my face, I can feel the warmth of my tears streaming down my face. These are moments of sweet release because I am no longer needing to hold back the pieces of myself that I have so quietly stored away. Peddle stroke by stroke I come back to myself, finding the divine in me, reconvening with my own light.
There are times when I don’t feel deserving of these space taking practices, where I prioritize a meeting or fall into the trauma response of business. And that is okay. When this happens, I take a moment, feel into my body and gently remind myself that I am healing… Every. Single. Day.
Healing work is an ongoing practice, it’s a slow build and when we are programmed to move quickly from the places of discomfort the slow can feel agonizing. A lot of us have learned to make homes out of chaos, expecting fast change at every corner so when things move slower, we can think we are doing it all wrong somehow.
In my 10-plus years of trauma healing work, I have been humbled by the slow, methodical work that is my healing. Some days are better than others, some days are complete shit, but I return to my daily practices of healing bit by bit. You are worthy of taking up space. I am proud of you—and I am rooting for you.
