How to Heal Trauma at Its Root as Highly Sensitive People so We Can Reconnect With the Energy Within Us

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover the step-by-step process I use to heal traumas big and small in my life and in the lives of my clients.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People. A podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie. A way to question and reduce stressful thoughts, and you guessed it. I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover why we avoid looking at trauma directly and what it costs us, how to meet trauma with love and understanding, and how to gently encourage the traumatized mind to expand. This is an addition of strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress.

As a highly sensitive person, as highly sensitive people, we feel things strongly. That’s our nature. We take things in, we work with them. We feel them. We experience them deeply. Trauma is one of the most highly charged kinds of emotional experiences we can have. So as highly sensitive people, any kind of trauma, even a small trauma, can feel very strong, very overwhelming, and by nature, trauma is an overwhelm.

It’s a very powerful kind of overwhelm. So naturally we tend to want to avoid feeling those feelings. That’s just, human nature. We don’t want to. Trap ourselves in and torture ourselves with some kind of traumatic feeling. So this is one of the reasons why we avoid looking at trauma, and I think this is true of the whole human race, but it may be as true, maybe even more true for highly sensitive people.

I will say with highly sensitive people, there is an interest in getting to the bottom of things also, and so that may override the discomfort and feeling of wanting to avoid those feelings. So there may be a little bit of two different factors there, and that actually is really helpful when you begin doing inner work.

I think we’re motivated as highly sensitive people to do that kind of work. Another reason that we tend to avoid looking at trauma directly is that there tends to be a lot of shame around trauma for many people. And it can feel like, oh, I failed at something. Or it can might mean that I might think it means that I’m weak in some way or just may remind us of our powerlessness.

And in addition, society at large tends to pretend that. Trauma doesn’t exist. It tries to, and even just now, it’s starting to emerge as something to pay more attention to, or that is more common than you think. In my opinion. Everyone has trauma and I grade traumas from huge to minor, but there’s no reason that some small comment that happened between two people.

There’s no reason to say that’s not trauma any more than something large that happened. The taboo, I think, comes from, in our society anyway, it comes from not having had an effective way of healing trauma. And so we tend to push it away and even with different ways that are effective in healing trauma, I think there’s this fear and this kind of.

Maybe common understanding that this is hard and I’m not sure I’ll be able to, and a kind of like feeling powerless against it. So naturally when there’s something we don’t know how to deal with, we push it away. And that’s actually a coping mechanism that we’re built with that is a good thing.

Otherwise, we’d be just living our trauma all the time. So we push it away, we bury it, and at least it’s not in our face at least. For now. There was a time when I was growing up was certainly the case and I think to some degree it still shows up here and there where mental health was a total taboo issue.

You don’t talk about it and you certainly don’t go see somebody to get help with it, that’s just for crazy people. So things have evolved a lot since the time when I was young, but there is still this kind of. A bit of a taboo around trauma. The problem is if we don’t look at it, it grows. It’s like the boogeyman under your bed.

It’s scarier when we can’t see, so when the lights are off and we can’t really see what’s going on, we imagine what it is and we, and it becomes bigger in our minds. If we could turn the light on, we would see, oh, there’s nothing there. Or it’s not as scary as we thought. But when we don’t look at something, when we bury it down in our awareness, which I said already is a coping mechanism, it’s not a terrible thing.

It’s just not the biggest picture of what we could be doing with trauma when we bury it. Then it tends to grow. It tends to gain strength. It tends to become scarier in our minds, and it tends to control us more. The effect of living with trauma for years is that it starts to zap our energy and our creativity.

It can cripple our bodies and can keep us depressed and anxious and stressed. I think this is even more true of highly sensitive people because we feel deeply. And even small traumas can have big effects for us. And always remember the differential susceptibility aspect of being a highly sensitive person.

We thrive in environments that are good. We do better than most in environments that are good, but we do worse than most in environments that aren’t as good. And so it’s doubly important for us to heal our trauma in some way or another. So how do you do this? The first part of working with trauma is to meet it with understanding.

Now, this seems strange because we’ve been just saying how the mind naturally wants to push it away, doesn’t wanna look at it. It may feel shame about it may feel powerless, and it’s also uncomfortable. So what do I mean by meet it with understanding? What I mean is that. To really meet your trauma with understanding, you have to be coming to it from a neutral place where you’re not actually trying to fix it or change it.

You’re not actually trying to push it in any way. You’re being respectful of it and giving it space just to be heard. This is the part of us that hasn’t been heard because we’ve pushed it down. And it needs to be heard. It needs to emote. It needs to let it out. It needs to be seen. This is true if it’s a tiny trauma from like a little interaction at work today, or a big trauma from when your parents divorced or when you were sexually abused even.

So how do you meet trauma with understanding? The main thing is to create a safe space for this. And you may need someone there who is experienced in holding space, but you can sometimes also hold space for yourself, especially with smaller traumas or little stresses. And you will gain experience with this the more you do it.

But what this means is listening without judging or trying to change and without trying to reinforce the victim mentality either. It’s a very fine line where you’re listening, you’re inviting the. The traumatized part to share what it’s thinking. You’re not trying to fix it and change it, but you’re also not reinforcing that, oh, that’s so terrible, poor you.

The kind of thing that sometimes friends will do and they think they’re being kind and helpful, but it can actually reinforce that feeling of I am a victim. So my favorite way of doing this is to invite that stuck part, that hurt part, to say what it thinks, to say what it feels to go back to the moment when it got triggered, and write down, speak out.

And then either the person with you writes it down, or you can write it yourself. What are the thoughts that are connected to this stress? Getting it out onto paper. Is very helpful in finding a little bit of separation between you and these thoughts and these emotions. It’s also a way of truly paying attention, like you’re saying to this stressed part.

I’m listening. I’m listening so much. I’m actually taking notes. I want to hear exactly what your thoughts are, and I wanna write them down verbatim exactly as you express them. And this. It feels like being heard and it can have a cathartic kind of experience. It can feel very relieving in a way, even though it’s not the whole journey of healing trauma.

It can be a amazing first step, if you have a crying baby and these little hurt parts inside of us are like crying babies. Then just paying attention helps. It’s not enough to just pay attention. You still have to change their diaper or you still have to feed them or whatever they need. But just paying attention already starts that process.

In some ways, journaling is a way of doing this. And there have been many studies showing how journaling is very helpful in reducing stress. It’s not just a somebody says, oh yeah, that’ll be good. No, they’ve actually studied it. Talking with a friend can also be very helpful as, and of course, working with a good therapist or a facilitator.

The other point here is you don’t have to hold yourself in it for long. You don’t have to just keep rehashing it and re reliving it. This can re-traumatize and we don’t want to do that. We just want to have it be heard, get it onto paper, and that’s good enough. Let the hurt part tell you. How much is enough?

You may only just want to touch the tip of the ice iceberg today. You don’t have to relive everything if that’s not what you need. So listen, your herd part will tell you, and it’s also important to say that just sharing is not enough. Sh sharing, getting it out is important. But just journaling alone may not actually heal the trauma, for example, or just talking with a friend may not actually heal the trauma.

So the next piece is what I find so powerful, and that is how to gently encourage the traumatized mind to expand, to literally play devil’s advocate with itself. Challenge its own beliefs and expand. Its understanding. This is called self-inquiry, and this is a way for the stuck part that got hurt to challenge its own beliefs and to be in control of the process.

This is not the same as somebody coaching you or training you or kind giving you wisdom. Or trying to change you in any way. This is saying, Hey, you know what? I want to hear from you. You the stuck part inside of me. I want to hear, do you think there’s another way of seeing this? And if it does, and if it finds something on its own, that’s how it starts to really break the spiral.

That’s when things start to shift on an experiential level, not from some external wisdom. That is totally true. But not helpful because it’s coming from the outside. Remember, these hurt parts that got traumatized are very cautious and not trusting of the outside world, including our own minds. So you have to be turning the power back to them to this little hurt part inside of you and saying, okay, what do you think?

Could it be that there’s another perspective here? And if it finds it, then that’s amazing. If it doesn’t, that’s okay. I use the work of Byron Katie to do this. It’s a set of four questions and some turnarounds, and it’s a very gentle way for the stuck part in me to question what it thinks. It’s a way to find the gray area between black and white thinking, where it’s oh, they did this to me.

I’m a victim. I’m stuck, right? You start to find the gray area where okay, how did I also make it worse? How did my, how did I end up getting stuck in it more than even necessary? So what’s, where is my part? Where did I give up my power? And how can I get my power back by seeing that, oh, I didn’t have to do that.

I don’t have to continue to do that. So there’s all this gray area in there. That starts to get exposed when you go through the process. And it also helps you to find out where you were not a victim and you thought you were, in some ways you may be a victim or certainly if some a crime was done.

To me, I’m a victim of that crime. That’s true. But the victim mentality is more under my control than I thought. So as you explore and as that little stuck hurt part starts to find. These things, it starts to feel less and less like a victim starts to see options start to feel power again. And that’s how it becomes reintegrated into the whole of you.

Usually I prefer not questioning the statements of fact, like what actually happened but rather the emotional interpretation. That is hurting you. ’cause usually the emotional interpretation, what I think it meant when they did this to me, usually that’s the part that’s hurting me the most.

That’s the one that feels closest to the hurt. For example, when I was young, my, when I was 16 or 15, my parents divorced and we moved and divorced and I felt like my family died, right? So I could question my parents divorced and. Yeah, it’s true. But it’s a little harder to question because it’s so true.

But if I question that my family died, there’s a little more of an interpretive quality to that, or I could go even closer, like my parents abandoned me. There’s that stuck part is feeling that, yeah, I, my parents abandoned me by breaking up their home. Or I can go even closer, and this was a thought that came up many times in my life is that I’m homeless.

In fact, my mom even said once, why do you act like you’re a like an orphan? So it’s ’cause I’m believing it’s not the stuck part of me that got traumatized by that divorce is believing that I’m homeless. So you can bring a thought like that into this inquiry during the work of Byron Katie, and you can question it.

And that means going through the four questions and turnarounds is it true? Is it true that I’m homeless? And really asking that, pardon me to answer it, not rushing the answer. Asking me, and can you absolutely know it’s true that you’re homeless? And how do you react? What happens when you believe you’re homeless?

How do you live your life? Notice all the stress, right? And who would you be if you didn’t believe you were homeless? The comparison between with the thought and without the thought can be amazing. And then turn the thought around. I’m not homeless. And find concrete examples of how that could be as true or maybe even truer.

This is a beautiful path of exploration that points you like. It starts with the stress, the stressful thought, the stressful experience. It’s going in, finding the homeless feeling, but it doesn’t stay there. It questions it and loosens it plays with it. And then it starts to turn it around and say, if homelessness is, what’s feeling so terrible, have you tried looking in the opposite direction that maybe you’re not homeless?

It can be liberating because it points you in the direction of light instead of dark. And when you start looking and your mind starts looking for reasons why that’s true, you’re gonna start finding concrete reasons that support this new hypothesis, which takes you away from suffering and. Brings you back to yourself.

So the feeling I’m left with today is that trauma is not something scary when you know how to approach it with love and respect. Love means holding it. Holding the space and respect means letting it do the inner work instead of you trying to do the work for it. In this episode, we looked at why we avoid looking at trauma directly and what it costs us.

And we saw it brings on, it gets worse the more it’s not looked at, and it costs us a lot in terms of our health, our wellbeing. And we also looked at how to meet trauma with love and understanding by giving it space, by creating a safe space, and then letting the traumatized part of us. Express, what are the thoughts connected that taking notes, writing it down, or having someone do that for us, it’s like it’s finally getting seen, getting heard, and then finally we looked at how to gently encourage the traumatized mind to expand and this has to be done on its terms.

We can’t say, oh, you know what? Spartan up you. You’ve got it all wrong. You’re not a victim. Just get over it. That doesn’t work. But what does work is to say, Hey, okay, what’s going on? I hear you thinking that, for example, you’re homeless is that really true? I want to hear your opinion.

I don’t want to hear the right answers here. I want to hear, what do you believe? What do you see? And this starts to expand. The mind starts to expand okay, maybe. Maybe there’s something I missed, and that traumatized part starts to grow and it starts to see a bigger perspective. So thanks for listening.

It’s always good to explore with you. This program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Join me next time for Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom.