The Power of Self-Healing

In this book I’m going to show you how to heal your trauma and create real change in yourself, your relationships and yourlife. And, even better, I’m going to show you that you don’t  need therapy to achieve these things.

I’m not anti-therapy, I’m just pro-you. You waking up, taking action, reconnecting to your adult self and unlocking your own power to heal your trauma. This message can easily (and lazily) be spun to make me sound like the bad guy. So I’m going to say it once more: I’m not anti-therapy.

I’m not anti-therapy, but I have come to understand that therapy alone cannot heal childhood trauma. I understand this because of my profession and because of my personal experience. I spent decades in therapy and did not heal my trauma. Despite all the talking, all the different therapists, all the intentions and all the learning, I did not do the one thing I needed to do to truly heal. And that thing that I did not do is what this book is about. It’s the secret no-one tells us. It’s the most important, empowering, liberating, and terrifying, thing you will ever learn about wellness and thriving. It’s the non negotiable, blindingly-obvious-once-you-know-it truth of trauma  healing. The truth is: you have the power to heal your trauma, but to heal you must take action. Therapy alone cannot heal trauma, but therapy coupled with structured, meaningful self-led action will create profound, deep healing and transformation. Becauseas we take action we break free from old trauma-led patterns and develop a whole new way of being and relating. 

This truth becomes self-evident and indisputable once we understand what trauma actually does. Childhood trauma, or any trauma in fact, creates an incomplete nervous system response to a perceived threat. We, quite literally, get stuck in fight, flight, freeze, fawn or collapse (more on that later). What’s happening in our nervous system shapes our thinking, our behaviour, our body, our emotions, our identity and sense of self, and our ways of coping. It affects how we relate to ourselves and others. It affects how we live. It affects everything. This is particularly true for those with childhood trauma because the patterns, led by the nervous system response, are so deeply ingrained. We’ve been unconsciously practising these patterns (patterns like anxiety, avoidance, people-pleasing, compulsive overthinking and worrying) since we were children. Childhood trauma is also referred to as developmental trauma, which is a wholly accurate term as trauma from birth to 18 affects how we develop and grow. Healing then, necessarily, requires us to learn a new way of relating and living. It is an un-learning, an un-doing and a re-patterning. And no matter how good our therapist, coach, psychologistor practitioner might be, we cannot sit in a room for an hour a week and learn a whole new way of being. To do this we must take empowered action during the other 167 hours a week. To heal our dysregulated, traumatised mind, body and sense of self we must act, not just talk about acting. We must act, not just think about acting. We must act.

The sad truth is our expert-led mental health system can induce in us a sense of dependence and disempowerment. We can easily and quickly feel as we have little agency and that we are not in control of our own healing. I believe this is one of the key reasons I didn’t get well sooner. I’d essentially outsourced my agency and my power. I put my therapist on a pedestal. I put all therapists on a pedestal. My childhood trauma whispered to me: ‘You’re getting this wrong, they all know more.’ I was searching, doing my best, hypervigilantly looking for the best therapist, the best practitioner who would bless me with their ‘better-than-me-ness’. I was looking forthe answer outside of myself. I believed that I couldn’t effect change and that I needed someone else to fix me.      

I believed this because I had unresolved childhood trauma (which strips us of our agency and leaves us in a state of freeze and powerlessness), yes. But also because it’s what I had been overtly and covertly taught by society. I had been taught, both professionally and personally, that trauma was complex and extremely specialised, and therefore belonged to the clinical and medical domain. That I needed someone (probably a man) with a great many qualifications to fix me. That trauma healing was elusive and hard to attain, rather than readily available within me.

The message in this book is simple but radical: trauma healing is far from elusive. It’s a very real thing we can all learn, implement and attain as we reclaim our agency and power by taking daily action. And I’ll show you how, step by step.

Everything required to heal trauma exists within you right now. Literally, everything. But to access your own power to create deep healing, you must become willing to practise and experience a new way of being and relating. No-one told you this before now because they know how terrified you might be to learn this. This truth means we must stop looking to others to heal us and instead start to take responsibility for our own healing. It means we must accept we are more powerful than our trauma led us to believe. And we must do the one thing we’ve been subconsciously avoiding: change. As intoxicating and appealing as change first sounds, really, truly, deeply changing is quite literally the scariest thing any human with trauma can attempt to do.

Fame and fortune are readily bestowed on humans who tell other humans what they want to hear. So I’m taking a risk here. You might not want to hear this. I’m going to talk about personal responsibility, daily action and real change.The approach I’m going to teach you is far from an intoxicating ‘heal in a weekend’ one. I know. We all want a magic pill. I’d much rather take two ‘cure childhood trauma pills’ every morning over learning a whole new way of being. I know this way is harder. I know it takes effort. I know this because I’ve been there (searching for a cure outside of myself, hoping that the next therapist is the therapist who will heal me, resistant to doing the one thing I actually need to do: take action).

Hopefully my lack of pandering will help you trust me. Because I suspect that you know that no one would advocatethis approach if it wasn’t true.

Trauma exists in us as an old way of being – an old subconscious playbook that no longer serves you. Trauma healing emerges as we learn a new way of being. That may seem like an overwhelmingly large task. But this book breaks it down in an accessible, logical way. You’ll come to see that despite the glorious long-term outcomes, we actually achieve this in the short term by repeating (and repeating and repeating) simple daily actions and principles designed to increase and build specific capacities. These capacities are currently limited, or entirely missing, because of your trauma.

As well as teaching you how to heal your trauma through self-led action and capacity building, I’m also going to tell you a little bit about how I learned this lesson the hard way. Life kicking my ass has always been my greatest teacher. I write this book not just from the perspective of a trauma specialist, but as a human who was urgently called to heal herself. In a very real way, I’ve had to practise what I preach. I’ve road tested everything included in this book, and as I took action I moved from debilitating collapse and illness into health, well-being and healing.This approach may not be the magic pill you might want, but I promise you that it’s precisely what you need to truly heal.