Show Notes:

 If you missed the intro to our latest series last week, here’s a quick recap: 

Based on listener feedback, we received a request to talk about how to know when you’re done the work of trauma processing, and what to do once you have “done” the work of therapy or healing. If you missed last week, you’ll want to be sure to go back and start there as it was part one of a two-part intro around how to know when you’re done the work – and today’s episode follows closely as part two. 

I gave you 3 things last week including:

1.      You are not ignoring, avoiding and distracting a substantial amount of the time.

2.      Coping feels established and stable. And

3.      We are aware of our common triggers, the feeling of being triggered, and have a tool kit to support us.

Carrying on from there, here’s what you can look for:

4.      You are noticing that you are generally experiencing more good days than not, or that you are better able to hold the tension that a day is not defined wholly by negative experiences. I remember one of the most profound things I have heard someone say was in a class I took on addictions. Our professor brought in two men who were recovering addicts and one of them said this thing that I wrote down and reflect on often. He said, “I learned that I can’t let a bad minute turn into a bad hour, turn into a bad day, turn into a bad week, and so on.” What he was talking about was the slippery slope that our brain can be when something hard or perceived as bad happens to us or around us – if we aren’t careful of our mindset or allow our stress center to take that ball and run with it, it will run down a path that says that everything is ruined. The whole day is bad, maybe even the week…maybe even my life. When trauma and stress are telling our story, they tell it from this kind of lens. As we heal, we start to discover pockets of curiosity where maybe not everything is terrible all of the time; maybe I’m not terrible all of the time. We start to hold newfound tensions, that hard things can happen, and that I can also be ok. That we can allow our minutes and hours and days and so on to be defined not only by my perception of hardship, but also by my perception of goodness. As we heal, it’s a bit like a horse wearing blinders – the blinders start to open up and gradually come off – allowing us to not just see what’s straight ahead of us, but far more context and periphery. We get exposure to not just the stressful thing before us, but have access to the care we experience, the connection to hope, the memories of fun – and together this offers us a more well-rounded and accurate experience of the world within which we exist.

5.      Problems are more present tense than past. If you are a loyal listener of this show, you’ll know that the part of your brain that manages stress and trauma responses doesn’t have a clock. What that means is that it experiences ALL stress and trauma as if it’s occurring in the present moment – even when we’re recalling events long since over and done with. Last week I quickly summarized that the process of healing from trauma and stress concerns involves helping our brain to relocate stress-related memories to the parts of your brain that are meant to hold and contain contextualized memory recall. As we do this, our experiences begin to feel old, distant, a bit faded, and contextualized within the time and conditions within which it happened. We can recall experiences without feeling like we’re reliving them, and we can recognize that we did what we could, and that it’s over now. As we heal and experience this distancing from past experiences, we get to interact more with present-day problems. There is room for the present-day problems, and when we interact with them, they are less triggering to the past and less informed by reactions that come from being triggered. You will notice that the problems you bring up with people – your therapist, trusted friends or loved ones, will have a more current-day context. There are still problems, they are still impactful, but they are real problems that we can interact with a make choices around now – not things long gone that we have no more influence over changing. 

6.      Closely connected to number 5, problems feel proportionate to present stressors and less informed by past experiences showing up in the present. This is really connected to that triggering piece. If you haven’t heard us talk about triggering on the show before, go check out our “Trigger Happy” series – Season 2, Episodes 22-25. Triggering is what happens when our stress center is still holding a lot of our memories, and keeping them highly activated in a largely misguided effort to protect us. When present-day problems happen, our stress center is scanning those experiences for any hint of connection to our past stressful/traumatic experiences with the goal of preventing the present-day problem from turning into experiences like our trauma again. When this happens, our reactions to present-day problems tend to be extremely disproportionate to the current situation. We are highly reactive, and likely to have our reaction be really out of whack with what the current situation would normally call for. We see this come up a lot in conflicts with partners and kids where reactions are intensely disproportionate, but it may also show up at work or driving in traffic or other random places. When we have done the bulk of the healing work, our brains have relocated our trauma and stress memories and contextualized them in a way where we can notice the difference between now and then. As this happens, we are able to remain more present in situations and respond to them in a way that is more in line with what the situation in its purest form needs from us. This doesn’t mean we won’t still have reactive moments, but they’ll be reactive because this moment genuinely calls for it, not because I’m so triggered by past experiences that I can’t see the forest for the trees and become overreactive to the current scenario. 

7.      I am able to be calm and connected rather than calm and disconnected. This is one of my favourite things to ask my clients about. Often I have clients who will come in and share that they’ve been feeling calmer lately – and the question I always ask is, are you calm and connected, or calm and disconnected? Depending where they are in the process, calm and disconnected is often the answer. As we move through trauma processing, sometimes the brain feels threatened at the thought of relocating trauma memories and experiences – your brain believes is needs these to keep you as safe as possible from them happening again. What this can mean is that your brain will learn to dissociate, which really just means tuning you out for periods of time, in an effort to cope and keep you from moving through the work of processing. Dissociation often does feel like calm – we feel kind of numb and tuned out…but that’s not the same as healed. It is actually it’s own version of a stress response and a defining feature of being not done the work depending on the degree and extent to which we’re experiencing it. When we have done really good healing work, we can experience spaces of being in our bodies and feeling calm and connected to ourselves and the world around us as opposed to calm thanks to disconnected dissociative efforts at coping.

8.      Support systems are beginning to emerge and are an intentional area of development. Support systems don’t manifest themselves overnight. They ta...