The Emotional Rollercoaster of Trauma: 4 Stages of Healing
By Kelsey Hoff
The journey of healing from trauma is long, and the road looks different for each person. The things that happened to you, the experiences that came before and after, the care you receive, your life circumstances and personality — all of these things play a role. Your emotions, your symptoms, and the steps it will take to find relief are unique to you. However, most people will need to work through four basic stages of trauma healing at one point or another. These include safety and stabilization, remembering and grief, reconnecting and integrating, and consolidation and resolution. To make things more confusing, many survivors experience grief for the things their trauma has taken from them, which has its own well-known set of stages.
You don’t have to figure all of this out on your own. Working with a therapist or care team and a healing-oriented community will help you find your way. Building up your personal support system will also help you keep moving forward when the going gets tough.
In this blog, I’ll outline the four main stages of trauma healing and what usually happens during each one.
The 4 stages of trauma healing
Trauma affects people in complicated ways, and recovery isn’t linear. This means that sometimes you might feel like you’ve made a lot of progress only to get knocked down again. It’s not that you’re doing it wrong. It’s that you’re uncovering deeper wounds that are ready to heal. You don’t actually lose your progress, but you may need more support and safety at times to access your insight and coping skills.
The following are the four stages that generally make up the trauma healing process. Like the stages of grief, they may not appear in this order, and some of them may be more prominent than others:
Safety and Stabilization
Trauma symptoms can be unpredictable and take away your sense of safety in your own body. Anxiety, flashbacks, and hypervigilance are the opposite of grounding and connection. Survivors need to re-establish safety inside and out before they can get to the difficult yet life-changing parts of their trauma work. This might involve changing their home environment, learning to set and maintain boundaries, and working on nervous system and emotion regulation skills.
2. Remembering and Grief
As much as you might like to, you can’t just forget your trauma and move on. Fully recovering means rewriting the story of what happened in a way that makes you feel empowered and whole. It’s best to set the stage for these memories to come up by seeking out a therapeutic environment and care providers who have experience working with trauma survivors. Accepting the reality of what happened is part of the process, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re OK with it. It just means you’re no longer resisting or denying what happened and allowing yourself to feel the way you feel. This opens the door for sadness, anger, and grief, which are all healthy and normal responses to traumatic events. Feeling these things safely allows you to turn all that energy into something else, like self-compassion or purpose.
3. Reconnecting and Integrating
The first step involves a bit of reconnecting, but after you’ve acknowledged your traumas, you can start to do this on a much deeper level. This part of the process is about becoming fully embodied and separating yourself from your pain. It’s when you start to rediscover your identity. You might do more work on your support system and your close relationships during this stage. You may also discover some new shades of meaning in your trauma and notice some big shifts in the way you feel and talk about it.
4. Consolidation and Resolution
The final stage is when you start to feel like you’ve exhausted all of the memories and feelings attached to your trauma and find a sense of closure. It’s about restoration, repair, and seeing the bigger picture. You’ll be prepared to spot triggers and care for yourself before your symptoms get out of control. You’ll also have plenty of practice re-framing negative thoughts. This is when you start to search for a deeper sense of fulfillment and reimagine your future. Ultimately, this stage feels like settling into the new reality of your life after trauma.
Find your way to trauma healing with support from the &Rise community
Healing trauma isn’t for the faint of heart. It has a way of teaching you new lessons just when you thought you had it all figured out. Creating up a solid base of safety in the beginning by learning to regulate your nervous system and build strong, peaceful relationships will serve you well. That way, when you start to process your worst memories and the feelings that come with them, you can keep yourself grounded and come through it more resilient than before.
We all need teachers, mentors, guides, therapists, and friends to help us through different challenges. If you haven’t had many safe and healthy relationships, it can be hard to find people who can stay by your side and provide support without judging or otherwise creating drama. That’s why it’s our mission at &Rise to bring women trauma survivors together and help them become the ultimate versions of themselves. We offer free weekly support groups, free counseling, events, and much more.
Ready to find your healing community? We can’t wait to meet you. Subscribe to our newsletter for a weekly dose of empowerment, news about what’s coming up, and ways to get involved.
