On Healing Trauma By Learning to Recognize Yourself Again

It was our last day in our gorgeous airbnb in Provence, and time to finally start cleaning up all the items we’d left strewn across the bnb for the week. (Does anyone else ever wake up in a cold sweat imagining their host coming back early and finding you’ve pulled all the comfy chairs onto the terrace and left a thousand teacups scattered throughout the house? Just me?)

I was listening to a podcast as I washed dishes- The Liz Moody Podcast, which I always enjoy- and the episode (New Research: Being a Good Girl is Making You Sick. Here’s How + What To Do), an interview with Sara Hirsh Bordo, made me stop in my tracks.

Sara talks about her new research on how “good girls”- women who caretake, who are “helpers”, who are eldest daughters- suffer autoimmune conditions much more frequently than the general population. This wasn’t really a surprise to me; I’m a trauma therapist, after all, and I can’t go a day without talking about epigenetics or the ACE study.

The part that stopped me in my tracks was when she tied this to what autoimmune conditions are all about: the body attacking itself, because it doesn’t recognize itself.

What if, she posited, our bodies- the bodies of over-responsible, caretaking, traumatized women- attack their own selves because they don’t recognize us?

They don’t recognize us through all the strategies- people pleasing, perfectionism, self-sacrifice- we’ve had to develop to cope.

They don’t recognize us through all the trauma symptoms- dissociation, hypervigilence, codependency- that our nervous systems have adapted in a frantic attempt to survive.

They don’t recognize us because we’ve stopped feeling our bodies, stopped using our voices, stopped recognizing our own desires.

They don’t recognize us…

And so they do what the immune system is designed to do.

They attack the invading stranger.

This makes me profoundly sad, and yet also makes profound sense.

It fits in with everything I know as a trauma therapist.

And it fits with everything I know as a trauma survivor with a little collection of autoimmune conditions of my own.

I immediately stopped washing the dishes, of course, and downloaded the report.

I then sat down to check in with my own parts and journal about what this brought up for me.

And you know what I feel more than anything?

I feel so, so proud of myself for taking this sabbatical.

This is a journey that started a long time ago.

It probably started when I was 30 and left my marriage.

It continued in a big way when I left my final toxic workplace.

It developed some more when I learned to stop being my own bad boss in private practice and to actually care for myself like I mattered.

The biggest shift came when I decided that the deciding factor for me for everything– what clients I take, what hours I work, what I eat for dinner, what I do on the weekends- is how my nervous system feels about it.

My nervous system spent the first 30 years of my life in extreme trauma. She deserves a fucking break, and it’s my job to give it to her.

Something I’ve been delighted to find on this sabbatical is that I have built a daily life I feel really good about. The rituals and people and practices and bedding in my life back home (after 7 airbnbs in a row make you really appreciate good bedding!) are all exactly what I’d like them to be. I’ve designed a life I love, and that’s entirely because I’ve spent the past years listening to myself and discovering what I love. Finding myself beneath the rubble of a life of trauma, and learning to recognize my true self again.

I recently published a reel on instagram (do you follow me at @teawithatraumatherapist ?) set to Maddie Zahm’s song You Might Not Like Her. It’s been running in my head on a loop all sabbatical…a power anthem about finding yourself again and liking yourself whether or not anyone else does. It’s been the journey of a lifetime, and I know it’s not over yet, but I’m so proud of where it’s brought me so far.

You don’t just take an eight week sabbatical on a whim. This was the culmination of many steps that came before- steps towards re-building trust with my own body and nervous system, steps towards recognizing myself again.

And I’m so proud I took every single one of them.

If you are looking for support on your trauma healing journey, reach out today.