8 Tips for Healing Emotional Wounds and Trauma

1) Take baby steps. Trying to make too many changes all at once can backfire. You may become overwhelmed or feel like a failure if you set unrealistic expectations. And dramatic changes are often unsustainable. Making micro-changes – small, manageable, incremental changes – creates feelings of success, hope, and encouragement that are important to carry you through your healing process. You can learn more about making micro-changes here.

2) Healing isn’t all or nothing; even some healing will probably improve your quality of life. Many people mistakenly believe that emotional healing is all-or-nothing, but you don’t have to heal 100% to improve the quality of your life.. Again, this belief can be discouraging and overwhelming. But most importantly, it’s not accurate. Any modest amount of healing will improve the quality of your life. Take it one step at a time and you will notice small improvements in your mood, ability to cope with triggers, relationships, self-esteem, and ability to complete your daily activities.

3) Be patient and persistent. Healing is a lot of work. We need to be patient and allow for the time needed to gain new insights and skills. And we need to be persistent and keep going even when it gets difficult, be willing to try new approaches, and challenge ourselves in new ways.

4) Set realistic expectations. I’m a big believer in the importance of setting realistic expectations. When we don’t, we end up disappointed and frustrated – often at ourselves, which doesn’t help us heal. One of the most common unrealistic expectations that I see is expecting progress to be consistently forward. Nobody just gets stronger and stronger, healthier and healthier. Progress is more likely to be two steps forward and one step backward. And, honestly, don’t be surprised if sometimes it’s two steps backward and one step forward. This isn’t a failure, it’s a reality. And realistic expectations coupled with patience, persistence, and self-compassion will lead to forward progress, it just may include a few detours and be slower than you’d like.

5) View setbacks as part of the process and learning opportunities. Not only are setbacks normal, but they’re also important. Often, we learn more from what doesn’t work than what does. So, instead of trying to avoid setbacks or relapses, accept that they are part of the process and challenge yourself to be curious about what you can learn that will help you move forward and toward greater healing and self-love.

6) Prioritize self-care and self-compassion. When you ask a lot of yourself, you need to give a lot to yourself. And working on emotional healing takes an awful lot of energy, time, and sometimes money. To keep going, you need to pay attention to your feelings and your physical sensations in your body (such as tight muscles, headaches, fatigue, etc.) because these are your body’s way of telling you what it needs. Take the extra time to listen and take good care of yourself.

7) Ask for and accept help. Healing isn’t meant to be done in isolation. It isn’t easy to ask for help, especially if people have betrayed you in the past. But reaching out for help has so many benefits—emotional support, guidance, and the ability to overcome shame. And help can take many different forms depending on your needs, so I hope you’ll look at it as another form of self-care and ask for the kind of help that best meets your needs.

8) Look for and seek emotional safety. It’s nearly impossible to heal if you don’t feel safe; physical and emotional safety are pre-requisites for healing emotional wounds. When you’ve been traumatized or experienced a deep emotional wound, it’s natural for your nervous system to be on high alert for signs of danger. Your nervous system wants to keep you safe. But sometimes we look so intently for signs of danger that we miss cues of safety–and when this happens we stay in a high-alert or fight-or-flight state, which makes it difficult to connect with others, trust, relax, be vulnerable, and regain our equilibrium and wellbeing. You might start to identify signs that you’re safe or not and notice when/where you feel safe.