Why Trauma Healing Isn’t Working for You (5 Phases Explained)

You've been trying to heal your trauma for years. You've read the books. You've been to therapy. Maybe you've done journaling. Maybe you've tried EMDR or positive affirmations. And you're still stuck and you're still getting triggered. You're still picking the wrong people. You're still struggling with procrastination. And you might even still be lying awake at night wondering what is fundamentally wrong with you. Well, here's what I want to tell you. The problem is almost certainly not that you're somehow incapable of healing or getting your life together. What's wrong is what you were told about how healing works. And for many people affected by trauma and childhood, so much of what passes as traumainformed care is outdated. It's incomplete. And some of it is flatout wrong. Now, there's an old way that the world sees trauma. And there's an emerging research-based understanding that's changing everything. And what I've seen in my own life and from teaching and coaching thousands of people who are working to change their lives after living through trauma is that healing seems to move through five distinct phases. Not in a perfectly straight line, but in a recognizable flow. And I want to share this with you because if you recognize yourself in one of the phases that I'm going to describe, you can stop spinning your wheels in one-sizefits-all approaches and actually direct your energy toward healing work that fits where you are right now. So, let me walk you through the way that I see the phases of healing. All right. Phase one is when you realize what trauma is actually doing to you. Now, everybody's different, but the effects of abuse and neglect in childhood follow shockingly common patterns. They're so common that when people first learn about them, I watch this like wave of relief come over their face because they realize, "Oh, a lot of my challenges and mistakes are not some kind of personal failure. They're normal responses to abnormal circumstances when we were kids. " Now, once you learn this, you kind of have to rethink everything. You're able to let go of the weight of self-lame. You don't have some crazy preference for drama. You're not seeking out people who hurt you, and you're not trying to recreate your childhood. Have you ever been told that? I have. It sounded wrong to me then, and it sounds even more wrong now. Because here's what we know. Childhood trauma has psychological effects. Yes. But at its root, it's a neurological injury. It disrupts brain and body systems. It affects your health. It can cause chronic disease, learning problems, relationship problems, financial problems, depression, anxiety, addiction. And this is a big one that gets overlooked. It can make it almost impossible to think clearly right when you most need to think clearly. It's this cognitive glitch under stress that drives so many trauma-driven behaviors like lashing out, hiding out, rushing into relationships before you know the person, quitting jobs in a moment of anger. Now, there's a lot of wrong information floating around. You see it in movies all the time. traumatized person finally talks about what happened. They cry and then everything's magically better. Ha, if only it were that easy. From the outside, I'm sure it looks like we just need to see or be told that we're traumatized, like we're failing to see or get it, or we're choosing not to see. And I can see why people think this because our actions don't make sense to other people. So, they assume it's some kind of decision we're making. And they dress that up with all kinds of reasoning. But here's the telltale sign that an idea or treatment isn't right for you. When you apply it, it doesn't do anything. The results aren't there. And results matter. You got to make them matter. If your failure to respond to common treatments is making you feel ashamed, let me just say this clearly. That shame is based on a misunderstanding. You're actually not a bad person. You're normal. Your symptoms are not your fault. And knowing this, you know, really hearing it is the first crucial phase. So when something doesn't work, it doesn't work for you. That's all. Now, phase two of healing is when you understand the root cause of most of your symptoms is dysregulation. And this is a word you'll hear me use constantly. I've been talking about it for 10 years.

Happily, so many people are talking about it now. Chronic stress and trauma in childhood can cause brain and nervous system changes that throw off every regulated system in your body. emotional regulation, cognitive regulation, hormonal and immune system dysregulation, and dysregulation of the chemical and electrical signals that govern your heart, your metabolism, your attention span, your ability to stay calm and present and not melt down at the worst possible moment. Right? In this phase, you learn to notice when dysregulation is happening. What are the signs? What sets it off? And I'll tell you, this is where a massive wave of growth begins for the people I work with. They'll say, "Oh my god, that's what I have. That's what throws me off every time. " And that's what's been making it nearly impossible to stop repeating the same mistakes. That's what makes problems hang around or get worse, even when you're doing everything right. And here's the good news. You can learn to reeregulate. There are simple techniques, and I mean genuinely simple, that can stop a trigger from snowballing into a three-day shutdown because that's what happens, right? Someone criticizes you. You have a disagreement, and suddenly you can't work. You're going through the motions, maybe numb, you know, numb inside, your hands are kind of buzzing, just waiting for things to change somehow. But when you know how to reeregulate, you still get disregulated. It's true. You do it sometimes, but you catch it sooner. You turn it around faster. You get back to yourself. And when you're regulated, you are so much less likely to lose your temper, to spiral into, you know, anxiety or feel completely overwhelmed. You have a way out. And when you're free from that cycle, so many things in life become possible. Now, a lot of people who had trauma in the past are still stuck in dysregulation. Whatever the cause is, you can learn to reeregulate. And I have two ways you can learn about it. A book and an online course. This is the book. Okay. The book is re-eregulated. It's very popular. It's in seven languages. And it's available in the audible version read by me, which is kind of cool because people who had trauma often struggle to have adequate focus to read a book, but we can listen. So, you can get it in whatever form works for you. I'll put a link to my book, Reeregulated, down in the first line of the description section below this video. All right, phase three of healing, as I've experienced it, is when you learn to genuinely connect with other people. Now, this is a hard one. If you're like a lot of us, it's the single worst impact of childhood trauma on your adult life. It's just like feeling like an outsider, feeling like you never got the memo on how to act around people. Or maybe you're great at acting like you're fine, but underneath you never feel safe to actually be yourself. You feel lonely in crowds. Romantic relationships are awful or non-existent or obsessive. and dealing with people gets so stressful that whether you mean to or not, you just start avoiding them. Now, it's not supposed to be that way. I see this again and again. Childhood PTSD is at its core an injury to your ability to connect. But that injury can be healed. When you're more regulated, connecting gets easier. And more connection handled slowly and consciously actually helps you stay more regulated. So healing becomes this upward spiral. You go through cycles. You make progress. You come back around and then you heal some more. And this is one of the reasons that I'm so passionate about group based healing because being in a small group connecting every week with people who understand, who share, you know, what you're trying, they everybody's like talking with each other. You're noticing what's working. You're watching other people reeregulate and come alive. And sometimes that's what it takes to really believe that it can happen for you, too. So, in my coaching programs, I get to watch this light go on in people's eyes like we're not failures. We're not stupid. We're just regulated. Aha. And this can be healed. So, if you're interested in coaching, you can see when the next group begins on my website at crappychildhoodfairy. com. Now, phase four of healing is when you face your self-defeating behaviors. Do you ruin relationships with your anger? Are you isolating? Do you have addictions or a problem with food or

weight that's hurting your health? Because these are trauma related and a lot of traumatized people stay stuck with these problems their whole lives. But when you're more regulated and a little more connected, you can actually begin to change them. That is sacred, honorable work to keep facing your own patterns, your own mistakes, and make dayby-day changes in a positive direction. You know, not perfectly or not all at once anyway, but consistently. And this is where life starts to open up. This is where it starts to feel genuinely different. So phase five, and this is a big extended phase that goes on and on for the rest of your life, and it's when you become your full and real self. This is where you shed the old limited idea of who you are. Just stuck in resentment or hopelessness or paralysis or endlessly trying to please people who are never going to be pleased anyway. This is where you discover who you actually are, the real you, and the gifts that you were meant to bring into the world. Now, you probably already have an inkling of what those gifts are, but the burden of the trauma that you've lived through has been too heavy to develop those gifts. Now, in my programs, we take people all the way through these phases, all the way to the gifts phase, the thing that you were born to do, the thing that's been nagging you in the middle of the night, reminding you, yeah, you were meant for more, but what is it? And this is the greatest pleasure of all is watching each person's power and dignity start to shine as they find that thing. Not the old identity of someone who's merely hurt, but their true identity. as someone who accomplishes meaningful things and whose presence makes life better for the people around them. And you watch that feeling of emptiness, that sense of life being meaningless just evaporate, like waking up from a bad dream. Because that's exactly what it is. The way the world looks through the eyes of unhealed trauma is a bad dream. And then you come out of it. So here's what I want you to do. If this path resonates with you, try a thought exercise. Imagine that you had to do all your healing in just one year. I know, I know that's not realistic. But if you just imagine that you had to heal and all you had was a year, what would you do? This exercise gets you in touch with the steps you know that you need. We know. And I have a free download to walk you through this exercise. You can grab it by clicking the second link below this video in the description section. Don't let anyone tell you that healing is a long slog. It's going to be a long time. It's going to get worse before it gets better. Uh-uh. That's not healing. That's getting stuck. That feels like a slog. You can change your life very quickly. Not all your problems there. There's going to be some stuff that takes time, but some problems can lift almost as soon as you name them really when you can make just a little progress with one thing. A little breakthrough happens and then you have the space for another breakthrough and another and all you have to do is begin. If you like this video, I've got one that you're going to love right here and I'll see you very soon. Today, what's happening is your own behavior. And the worse you were hurt back then, the more likely it is that you have a pattern of hurting yourself now.