Self-Compassion in Healing from Trauma

Trauma impacts how we feel about ourselves, the world, and those around us. Many trauma survivors have lost their sense of safety and security, making everyday interactions difficult and confusing. One of the hardest feelings is losing the sense of unconditional self-acceptance. Self-compassion is a conscious choice to accept ourselves where we are at in the moment regardless of what has happened to us and how we are handling it. How do we treat ourselves when we make a mistake or when something doesn’t go to plan? Often, we are our own harshest critics saying things to ourselves that we wouldn’t dare to say about someone else.

Trauma Changes the Way We View Ourselves

People who have experienced emotional trauma or neglect often blame themselves or internalize messages they heard while being abused as true and factual. In reality, those messages are the nature of the abuse and how it keeps playing the tape of being unworthy and unlovable in our lives. Trauma survivors can be very rigid and unforgiving toward themselves. It is the mind’s way of protecting them from further abuse. This is a hallmark symptom of trauma, changes in our beliefs about ourselves. It messes with the sense of safety and self-worth and causes survivors to believe they are what they think they are.

Triggers can pop up unexpectedly and cause a chain of symptoms that flood the body with a trauma response—taking a regular everyday interaction and making the body feel like a physical or emotional threat that needs to be responded to. This change is often quick and unconscious and comes from the nervous system bypassing our daily thought processes. Many survivors try to work through the responses and get them to stop happening. It is complex and confusing for many people to understand why the body responds the way it does. Often this loss of thought control when a trigger is encountered causes trauma survivors to feel guilt, shame and lose trust in themselves and their ability to manage situations.

If this is you, you probably feel like you are stuck in a cycle and overwhelmed trying to understand why this is happening and what you can do about it. It is not your fault! Building self-compassion is so important because it is not your fault. You are doing the best you can. Your body is trying to protect you. Beating yourself up does not help you heal from what happened to you. It holds you accountable for a situation that was out of your control.

Self-compassion can help change the tape and begin creating a new narrative about how you feel about yourself. Over time and consistent self-compassion can help you remain calm and centered and help manage situations that cause trauma responses. It can help you build new skills in your life. Learning new skills requires trial and error. When we learn new skills, we learn from times we slip up and gain greater awareness of what we can do in the future to master the skill. If we are self-critical when learning something new, we sabotage our own learning process. We have all the emotion and effort into learning, but none of the reward of seeing change. Self-compassion can help you stay in the learning process and work to master new skills. Whereas self-criticism keeps you stuck and feeling bad about yourself like change isn’t possible. Change is possible as long as you accept yourself through the learning process and give yourself the gift of grace and space to learn.

Having compassion for yourself might be difficult. However, it is an important practice to start. Start small and begin practicing self-compassion in small everyday situations and build up to harder ones. Self-compassion looks like replacing self-critical thoughts with self-accepting thoughts.

Here are some examples to get you started:

1. I am doing the best I can

2. I love and approve of myself

3. I am learning to do things differently

5. It’s okay to feel what I feel

Through a daily self-compassion, you can build on your ability to trust yourself again. By using self-compassion, you acknowledge what happened to you was difficult to get through. You are giving yourself the grace to be human after being through something painful. So painful that your body had to use survival skills to protect you from it. It’s okay to struggle with difficult feelings. You don’t have to do it alone. If you feel this is too difficult to do alone, that’s okay and completely normal. Trauma treatment is often helpful to help you manage what you are experiencing and create a plan to help you live the life you want. Things can change, and the body and mind are capable of healing. Things can improve over time with compassionate treatment that helps you gain skills to manage the symptoms holding you back.

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