You’ve read the books, you can name your patterns and trace them back to where they started. You can explain exactly why a reaction doesn’t make sense, and it still shows up anyway.
A lot of the trauma self-help world would tell you to keep going, because with the right information and enough effort you can heal yourself. I think that’s partly right, and the part it gets wrong is where a lot of people end up stuck.
In this episode I look at what “healing yourself” actually means. I cover what you can genuinely change on your own (insight, self-talk, new experiences), where insight and coping strategies run out, why you can know a belief is false and still feel it’s true, and how the “heal yourself” message can keep you collecting more information without getting any closer to change.
Spoiler: needing trauma therapy says nothing about how hard you’ve tried.
Some people knit. You read about trauma. This one’s about what all that reading can and can’t do for you.
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I'm back. Welcome to the second season of The Trauma Nerd Podcast. We've got a new website, new branding and a new podcast cover. We've refined a lot behind the scenes, and this season is going to be even more awesome than the first, if that's possible. It's actually extremely possible, because I was still figuring things out. Now I've figured things out, so you're in for a treat, gang.
I've been thinking about today's episode for a while, so let's get into it.
There's an idea that gets sold a lot in the trauma and wellness space: that you can heal yourself. How to heal yourself, ways to heal yourself, learn to heal yourself. It's kind of the entire thesis of the trauma self-help sphere, really. Let us help you heal yourself.
Beautiful promises. But this is where I get interested. The idea that with the right information, the right tools and enough effort, we have the power to sort ourselves out is obviously attractive. Who wouldn't want to understand what's happening, where it's coming from and how to fix it, and make the necessary changes without having to rely heavily, and expensively, on anybody else?
But here's my question. Is it actually possible to heal yourself? My take: kind of, with a tilt towards no.
I appreciate that's a spectacularly unsatisfying answer, but there's a reason for it. I'm also aware I've just pissed off the entire trauma self-help industry, but that's okay.
Let's add an asterisk here, because it depends on what you mean by healing. What does it mean to heal your trauma? When we say somebody can heal themselves, what are we actually saying they're capable of doing? Are we talking about developing insight into psychological patterns, learning to manage our emotional reactions, making different choices? Because all of that, I think you can do yourself with the right education and guidance.
But if we're talking about changing things fundamentally, so that a person no longer experiences certain things the way they used to, when the way they used to was caused by trauma? Well, no. Those are two very different things.
I fully believe it's entirely possible to get much, much better at managing without actually addressing the processes underlying and contributing to the problem. So if the question is "Can you make meaningful changes on your own?", absolutely, yes. If you're asking whether most people can resolve the effects of their trauma on their own, I don't think that's true, and I want to explain why.
What you can do on your own
Firstly, there are a lot of things you can do yourself that will make a very significant difference.
One of those is developing insight. You can learn about psychological processes. You can recognise patterns in how you think and feel. You can develop some probably pretty sophisticated hypotheses about why you respond to certain situations the way you do, based on things you've read. Maybe you've read about attachment theory, little t and big T trauma, or EMDR's adaptive information processing model. There's a plethora of information out there, on Instagram, on TikTok, all over the internet, and somebody who's pretty committed can get a good idea of what's going on.
You might recognise that you're especially sensitive to criticism, for example, then read that this can be caused by trauma, start exploring and go, "Hey, actually, I was criticised a lot as a child. Maybe there's a link there." Of course you can do that on your own. And that awareness can be incredibly useful, because once you recognise those patterns, you're in a much better position to examine them and make different choices.
But there's a very important thing to notice here. Understanding why a response is there, and where it comes from, doesn't necessarily mean the response is going to change. Making different choices doesn't change the felt experience. It's still there. We're going to come back to that, because it's an important distinction.
Another thing that can make a really big difference is what we call, in psychology, corrective experiences. This is when you have an experience that's meaningful and healthy and actually corrects an earlier experience. Speaking generally, and not about anybody specifically, I've seen people working on something in therapy who then meet somebody and have a really healthy, supportive, loving, unconditionally caring relationship, and the things they were working on end up getting addressed through that relationship. The beliefs they developed about themselves in an abusive relationship get corrected in the later one. It doesn't work for everybody, and it depends on the circumstances, but that's an example of how a corrective experience can work.
Another thing you can do on your own (this isn't an exhaustive list, by the way, it's just what came to mind while I was putting this script together) is work on how you talk to yourself. If you tend towards particular unhelpful forms of self-talk, you can learn to recognise those thoughts, question whether they're accurate, and intentionally respond to yourself differently.
Say you make a mistake and have the automatic thought that you're an idiot. Instead of automatically believing it, you can stop and think, "Hang on, am I really an idiot for making a mistake? No, I don't actually believe that, so I'm not going to engage with it. I'm going to put that thought aside and keep going." You can practise responding differently.
These kinds of changes are significant, and I think you can make them on your own. But notice there's a bit of a pattern here, corrective experiences aside. The problem is still there. We're just responding to it and managing it better.
For some people, maybe that's healing. Maybe that's your goal, and maybe that's enough. For many people, that's a freaking fantastic outcome. But it's not my definition of healing, which is why I'm so sceptical of this. I'm an i-dotter and a t-crosser, and my definition of healing is very different.
Coping versus healing
Psychologists register with AHPRA, and we have to be very careful about how we present ourselves in public, so this is my opinion. I think what often happens with "we'll teach you to heal yourself" is that you end up with a good set of coping strategies. They're ways to manage and respond differently, which is still great. That's still really, really good. But I don't call that healing. I call it much improved coping, which is very important, and probably the stage we need before healing anyway.
So here are some examples of where I see the problems, and where coping meets healing. (Even though I'm technically still in the self-help world just by being here, I'm on a different planet of it.)
The first is that you can logically know something isn't true but still feel that it's true, because the rational, logical learning and the emotional learning aren't aligned. Changing the emotional learning, either completely or substantially enough that you really feel a difference and it overrides the little bit that's still telling you the opposite, is what I call healing.
Take self-worth, because it's the most common example. You might logically understand that your worth as a person isn't determined by whether other people like you, whether you make mistakes, whether you achieve certain things or whether you meet somebody else's expectations. You can know all of that.
But when it comes to how you actually feel about yourself, deep down, your felt experience might be a completely different story. You still feel inadequate. You still feel like you're not good enough. You feel shame when you make a mistake, even though you can explain in considerable detail why that shame isn't warranted and why it's okay to make mistakes. You might even be parenting a child and responding beautifully when they make mistakes, while still feeling like a total piece of shit when you make one yourself.
This is incredibly frustrating for people who've already done a lot of self-help or psychological work, because you're not ignoring the problem. You know it's there and you're working on it. But the emotional learning, that physical experience, isn't aligned.
This is where I think healing is a different story. Trauma processing therapies, and EMDR is one of them (it's the one I speak to because it's what I have the most training in, but it's not the only effective trauma therapy), can offer something very different from simply developing more insight or responding differently.
In trauma therapy, we're not trying to convince you that your belief isn't true. Half the time, the person I'm working with already knows it isn't. If they don't, I'll probably do a little work around that, but I won't spend a huge amount of time challenging it, because I know that if we work on the body layer, the mind will follow. In EMDR, if somebody says, "I really believe I'm worthless," I don't sit there challenging it. I just say, "Okay, let's continue." That's because we're working on the experiences and associated material that are causing or contributing to it. Trauma therapy can shift that. That's healing. That's my standard.
The second example is that understanding your triggers doesn't stop you from being triggered. If you know you have a certain emotional reaction to something, understanding it logically doesn't stop it from happening. Healing, from my perspective, is when that reaction no longer happens. That's the ideal, and it doesn't always work out like that, but at the very least the intensity and frequency are reduced, so you have more control. Maybe it still comes up a little, at maybe a third of what it was, and you're able to notice it, stay in control and know what's going on. That's healing to me.
The final point in this coping versus healing discussion is automatic negative self-talk, which I mentioned earlier. Let's say you make a mistake and straight away, automatically, without you intentionally thinking it, it shoves its way into your head: "You're so shit. You can't do anything right. You're a failure. You should be ashamed of yourself." Charming.
If you've done a lot of psychological work, self-help or therapy (CBT does this kind of thing too), you might be pretty good at recognising that thought for what it is. You might immediately think, "That's not a reasonable response to a mistake. It's okay to make a mistake. I'm a human being and I'm allowed to get things wrong. That doesn't mean I'm incompetent, and it certainly doesn't mean I need to be ashamed of myself." Perfect. Ten out of ten for your response.
But did you notice you still had the negative thought? That it was the first thing that came up, and you had to work to respond to it? I think real healing is when that thought doesn't pop up anymore. Again, that's the ideal, and I'm not suggesting everyone can achieve it all the time. But I think people can achieve a flavour of it, where the negative thought is much less intense, doesn't come up as quickly or doesn't come up as often. Some kind of actual change. That's healing.
Why this matters
So why am I getting all up in arms about the "you have the power to heal yourself" narrative? Because I think it can be problematic. It sets an unrealistic expectation that you should be able to achieve things that I don't think everybody can.
To be clear, I obviously don't have an issue with people learning about psychology or developing skills that help them improve their lives, work through things and respond better. That's part of my job. But I do have an issue with the implication that if you just find the right information and put in enough effort, you should be able to resolve your trauma-related difficulties yourself. I don't think that's true for most people. It depends on your definition of healing, but for the most part I don't think it's possible to do that completely on your own, even with good guidance.
Think about what happens when somebody takes that message really seriously. You're reading, you're learning, you're working really hard on your beliefs. You're practising the strategies and techniques and identifying the patterns. You make some really meaningful changes, but you still experience that feeling of inadequacy. You still have big reactions to certain situations that you just can't seem to change, no matter how much you try to talk yourself out of it, no matter how often you tell yourself, "You're safe now. It's different now." Maybe you still criticise yourself constantly, knowing there's a better way.
If you're operating under the belief that you should be able to address this on your own, you'll probably conclude that you're missing something. You haven't found the right explanation yet. You need a better strategy, the right technique. Maybe there's something else you should pay for. Maybe you need another book. Another podcast (hello). Another course. Another freaking framework.
What can happen is that people spend an enormous amount of time collecting more psychological information without getting any closer to the change they're looking for. I find that really unfair. It pisses me off, because you shouldn't be put in that position, and it's not your fault that you're in it. You're working on what you've been told.
Sometimes the issue isn't a lack of insight. In fact, many of my clients have too much insight. They've got too much knowledge, sometimes to the point of information overload. It's not a lack of insight, knowledge or effort. Sometimes the thing you're trying to change can't respond to the approach you're using.
And I'm not criticising any of the strategies I've mentioned. As long as you understand what they actually do, what their limitations are and what they're for, that's fantastic. But it's important to know which approach is right for which problem.
That doesn't mean every single person needs to go and do intensive trauma therapy. It's about addressing the right problems with the right approaches and matching those up correctly. But my opinion is that for some people and some problems, including some of the ones I've mentioned, trauma therapy is probably the only way you're going to shift it. And I think we should be able to acknowledge that without treating it as some sort of failure or inadequacy on your part, because it's not.
So, can you heal yourself?
My answer is leaning towards no. I think you can make enormous changes to your psychological wellbeing on your own with the right guidance. You can develop insight, recognise patterns, improve how you interpret and respond to situations, change unhelpful responses and behaviours, and have experiences that genuinely alter some of what you learned from the past. Depending on what's happening for you, that may well be enough.
But that isn't healing in my book. There's no single definition of healing, so this is mine. I think it's a huge improvement, but from my perspective the problem is still there. You're just coping with it and responding to it better. You're taming the beast better, so to speak.
So I don't agree with the blanket suggestion that everybody has the power to heal their trauma. I just don't think that's true. And I think it can be unhelpful to perpetuate that idea, because it can make you feel bad if you haven't been able to do it.
Can you heal yourself? Kind of. Kind of no.
I hope you enjoyed the first episode of Season 2. It was probably verging on ranty, but this kind of thing irritates me. If you liked it, please leave a review and tell me how great I am. If you didn't like it, don't leave a review. (I'm joking.) Subscribe to my email list if you want monthly updates, or follow the pod if you want to know when new episodes come out.
Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. Bye.