Many of us think going out into the world and chasing success will somehow heal us from all the shame or trauma we experienced. This does not always work. This usually leads us to drive ourselves with perfectionism and an overdone type-A personality. It makes us almost feel like we cannot do enough, and everything must be a certain way.

Instead of compassion and self-love, we become too indulged in stressing to make the right choices. All this post-trauma affects us so powerfully in our day-to-day lives.

Do you feel as if you are kept in a small life where you are not moving forward?

This post may not have the keys to remove your trauma, it is ONLY YOU who has the answers inside of you; you just have not accessed them yet.

And this is what we’re going to do 🙂!

Suppressed trauma

The idea is about when we go through trauma and when we don’t process what happened to us, and we don’t deal with the emotional energy we have surrounding it, we suppress it,

compartmentalize it, and think, “Oh, if I ignore it, it’ll go away.”

Remember! Emotions are energy and so they don’t go away. If you stuff them down, that’s where they stay! So, when you experience trauma and you don’t deal with the emotion surrounding it, it stays in your BODY, and it creates these stories for you.

Your brain creates stories around your trauma because your brain wants to keep you safe. Your brain shifts into survival mode. In other words, when you have suppressed unprocessed emotional energy, your brain may still think you’re in some kind of danger and so it writes these limiting stories for you about your shame, your unworthiness, who you can’t be in the world, and what you shouldn’t say or do.

This makes us afraid to follow or rundown our dreams.

So many times, people who experience trauma begin to live in a gray-skied mental landscape. It is living inside a repeatedly recounted story that you believe about yourself.

No one wanted me.

I would never be good enough.

I could never be happy.

It is certainly okay to feel overwhelmed and scared when you start unfolding your trauma. The beginning can bring even more confusion. You don’t know what to do, where to go, what to read, or what makes sense.

The roadmap

Why go all in to let go? Did you know you can let go of past trauma and that your body already knows how?

Going into our body is very important because the trauma is stored in our tissues. We need to learn how our body specifically releases trauma, so “go all in” can mean so many things in these areas, it can be letting go of the negative beliefs in our minds, and it can also be letting go of things that happen in our body.

Basically, going all in and letting go are connected and are interconnected in many ways!!

The 3 steps to healing

The three-step process to heal trauma is inspired by Cami Birdnon (Trauma Trained Embodiment Coach).

As you start going in your body and begin learning tools, you will recognize differences, where trauma is released. This is what the 3 steps process is all about.

The 3 steps process is about being able to understand how your body talks to you. The approach is centered around TOP DOWN, BOTTOM UP & SIDEWAYS of your body.

This is an understanding of when your top-down is talking to you, when your bottom-up is talking to you, and when things are coming from the side which is the sideways process.

1. Top-down processing

The Top-down processing is all about awareness. Going on in your mind and using that awareness to pay attention to what’s going on in your body. It is also a mindset tool. You are being the watcher, the noticer of what is going on in your body.

Trauma is not always visible, and this is why we have the top-down concept.

The approach: you have something going on in your body. You find yourself doing certain things repeatedly, why?

When you ask yourself questions, you may find; oh, so it’s because am thinking this way about it and then that might link to a trauma belief. It’s AWARENESS and that is what we need to achieve mental well-being.

• The top-down approach raises questions
• you start to recognize thoughts
• Test the truthfulness of the thought
• Finding the links to trauma belief

Top-down processing is a nice space to use for journaling. You start to have tangible evidence and understanding of what is going on cognitively with the trauma happening in your body. Not only knowing what is happening in your body but also begin understanding what is normal in trauma 🙂

2. Bottom-up processing

This bottom-up processing is when you have something that seems to be uncontrolled. This is when triggers happen that you can’t control, and suddenly you feel like you need to curl up in a ball and hide, or when you have all that anxiety and want to fight to be free from something.

This is when you want to use some tools to offer safety to your body, once you recognize what you are feeling from the top-down processing. A well-known tool used in trauma healing is the (butterfly hug). The idea is that the butterfly hug teaches our body how it can be our container safety. In other words, this makes us connect to ourselves and learn to trust our bodies instead of trying to get out of our bodies which is often felt in trauma.

3. Sideways processing

In the previous two processes, we discussed how to raise questions about our thoughts, and from there we learned tools to handle uncontrolled anxiety, the tools to offer safety to your body. This leads us to the third and last process the sideways processing.

Process 3 deals with recognizing where the thoughts are coming from and what the energy coming from the thoughts.

Sideways enable us to observe both our top-down and bottom-up responses and reflect on how we perceive them. Do we judge ourselves? Are we compassionate towards ourselves? Do we believe we should be doing something better or differently? Do we view something as a problem?

• Sideways Tools include but are not limited to:
• Mindfulness
• Captured by Your Truth
• Be the Watcher
• Integration

Conclusion

Working on your mental health is very brave. It involves recognizing internal and external wounds. Repressed trauma stays within us and shapes limiting beliefs about ourselves.

By embracing the 3 steps you learned in this post today. We hope you can begin to release stored trauma, transform limiting beliefs, and move towards a lie of greater self-awareness, compassion, and mental well-being.

To practice more self-healing, you can click the Worksheet by Cami Birdnon for even more tips and ways to apply the 3-Step Process to Heal Trauma 😀