Healing Trauma through Parts Work, Resourcing, Integration, & Acceptance Practices

We are learning more and more about the impact of trauma. From books like The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk to What Happened to You? by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey, it feels like we are moving towards a deeper understanding of what trauma is and what we can do about it. Here at Modern Thrive Counseling, we’re here to help you deepen your understanding and increase self-compassion as you or a loved one heals from trauma.

Trauma is not only about what happened, but the absence of an empathetic person to be there with you while you were experiencing the trauma. In other words, trauma can be what didn’t happen just as much as what happened to you. Ever wonder why your therapist asks you to locate a feeling, memory or sensation in your body? That’s because our body creates a record of everything we’ve been through. Our bodies often knows more than our minds do. When we lean in and listen, your body can become your teacher. What is your body trying to tell you or teach you with the signals it is sending?

How do you heal trauma?

This is a huge question, and we will not be able to fully address it in this blog post. Trauma healing takes willingness and patience, and often a trained mental health professional to help guide you. However, we want to offer you some foundational knowledge regarding trauma.

We are all made up of different parts. There is our true self, and other parts, for example an anxious part that feels like it is part of us, but not all of us. Trauma has the effect of locking away the parts that got hurt the most. Think about it; the traumatic memories often get blocked out, or disregarded. Many people who experienced trauma in childhood say that they can’t remember big parts of their childhood. But I bet you can feel your stomach tighten or your head hurt, chest feel heavy or shoulders shrug up towards your ears when you think about the memory. It’s also common to push the memories away again.

This is functional; our parts try to protect us by blocking out the pain. And it works.. for awhile. Until it doesn’t. One of the first steps in trauma healing is acknowledging the part of you that kept you safe, even if it gave you other challenges, like anxiety or depression, codependency or avoidance, migraines, fibromyalgia, or GI issues. When we honor what that protective part was trying to do, we can begin to gain access to the memory work in a new way.

Next, we want to figure out what are resources that are available for you. Is there a nurturer, protector, or wise figure that you lean on in tough times? Perhaps it’s your grandmother, or the family dog, or the big tree in your backyard. By leaning in to protective resources, we guard the part that was hurt by the traumatic event with love and protection. Can you allow your younger self/inner child to experience a safe place in your mind?

Then we want to integrate. Dan Siegel explains that the path to healing is through integration. When we experience increased levels of arousal in fight, flight or freeze, the less resilience we have and the more traumatic the event will feel. However, when we can slow down the process of escalation, exhale long breaths and begin to integrate the mind with the body, healing can begin. In order for trauma healing to occur, you have to lean in to what your body is communicating and let your mind catch up. So often the sensations we feel when reprocessing trauma are not comfortable so we pull away and avoid those feelings. However, when we can listen to our bodies and then make some cognitive sense of them, that is when you begin to feel in control again.

Finally we want to engage in acceptance. “Accepting something doesn’t mean you approve of it. But acceptance is also not the same thing as putting off a decision or not making a decision. When you accept something, you stop fighting with reality and embrace what is, even if you don’t like it,” Amanda E. White. The role of acceptance in trauma healing is a vital piece to the healing process. When we can accept the reality of what has happened to us, we can then lean into compassion and begin to change our narrative of the future.

Healing is understanding the parts of you that have tried to keep you safe. Healing is developing strong internal resources. Healing is integrating the mind with the body’s signals. Healing is in movement and music and connection. Healing is the paradox of acceptance and change.

There are many trauma treatments available. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a common trauma treatment and offers relief for many clients. EMDR helps clients reprocess their traumatic memories to decrease the body sensations accompanied with the memories Somatic experiencing and Internal Family Systems (IFS) are also effective trauma therapies. Somatic experiencing focuses on the experience of the body and learning ways to help the trauma move out through movement and tones. IFS helps clients learn more about their different parts that make up their internal system, and what each part needs to function more effectively. There are many other therapies for trauma. We wanted to give you a quick overview of a few of our favorites. Whatever path you choose, we wish you peace and self-compassion on your healing journey.

Perry, B. D., Winfrey, O. (2021). “What happened to you? conversations on trauma, resilience, and healing. Flatiron Books: An Oprah Book.

Siegel, D., & Solomon, M. (2003). “Healing trauma: attachment, mind, body and brain.” University of California-Los Angeles: Norton Professional Books.

van der Kolk, Bessel A. (2014). “The body keeps the score: brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma.” New York, New York: Viking.