Part 3 of 3: Do You Want a Lifeboat or a Ship to Cross the Sea? Here Are 3 Ways to Turn the Tables on Trauma

When the biological factory settings of our mind have been hijacked by trauma, traditional intellectual strategies cease to be effective. As we uncovered yesterday, trauma plays an ultimate deception: it completely disables our left brain. Trying to think, reason, or talk our way out of severe emotional disregulation when half our brain or mind is offline is impossible.

When I sat in that community room with my two fellow heartbroken attendees at the gathering organised by a fantastic small mental health charity, they looked at me and asked:

"What do you advise us to do?"

This is the advice I gave, which I share with you here: 

Step 1: Study & Spy on Your Enemy: Learn Trauma's Tactics, Tricks, and Threats

We cannot defeat an opponent that we do not understand. If we have less information about how trauma acts within our mind and body, our chances of turning the tables on it become remote. We must bypass cheap, surface-level self-help materials that provide a lifeboat when we need a ship to cross the sea.

Step 1 is gathering intelligence on the enemy, and that starts by studying these three essential manuals:

• The Body Keeps the Score by Dr Bessel van der Kolk (The definitive guide that helps us understand trauma’s tactics, tricks and threats, and how it hides in our body).
• What Happened to You? by Oprah Winfrey and Dr Bruce Perry (A profound shift that helps us to learn to stop asking "What is wrong with me?" And instead to learn to ask, "What happened to me?").
• What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo (A brilliant, raw blueprint of how a journalist wrestled with trauma, won and healed from Complex PTSD).

Step 2: Go Undercover in Your Body and Mind: When the Student Is Ready, the Teachers Appear

In The Body Keeps the Score, Dr Bessel van der Kolk delivers a truth that completely changed my life: traditional talk therapies and psychiatric medications frequently fail to resolve deep-seated trauma because they cannot access the primitive survival structures of the brain. Logic cannot reach a body that feels like it is constantly under attack. 

Instead, we must utilise "bottom-up" somatic and experiential treatments. These methods actively regulate the nervous system from the body upward, restoring our visceral sense of physical safety.

Taking his clinical insight into my daily practice, I have found a fantastic therapist who specialised in both Gestalt and EMDR, and started my healing journey. Later in my journey, I searched for and found a fantastic ROSEN Method bodywork therapist. The best decision I have made was to invest in my healing, learning how to outgrow surviving, how to breathe again, live again, and thrive. 

• Gestalt Therapy: is a humanistic, holistic psychotherapy that focuses on a person's present-moment experience rather than dwelling on past events. It emphasises personal responsibility and helps individuals understand how their current thoughts, actions, and relationships impact their well-being. The word "Gestalt" comes from German, meaning "whole" or "form," reflecting the core belief that people must be understood as a whole entity of mind, body, and environment.
• EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing): A structured technique that uses bilateral stimulation to help the brain safely reprocess and redefine traumatic memories. A structured psychotherapy that helps the brain process and heal from traumatic memories using bilateral stimulation, such as side-to-side eye movements. It allows the brain to successfully re-file the traumatic event as a normal, non-threatening historical fact.
• The ROSEN Method: A somatic process, listening to the body’s voice with touch, feeling for the unconscious physical tension, a sign of where the trauma is hiding in the body and combining this with verbal communication to unlock the meaning of the physical sensations and increase awareness, reconnecting and integrating the body and the mind. 

Step 3: When Our Soul Becomes Conscious, It Lights the Way—And Our Voice Is the Spark

Now for the homework. No matter how good or effective a medicine is, it has absolutely no effect unless we actually take it in a timely manner. This ensures that healing happens slowly but surely, and over time, the wound heals fully.

The third way to turn the tables is establishing a disciplined habit of keeping a regular Voice Journal:

Every modern smartphone has a built-in voice recorder. We need to use it to record our thoughts, particularly immediately after a therapy session or during a moment of intense emotional highs or lows. A voice journal can be 1 minute, 5 minutes, or 45 minutes—the length of time is not important. Voicing our thoughts, feelings, and ideas helps us see them more clearly, warts and all.

Crucially, remember that life consists of happy, sad, and neutral moments. We must remember to do a voice journal on each of these occasions to capture the full spectrum of our lives.

Never do a voice journal only on the sad days or the happy days! If you keep a record of only your extreme moments, how authentic or representative is that of your life—or for that matter, any life? By documenting the full spectrum, you learn to examine your life and see yourself, and it helps in the following ways:

• No Barriers to Entry: Writing requires spelling, sentence structure, and handwriting—tasks that your shut-down left brain will actively resist. Voice recording captures your immediate, raw truth without those filters.
• Capturing Auditory Data: A voice journal records the exact language of your soul. It captures long pauses, sudden crying, deep sighs, and shifts in tone. This serves to offload intense emotions into a safe, secure space. We learn to hold space for ourselves. We learn to become our own therapist.
• Exposing Hidden Patterns: When we review our recordings weeks or months later, the underlying patterns of our disregulation that remained hidden from view suddenly become visible. We learn to see that which we did not see before.

Over time, our mind learns to connect our soul with our voice, our spoken word, our emotions, and our body. We learn how to emote. We learn how emoting releases our emotions from the internal cage we have been locking them in.

We recognise and learn how voicing our emotions releases them, helping us offload them and how this provides for us an immediate way to regulate our emotions. This actively rebuilds, reconnects, and reintegrates the neurons between our logical left brain, emotional right brain, and physical body.

Final Thoughts: Healing, like life, is a journey, not a destination.

In his famous essay Experience, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

"To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom."

Remember, like any journey, during our healing there will be moments of deep despair, of pain, of struggle, quiet moments of bliss, happiness, and contentment, and many dull moments filled with the everyday vicissitudes of life. They are all equally important.

When we watch our favourite movie, filled with all these various moments, do we skip the parts where the main character is in despair or struggling, fast-forwarding the film just to reach the moments when they triumph?

Of course not.

Ask yourself:

'Why do we refuse to do that for a movie, yet we constantly try to do that with our own lives?

It is exactly because we watched every single painful moment of the main character’s journey that their final success becomes meaningful.

Trauma hides our inherent power the way heavy storm clouds hide the sun. But we need to remember: the sun has never once left the sky. Let us stop calling our unconscious conditioning "fate."

Let’s learn how to direct and create our life, and unlock our Path to Self-Power