Early in my own work of healing from trauma I watched the movie 28 Days with Sandra Bullock and had such a longing to go away from my regular life so that I could focus on healing and come back ‘fixed.’ It can be hard to feel so bad and have to go about your life as if you weren’t feeling that way. It can be hard to feel what you feel on the inside and feel like you have to walk around ‘acting normal’ and not be able to share it on the outside.

And sometimes, especially depending on what you are dealing with, going away might be necessary for your healing. But for most people healing from trauma, it’s not about going away to get better, it is about learning to stay. Stay with the part of you that is healing. And stay with the part of you doing your day-to-day life. Healing from trauma is about learning to hold both: your life in the present and your trauma history--all at the same time.

Holding both is rarely stated directly. This explicit instruction –that you have to hold two tracks of your life running simultaneously—is often unsaid and left entirely implicit. Yet I have found it to be one of the more important skills required for healing. Letting your life run on two tracks at the same time is actually what allows for healing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a single person or an entire country—you have to be able to do both at the same time—manage the pace of life of you are living in the present and manage the pace of trauma work—so that both exist in a balance that allows you to both function in your life and continue to heal. There will be days you have to focus more on the present, and there will be days you will focus more on your trauma history—where you need to take extra time to recover.

There is an illusion, once you start working with your trauma history, that you can muscle through it. That once you start taking on your trauma history—that is all you are going to do, in sort of a linear all out effort. But the pace of healing—allowing yourself time to digest what you are healing from, to rest, to gather your feet under you, and then to head back in, is what allows for real mending of what had been torn.

The two tracks, present and past—are what weave you together into a whole—and allow a new future to begin to emerge. I have found in my work that when people are working through a difficult trauma history that the present can get ignored—both in treatment and in their attention to what else is going on outside of treatment. But the present is what keeps you connected to your center. The present acts a set of belay ropes connecting you to a sense of stability and safety. The present is where you can feel the solidity of your feet. The present is where you look around and feel that whatever your history was, you have survived it. The present is where you recognize that the trauma is over and you are currently in an entirely different chapter in the book of your life. Your ability to find an anchor in the present will give you a much greater capacity to heal your past.

Sometimes the metaphor I like to use is someone who is working two jobs—or really one full time job and one job they are trying to do on their own time. Like the person who is working full time and then comes home every day to work on renovating their house. Both are true: they are doing the work they need to at their job AND they are doing the work in the evening to renovate their house. It isn’t easy.  It can feel tiring and overwhelming. Sometimes things go wrong in one place or the other. Or both. But you stay aware of both tasks. You hold both tasks as important.

Whenever you feel yourself getting too overwhelmed with your trauma history—you can reground yourself in the present. You can focus more on the everyday and mundane: clean a closet, get the oil changed in your car, meet a friend for coffee. Do something in the present that you can see, feel, hear.  And only when you feel solid again in the present, can you return to your work in the past. It can be really difficult to have both tracks playing in your head at the same time. It can be really difficult to hold the aspects of yourself—the ‘you’ you were then, and the ‘you’ you are now. But it is a skill worth working on, a muscle worth strengthening. And the more you practice holding both tracks, the more solid your healing journey will be.  

© 2024/2014 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD