Self-Care Series: My Journey of Redefining Self-Care

If you feel that trauma has changed you and your needs, and you’re struggling to find what truly soothes you, feeds your soul and breaths life, stability and purpose back into you throughout fresh trauma and post-trauma, then keep reading. Maybe it will be of some help to you.

I know what it’s like to be left reeling with and having to manage a trigger storm. I know what it’s like to find myself feeling mentally and emotionally foggy and drained. I know what it feels like to be drowning in the waves of emotional flooding and flashbacks. I know what it feels like to wake up from an uninterrupted night’s sleep and feeling exhausted and disoriented. I’m intimately familiar with the trepidation, dread, and even sometimes the terror facing bedtime and all the potential sleep disturbances. I know the distressing cognitive dissonance from learning how to trust again.

In the storm, the chaos, the waves, the disorientation, the confusion, the sheer trauma, panic, fears, anxiety, anger, deep pain, resentment, and hope; I know how hard it is to redefine one’s own self-care when you hardly know who you are anymore. As I’ve passed through alllll the trauma and freeze and moved out of trauma I changed. My needs changed. Which meant my self-care needed some changing too. The things that once fueled me weren’t enough anymore. With my world still feeling upside-down and backwards from all the change and redefining myself in relation to my traumatic past; feeling so broken and worthless, I felt lost and uncertain as to what self-care really was and what it looked like for me post-trauma. The process of reformulating my self-care was eye-opening and transformational. But it didn’t happen in one therapy session or “ah-hah” moment. Instead, my definition and understanding of self-care morphed gradually. Then creating my new self-care plan began. It was more of a self-discovery, trial-and-error process.

Let’s start with how my ideas of self-care morphed.

Prior to experiencing new trauma in 2017 I thought that self-care was doing what outwardly appeared good: putting on makeup, exercising, and eating healthy food. Discovering that I was living with fresh trauma happened gradually over the course of a few years. But when the realization hit me I started attending support groups. There I learned (or rather observed) that self-care (according to some of these groups) was just a way of distracting sufferers away from “obsessively worrying” about the cause of their trauma.

I was so desperate to “own” whatever I needed to own so as to alleviate the trauma. So I decided to try taking on the mindset or belief that I was truly “obsessively worrying”. All I would need to do then is just self-care a lot and all the trauma would go away. Right…?

It was both energizing and disempowering. Me? Choosing to “obsessively worry” about the cause of my trauma? The truth was that I was dealing with trauma – NOT a mental or emotional health diagnosis of “codependency”, OCD or generalized anxiety that caused me to “unnecessarily and obsessively worry about things that most likely would never happen.” Out of desperation and out of shame for “being the cause of my own suffering” (according to some of these support groups), I started diving into self-care. Anything to relieve the incessant tsunamis of trauma response.

Though I went into intensive self-caring for very inaccurate and harmful ideas, some things started to shift for me. I realized self-care was building new neuropathways – essentially reconditioning my brain away from living in constant trauma-mode. I had experienced the reconditioning process before as a young adult when I worked on healing childhood trauma. My familiarity with neuropathways was empowering and motivating. I now had some power to change my own brain’s wiring and responses!

I began taking violin lessons from a renowned violin teacher in my area. I chose violin because it is upside down, backwards, and has different strings and fingerings than a cello. (I grew up playing piano and cello.) Violin required a lot more focus and effort – a perfect challenge for rewiring my brain. Every time my trauma response was activated, I picked up the violin and concentrated really hard on proper hand position, bowing, fingering, tone, intonation, and projecting sound.

Learning violin was perfect for small to moderate trauma responses – while my prefrontal cortex (the “higher order” brain) could still be accessed. But for large trauma responses that dropped me to the floor and left me gasping for air, I needed something else. I needed something that would tap directly into my brain stem – the part of the brain that runs the “fight-flight-freeze” trauma responses. I didn’t know what would work. But I started trusting my brain and body to guide me.

I began observing and listening to what my mind and body craved in those intense moments of incapacitating trauma responses. I’d feel a yearning to crawl under my bed and cover my head. I listened to that yearning and crawled under my bed. I lay there in the dark enclosed corner rocking myself with a blanket over my head – under my bed. Within seconds I was soothed and back in the present again.

I lay there quiet and still under my bed gaping in awe at the rapidity of my recovery from such a debilitating trigger.

In the stillness, safety and wonderment under my bed I felt and heard God speak to me and teach me a lesson on self-care that I will never forget.

Self-care is doing genuine, compassionate actions that show your inner self that you are safe with YOU.

Think on that.

Stay tuned for the next blog post in my self-care series.