Trauma Work - What Is It?

I’ve been doing this work for over 12 years now, and I can honestly say, I’ve impacted lives. How do I know? Because I’ve sat across from people who walked into my office completely shut down. Grey. Exhausted. Miserable. People who couldn’t see any light in their lives.

They were desperate. Desperate to heal. To feel again. To smile. And slowly, with time, they did.

But I want to be honest with you, trauma work is not just therapy. It’s not just “talking it out.” It’s not what you see on TV, where you're sitting on a comfy couch, laughing, having some grand aha moment, and then poof everything falls into place. That’s not how healing works.

Real trauma therapy? It’s messy. It’s uncomfortable. It’s brave.

It’s not just telling your story. It’s actually feeling it in your bones. It’s breathing through the parts of your past that your body still holds onto like they happened yesterday.

Let me put it this way: How often do you think about the happiest day of your life? Probably not that often, right? Why? Because those good memories are processed. They’re tucked away in the filing cabinet of your brain. They feel safe. They don’t hijack you.

But the worst days? How often do those memories crash in out of nowhere? How often do you feel that gut-punch, or tightness in your chest, or that overwhelming flood of “I’m not okay”?

That’s trauma.

It lives in the body. And trauma work is sitting in all that pain...the pain you’ve been avoiding for years and finally letting it move through you.

Think of it like this: Trauma is a blockage. It clogs the flow of energy in your body. You resist it, and it builds. It weighs you down. Your muscles hurt. You’re tired all the time. You feel stuck. Because you are.

Healing? It’s getting into that mud with someone who won’t flinch when it gets messy. Someone who says, “Let’s go there—together.”

I’ve had so many people over the years tell me: “I know why this happened.” “I know my ex treated me like garbage.” “I know what I should be doing.”

And I’ll gently say: If you really knew (deep in your body) you wouldn’t still feel so miserable. You wouldn’t still be sad. Or lost. Or questioning if you even matter.

Trauma work is more than knowing. It’s feeling. It’s releasing. It’s learning how to be okay feeling uncomfortable, so you can finally get unstuck.

Is it terrifying? Yeah. Sometimes it is. Is it hard? Absolutely. But is it worth it? More than anything.

And let me just say this: Healing isn’t always peaceful. It’s not some quiet walk into the sunset with deep breaths and gentle music. Sometimes it’s a shaky roller coaster with a broken seatbelt and cobwebs slapping you in the face.

But you will survive it. You can make it through. You are way more capable than you’ve ever been told. And just because someone (or a whole lot of people) told you otherwise, doesn’t mean that’s the truth.

You just haven’t been told enough: You can. You will.

So what is trauma work? It’s you getting real about what’s been buried. It’s letting yourself cry the tears you’ve been holding in for years. It’s honoring the pain in your body and saying, “I’m not carrying this alone anymore.”

And eventually........That’s when the breath comes. That’s when the light breaks through. That’s when you start to feel like you again.

You’ve got this, my friend.