Written by: Jen Barnes, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Only talking and thinking about your traumatic stress isn’t how to recover from it. In fact, using only cognitive techniques to recover from traumatic stress may work in the short term, but long term, you will end up feeling more stuck, and it can be harder to heal.
I understand why you would think talking and thinking alone could help you recover. For centuries, treatments for traumatic stress and mental health-related struggles have been talking therapy and techniques that help you shift how you think about the problem. Those things can help and may help for a while.
But the problem is, if you have been facing traumatic stress, that stress is encoded in your body, not in language.
Here’s how: When we are facing traumatic stress, our nervous system shifts into the fight or flight response (sympathetic nervous system) or the shutdown response (dorsal vagal). In these responses, the parts of our brain that think and that create narrative memory (i.e., the story using words) are relatively inactive. Thus, the memories we have of traumatic events are stored in the body. These body memories show up in the form of body sensations, images, smells, and other somatic experiences. The words we have that tell the story of a traumatic event tend to be created from these somatic experiences, not from memory themselves. To heal, we need to get to the root of the stored memory, which is in the body. This is why you can go to years of talk therapy or talk about the chronic traumatic stress you face for hours and hours and never really feel better. Alternatively, you may feel better for a while, but the same troubles resurface. So what can you do instead? You can use body-based techniques to heal from the traumatic stress you face ‒ to move the trauma from your body and reorient yourself to the present, where the trauma isn’t happening anymore. There are several body-based or somatic therapies that can help. My two favorites are Internal Family Systems and Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga. Today I will share about Internal Family Systems. Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a type of therapy and, in some ways, a way of life that recognizes our multiplicity, that is, that we all have parts. For example, you may have a part of you actively listening to what I am saying that may be wondering about this multiplicity thing, perhaps another part of you thinking, “that’s ridiculous, I don’t have multiple personalities,” and perhaps another part thinking about what you’re going to eat for dinner. Recognizing that we all have parts honors that we can feel multiple ways about the same thing at the same time. Further, it honors that we may hold multiple perspectives on the same experience. For example, we may have parts of us who hold more of a trauma response to an experience even if our more present, thinking parts have made sense of what happened.
Recognizing this opens the door to deeper healing from a place of self-love and self-compassion.
Most importantly, in IFS, all parts are welcome. All of our parts have value and are trying to help us in some way, even if it doesn’t seem like it on the surface. It’s just that sometimes the ways parts try to help us are outdated, perhaps from a time in our life when that strategy worked in some way.
So even if you aren’t going to jump into therapy right now with an IFS therapist, one way you can incorporate this into your life is to honor your inner parts and allow them to be welcome ‒ even if you don’t like the way they are showing up.
This can be as simple as saying, “a part of me wants to scream at admin for not getting that they put too much on us,” and then honoring that the anger and urge to scream is completely valid because it’s true that too much is being put on you and that anyone would feel angry about that. At the same time, a part of you may realize it isn’t effective to yell at the bosses, so you may seek out an alternative way to send the message.
The important piece is that you don’t shame the part of you who wants to scream or try to suppress the anger this part feels. Instead, you can allow space to receive the message of this part who is feeling angry and wants to scream, validate it, take it in, and reflect on an effective way to handle the situation.
Using IFS in this way can help us work through our many feelings and mitigate shame by recognizing whatever is coming up for us is valid, even if that isn’t where we want to land permanently. A great resource to help with this kind of work is the book Self-Therapy by Jay Earley.
For deeper, trauma-related work, I highly recommend seeking out an IFS therapist. Since IFS can bump into some of that heavier stuff, it is best not to go it alone to avoid re-traumatization or getting stuck in some way.
For more on how to work with Jen on recovering from traumatic stress and burnout, you are invited to her complimentary workshop, How to Recover From Chronic Stress and Build Resilience in Nursing, on Thursday, October 20th, at 7:30 p.m. Central Time. Follow this link to register. The event will be recorded, so be sure to register to access their replay and the accompanying workbook.
Jen Barnes, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Jen Barnes is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker in private practice in Minneapolis, MN. She specializes in complex trauma, PTSD, stress, and grief. The daughter and sister of nurses, she has a passion for empowering nurses to build resilience. She has worked with nurses 1:1 hoping to expand her reaching to a broader audience. In 2021 she completed the Dare to Lead certificate program in order to more effectively address organizational challenges in healthcare. Most recently, she spoke at the American Association of Critical Care Nurses’s 2022 NTI conference on Building Resilience in Nursing.
