Healing on Purpose: Our Stage-Based Trauma Integration Pathway
- Aug 21, 2023
- 4 min read
At growURpotential, Stage-Based Trauma Integration starts with understanding the mind-body connection. We invite you to align your understanding with this orientation video: Healing on Purpose.
Healing is labor. Healing takes time. And every body deserves the opportunity to move at a speed that supports our unique journey. Our beliefs, memories, emotions, habits, relationships, and experiences live somewhere in us. When trauma remains unresolved, the body may communicate through anxiety, depression, brain fog, burnout, disconnection, difficulty focusing, or patterns we cannot seem to think our way out of.
Stage 1: Stabilization + Trusted Space + Naming Needs
We begin by helping the mind-body cope without overwhelming distress. Before asking What happened to you? we are most interested in: What do you need right now?
Stage 1 is about stabilization, building trust in healing spaces, and understanding our needs. Everyone has a therapist or mentor whom we consider a care partner, and everyone participates in group experiences.
Together, we explore a care plan. We learn language for what is happening within us. We begin naming unmet needs. And our care partners challenge thoughts and patterns that may no longer serve the life we are building.
Stabilization does not mean that everything is suddenly comfortable.
It means we are building enough support to stay present while doing THE WORK.
Stage 2: Track + Process + Practice
Trauma has stuck points. Sometimes we know exactly where they came from. Sometimes we only know that a particular person, conversation, memory, smell, rejection, silence, or experience makes our body respond as though something dangerous is happening again.
Stage 2 teaches us to track unresolved trauma instead of simply being overtaken by it.
We begin with pattern recognition, noticing our current activations and processing our story out load to develop somatic awareness. Somatic practices help us understand the relationship between what we think, what we feel, and what happens inside the body.
Instead of relying only on talking, we may use movement, sensation, mindfulness, grounding, body awareness, and other practices that help us recognize and respond to activation. The goal is not to become a person who is never triggered. The goal is to become increasingly confident in recognizing that something is happening in me, and I know how to care for myself while it is happening.
That is confident self-care. And with practice, we begin the beautiful work of reauthoring the world around us.
Stage 3: Deeper Trauma Processing
Not every stuck point moves because we understand it or because we cracked some hidden code. We can know why we behave a certain way and still find ourselves doing it. We can forgive and still feel the grief. We can know that the danger has passed while some part of us continues preparing for its return.
For people who feel ready, Stage 3 creates space for deeper trauma processing.
Our video names approaches including EMDR, Brainspotting, Tapping, Tension Stress and Trauma Release, psychedelic integration, and other integrated somatic care.
These approaches are not a race toward the most painful memory.
These opportunities work differently with stubborn stuck points. The brain has extraordinary capacity beyond thinking and many pathways exist to integrate healing beyond the behaviors that frustrate us, or our attempts to keep us safe.
Healing asks us to become curious: What is no longer working?
And then: What might we try instead?
Healing Does Not Require Us to Do Everything
There is an important choice built into our model.
Many people choose to graduate after confident practice has been accomplished. Stage 3 is not proof that someone is more committed to healing. Deeper trauma processing is available for people who are ready and who continue to experience stuck points they want to address. Thriving on purpose is a lifelong process.
Sometimes healing looks like playing games with strangers until our minds remember that new people can be safe. Sometimes healing looks like practicing healthy communication, participating in community, learning coping skills, finding a mentor, asking for help, or finally naming something we need.
Resilience is innate.
Hard experiences often make us forget.
We invite you to take one step at a time toward the practice that helps us remember.
Healing Justice Means We Do Not Heal Alone
Our work is rooted in Healing Justice and survivor-led mentorship: Each one, teach one.
As we heal, we increase our capacity to become healing people in our families, neighborhoods, workplaces, and communities.
This also means questioning who gets recognized as holding healing wisdom.
Decolonizing healing asks us to expose the ways wisdom can be minimized or devalued simply because its origins and pathways exist outside academia.
Every body carries wisdom.
Clinical knowledge matters.
Lived experience matters.
Community wisdom matters.
The Journey Starts and Ends With Self-Reflection
Our Stage-Based Trauma Intervention can be remembered simply:
Stage 1 — Stabilize. Build trust. Assess what we need.
Stage 2 — Track unresolved trauma. Process current triggers. Practice somatic self-care until confidence grows.
Stage 3 — When ready, address the deeper stuck points that remain.
There is no prize for rushing.
There is no single healing tool that fits every body.
And there is no requirement that our healing look like somebody else's.
At growURpotential, we know that every body is capable of healing.
Your healing is worth your commitment.
Choose it ~ on purpose.
Book an appointment for a consultation today, or ask for financial assistance at casemanager@growURpotential.org