What Trauma Healing Looks Like

Source: Chris F / Pexels

This is the concluding post in a 3-part series.

Decades of research into human resilience after potentially traumatic events have shown repeatedly that two-thirds of us regain our resilience without any interventions required.

No matter the type, duration, or severity of potentially traumatic events, we are twice as likely to return to resilient functioning as we are to require extended support.

In part 2 of this series, we explored the flexibility mindset that resilience researchers have identified in the 66.6 percent of us who regain our resilience after traumatizing events:

"At the core of the mindset are three interrelated beliefs: optimism about the future, confidence in our ability to cope, and a willingness to think about a threat as a challenge" (Bonanno, 2021).

In part 2, I shared my concern that much of today's trauma-healing industry, with its outdated concepts and neuromyths, tends to interfere with all three of these protective beliefs.

However, the flexibility mindset can be cultivated, and George Bonanno's book, The End of Trauma (2024), focuses on this mindset and the related flexibility sequence that can help us restore our resilience.

From the flexibility mindset to the flexibility sequence

Bonanno describes resilience as: "a pattern of continued good mental health after potential trauma, or, more precisely, a stable trajectory of healthy functioning across time" (Bonanno, 2021).

This healthy functioning looks different for each of us, but follows a reliable sequence that includes context sensitivity, repertoire, and feedback monitoring.

Context sensitivity refers to your ability to identify what is happening, orient yourself to the situation, and make decisions about how to act based on your abilities and your skills.

Repertoire refers to your abilities, skills, and tools, which are unique to each of us. Also, and crucially, no single part of a repertoire has been proven to help people every time. No modality, no emotion regulation tool, no medication, and no trauma-informed approach is a surefire winner. The protective feature of your repertoire is its size, variation, and flexibility.

Feedback monitoring refers to your ability to critique your repertoire and your response and ask yourself: Is this working? For instance, if you've been relying on a specific trauma-healing modality with great dedication, yet not recovering, feedback monitoring would help you understand that it's time to move on to something else.

Your capacity for context sensitivity would help you understand that in your specific situation at this specific time, this modality is not useful for you. If you didn't know about feedback monitoring, you might double down on the modality, attach yourself to it with fierce dedication, and waste your time, energy, and money on something that's already not working for you.

And you might incorrectly conclude that you have failed, or that healing from trauma is not possible for you.

A strange truth: Everything works for some, and nothing works for all

We are surrounded by promises about the effectiveness of this or that trauma-healing modality, and it makes sense for practitioners to dedicate themselves to specific modalities. However, no trauma-healing approach has been shown to work universally, and many are being called into question because their neuroscience is outdated or incorrect, or because possible adverse effects have not yet been monitored.

If we focus too much on specific modalities, our options become limited, which means that our repertoire becomes less robust, and our feedback monitoring becomes impaired. The key is to focus on our own unique responses and to understand that restoring our resilience is a natural function; it's not dependent on any modality.

Trauma Essential Reads

We're Asking Sexual Trauma Survivors the Wrong Questions

What 'Prima Facie' Gets Right About Trauma and the Law

In fact, in The End of Trauma, Bonanno writes out a list of the most successful strategies people use in their healing process, and it's basically a list of everything that humans do to care for themselves. Some of these strategies include opposing actions such as suppressing and expressing emotions, modifying the situation or ignoring it, facing things head-on or using wishful thinking, getting therapy or not getting therapy, and avoiding people or asking for help. Some of these strategies may seem healthy or unhealthy, but depending on the context, each is a valuable part of our flexible repertoire.

The key to using your repertoire well is relying on the flexibility mindset of optimism, confidence, and a challenge mentality. This mindset helps you remain sensitive to the contexts in which you're using your strategies, and it helps you monitor the feedback you receive when you apply them.

For instance, if you're ignoring the situation with distractions or self-pity, yet those actions are helping you cope and rest, they're fine for now. But if those actions are leading to more distress or less sleep, they're not useful any longer, and it's time for a shift in your strategy.

Resilience researchers have found that the specific strategy is almost unimportant; anything that works is helpful. If a behavior or strategy meets your needs and helps you cope and regain your resilience without creating other problems, it's valuable.

Everything in the healing process is context-dependent and based on the flexibility and variability of your repertoire.

The unique trajectory of trauma healing

In part 1 of this series, I shared my concerns about research on trauma-healing modalities, because if they don't take our natural tendency for healing into account, their conclusions will be questionable. We can't claim that this or that modality works if 66.6 percent of the people in the study would have regained their resilience regardless of the intervention.

Each of us who survived traumatic events and regained our resilience had a unique trajectory. And in most cases, those trajectories were not transferable. What worked for you might not have any value for me, because our contexts and needs are different. And what works for you today might need to be swapped out for something else next month; your feedback monitoring helps you identify when another tool in your repertoire would be more appropriate.

Again, it's not the modality that guarantees healing from trauma; our return to resilience is a natural process that is based on our flexibility mindset and our ability to apply the flexibility sequence. That's where our focus needs to be.