Rebuilding after trauma: Feeling fragile

Recovery from traumatic or painful events can leave us feeling emotionally fragile, physically shaky, and lacking a firm foundation from which to move on.

The event could be a bereavement, the end of a relationship, a long or serious illness, being the victim of a crime, or the cumulative effect of many small knocks and setbacks that never quite get resolved.

Small tasks can seem impossible to cope with, everyday responsibilities feel like the heaviest burden on your shoulders, and by the end of the day, you're worn out both physically and mentally.

How do you get back on track?

Here are some suggestions for building yourself back up again during recovery from a traumatic or painful event:

1. Be kind to yourself: Telling yourself to 'get a grip' is rarely helpful and certainly effective in the long term. Clients in deep emotional pain often ask, understandably, 'When will it stop hurting like this?' My answer is that emotional wounds, like physical ones, heal in their own time, but there are things we can do to help the process along.

2. Don't expect too much of yourself: Emotional pain can be as debilitating as physical illness. Most people now accept that 'pull yourself together' is not a helpful response to someone struggling to recover from a physical illness, so why expect it to work for someone in emotional or mental anguish?

3. Accept that your emotional pain is as real as a physical injury: Emotional pain has physical effects on your body. It’s important to acknowledge that emotions are not an 'add-on' to our experience of life, something that can be switched on and off at will—they are an integral part of it and must be respected.

4. Write about the event or experience: Research has shown that people who write about traumatic events feel better about their emotional and physical health than those who didn't write or only about the factual events of their day. For some people, writing in the third person about their trauma made recalling the painful event easier to cope with. So instead of writing "I was afraid of being on my own after the divorce", you could try "She (or he) was very afraid...". Find ten minutes of quiet time every day to write in this way.

5. Set small goals: You may be a high flyer or a superstar when you're firing on all cylinders, but when recovering from emotional trauma, you need to reassess what's important in terms of the goals you set for yourself. When I worked in the media, we had an expression - 'no one dies...' - for those times when deadlines were looming, and the demands for results were high, yet, in the grand scheme of things, were they a matter of life and death? No. Work out which tasks and responsibilities might seem crucial in normal times can be safely postponed with little ill effect until you feel stronger.

6. Ground yourself by rediscovering the things that make you feel good: What you like to smell, touch, look at, listen to, and taste. If you can combine doing something with one or more of those sensual pleasures, then so much the better. For example, going for a walk by the sea, watching the gulls, hearing the waves crashing on the pebbles under your feet, and smelling and tasting the salt from the spray. Or having a soak in a warm bath, while listening to music, with scented oils or candles and a glass of wine or fresh juice.

7. Reconnect with your support network: Feeling fragile can leave us with a sense of isolation and a need to withdraw from the world and our friends and family. Sometimes this is a healthy and much-needed thing to do, but it can also become entrenched, habitual, and damaging. Make a list of the people, organisations, and other resources you can use for support. 

8. Stay nourished: Sometimes, when we're in pain, eating and drinking is the last thing on our minds. But just as after a physical injury, the body (and mind) needs fuel to heal. Eat small meals regularly throughout the day and drink plenty of fluids. Research has shown that even mild dehydration (i.e., before we even start to feel the sensation of being thirsty) can have marked effects on our emotional state and our ability to think clearly. While alcohol can give us a temporary uplift or respite from our woes, it's a depressant, and too much of it can worsen our distress in the long run.

In some ways, 'stay nourished' is the most important suggestion because 'nourishment' doesn't just mean food and drink; it also refers to all the other things I've already mentioned.

In recovering from emotional trauma, you need to 'feed' yourself—your body, mind, senses, and emotions—to give your whole self the nourishment it needs to rebuild.