Category: Trauma Healing

Anxiety Relief, Mental health, Personal Development, Trauma Healing

How to Start a Gratitude Practice

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During my 2nd year of graduate school, I began experiencing the pendulum of anxiety swinging to depression. Searching for a solution, I ended up taking a workshop on how incorporating a practice of gratitude can help decrease your symptoms of both anxiety and depression. I decided to commit to spending five minutes a day writing what I am grateful for, and on the days where I struggled to find gratitude, I would go back and revisit past entries for inspiration. I found it beneficial because it was gratitude in my own words, not someone telling me to be grateful. This is why I encourage all of my friends, clients and family to start a gratitude practice.

If you have noticed that you have difficulty focusing on the positives rather than the negatives, you are not alone. This is because we have had what is known as the “negativity bias” hardwired in our brains since the primitive ages. At that time, this was a crucial survival tool that allowed us to prepare for and navigate the worst-case scenario in each situation.

However, just because this was programmed into our nervous system thousands of years ago doesn’t mean we are helpless. That is where the power of gratitude comes in!

Whether you choose to verbally recite or jot them down in a notebook, formulating a list of things we are grateful for helps rewire our brain to remain in a positive state. I have an app that gives me a daily prompt of things I am thankful for that day.

If you are new to practicing gratitude, you are in luck, it’s easy, and there are no rules on how to do it. Putting in the effort is what matters.

I recommend my clients start by stating or journaling between 3-10 things they are grateful for within the last 24 hours. This helps us stay grounded in the present and prevents the tasks from becoming repetitive over time.

Maybe you are grateful for the discount you got on groceries, how great the outfit you wore to work looked, and how the sunset looked on this beautiful spring evening. Boom! You’re done! It is that easy.

Still unsure? Here are five benefits of having a consistent gratitude practice.


  1. Gives Us Hope for the Future

    If you can find a way to be grateful for the small milestones you accomplish today, think about how you will feel when you truly achieve your dreams?


  2. Reduced Stress

    Loads of research have shown that keeping a daily gratitude journal can help lower cortisol levels and, as a result, signal our body to relax.


  3. Improves Sleep

    By lowering our stress, we can sleep much more freely. Plus, if you wake up and cannot fall back asleep, rather than check your phone, start reciting things you are grateful for and watch yourself slowly doze back off to sleep.


  4. Boosts Self-Esteem

    You will often be writing about things you have accomplished. What better way to remind yourself of your successes than seeing them written down on paper?


  5. Instantly Boosts Your Mood

    Focusing on all the positives in your life makes it that much harder for your brain to drift back toward the negatives. Plus, on days that seem especially hard, you can return to previous days and remind yourself of all the things you have been grateful for. The best part about it? It’s written in your own words. It’s not a friend or coworker trying to convince you that your life is fantastic. You already did that heavy-lifting!

Through your journey as an entrepreneur, your emotions will undoubtedly vacillate from high to low depending on your success.  This is why I encourage my clients to start a gratitude practice to help them cultivate a positive mindset, allowing them to avoid the severe pendulum swings that seem almost built-in to the entrepreneurial experience. 

It can be easy to forget to focus on our lives’ beautiful aspects with an increasingly hostile world around us. That is why I cannot emphasize enough the importance of developing a gratitude practice as part of your daily routine.

Start getting in the habit today! There is no wrong way to add gratitude to your life.

Anxiety Relief, Mental health, Personal Development, Trauma Healing

What is the difference between EFT and EMDR?

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Are you starting to embark on your healing journey and find yourself researching ways to jumpstart or accelerate the healing process?

You may have come across the terms Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Both are widely accepted and prominently used models in psychotherapy that help reprocess past experiences.

When we are actively healing trauma, we need to rewire and strengthen the neural pathways in our brain. This is necessary because our brain tends to get “stuck” and focus on the negative aspects of past experiences. For example, a person who survives a car crash often agonizes and relives the traumatic portions of the event, rather than finding solace that they survived the event and became more appreciative of the fragility of life.

Both EFT and EMDR require the brain and body to reprocess your trauma by simultaneously stimulating both sides of your brain. Ultimately the aim is to allow yourself to view the full scope of an event.

When I discuss EMDR with my clients, we start by understanding the role rapid eye movement plays in processing our day. As you may know, the portion of deep sleep is known as REM-sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep. When we reach this level of sleep, our body is essentially paralyzed outside of our eyes, which flicker back and forth as we process the day’s events. If that day was particularly traumatic, the events can get “stuck” and develop into recurrent nightmares, physical manifestations, or dramatic shifts in our personalities.

With EMDR, we want to tap into the brain’s ability to process and digest memories. During a session, you will discuss a problematic memory with a licensed professional while moving their fingers back and forth while you track with your eyes. Sometimes they may use a light bar, a set of buzzers, or ask you to tap your shoulders as an alternative. Regardless of the practice, the idea is to activate both sides of the brain and help us stop reliving our trauma, and allow us to move forward in our lives.

EFT is a similar practice but does not require the guidance of a licensed professional. Instead of following a finger back-and-forth with your eyes, you will be tapping on different meridian points while desensitizing yourself to the stressful memory. I like to think of it as a form of emotional acupuncture.

Now that you have a better understanding of the basic concepts let’s talk about some similarities and differences.

Similarities
  • Both focus on rewiring the brain to process traumas, fears, and limiting beliefs.
  • Both incorporate the mind-body connection by stimulating the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
  • Both use the Subjective Units of Distress Scale (SUDS) to measure progress objectively.
  • Both focus on our earliest memories rather than our most severe ones. For example, if you fear public speaking rather than focusing on the worst sensation you’ve felt, you are asked to think of why this fear originated in the first place.
  • While public speaking, the aim is to pin the earliest time the physical sensation was present in your body. Our oldest memories are the ones our brains return to the pull evidence to support their desire to catastrophize an upcoming decision.
Differences
  • Anyone can be trained in EFT, making it more accessible. When I got certified in EFT, I took an 8-hour class with an exam at the end.
  • EMDR, on the other hand, requires a master’s level therapist or a therapist working towards a master’s degree while under the supervision of a licensed therapist. Because EMDR tends to bring up intense memories, someone with experience in therapy must be present to help you stay in your body and prevent you from dissociating.
  • In my experience, EFT is less intense because you are focusing on how the memory feels in your body rather than solely on the memory. EFT helps remove the feeling in your body to allow you to discuss then and further heal the trauma.
  • EMDR, on the other hand, focuses on the image without talking or looking inward.
  • EMDR “butterfly tapping” can be helpful to do at home but is more effective when done with a licensed professional.
  • You can do EFT on your own. Many free resources on Pinterest and YouTube can help guide you through EFT tapping protocols. While there are YouTube videos that take you through EMDR sessions, I personally would not recommend these as I had had clients do them in the past and found themselves more triggered than ever before because there was no one present to help guide them out of their altered mental state.
As a provider, I am always looking for new and effective tools for my clients to utilize. In 2015 I got trained in EMDR, and every few years, I participate in additional training to help support my clients. My first introduction to EFT came in the summer of 2021. After my first experience with it, I felt a significant benefit and knew I had to get certified in this modality as well.

Being trained in both, you might ask which I prefer or find most effective… 

The answer is that you really can’t go wrong with either one! I practice EFT on myself regularly, as I don’t always have the opportunity to sit down with a licensed therapist to do EMDR. I recommend trying both and finding out which one works best for you.

The important thing is that you are actively striving to make yourself a better person!
Anxiety Relief, Mental health, Personal Development, Trauma Healing

Five Benefits of Healing Your Trauma

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Back in January, I did my first ever YouTube Live. As the nerves were settling in, I took a moment to pause and reflect on how far I had come since posting my first YouTube video back in 2020. If you had told me back then that I would ever have the courage to go live on YouTube, I would have said that you had lost your mind! Until recently, I considered myself risk-averse, so what changed? The answer is pretty simple: I invested the necessary time into healing my past trauma.

But Alyssa, healing your trauma sounds intense! Who wants to be reminded and have to relive awful memories? Most of us would rather “keep calm and carry on.” While that motto seems like the safer route, there are several benefits to healing your trauma! Let’s dive into what I feel are the five most essential advantages of healing your trauma.

1. Feeling Validation and Acknowledgment
We often downplay the trauma we have been through as a defense mechanism, telling ourselves and others things like “it was so long ago” or “you know it really wasn’t that bad.” In reality, trauma can negatively impact our lives, regardless of how others interpret its severity.

When I am doing trauma work with a client, we focus on validating what happened to us. We acknowledge that these negative experiences were not okay and that it is okay to feel sad that they occurred.

This validation can help us process and move forward, cultivating a sense of safety that we can live our truth and not force ourselves to downplay past experiences.

2. Acquire New Coping Skills
As we heal our trauma, we develop new coping skills that allow us to manage past, present, and future traumas more efficiently. Not everyone’s coping skills will be the same, but we will find skills that best suit our needs with practices.

One of the most significant benefits of healing our trauma is getting rid of the layering effect. Without healing trauma, we continue to compile trauma on trauma, which adds more and more stress to our plates. Instead, we are now given somewhat of a blank slate, allowing us to remain in the present and worry about the here and now.

In my course Inner Compass Accelerator, we dive deep into the idea of widening our window of tolerance. As our window of tolerance expands, the more stress we can handle and the less fear we develop about experiencing future stressful situations.

3. Understanding How Your Trauma Has Impacted You
Our trauma causes us to see our lives through a distorted lens. This lens often catastrophizes the worst possible outcome in every scenario. As a result, our decision-making changes. We try to “play it safe” rather than take the necessary risks to live the life we desire.

Understanding how our trauma has impacted us changes our perception of what we are capable of achieving. It also unlocks our ability to find more joy in life, ultimately allowing us to live the life we truly want to live. Who knows, after healing your trauma, you may have a career change or find the courage to get back out there and search for your soul mate.

4. Improved Self-Worth
Trauma survivors often blame themselves for their experiences, saying things like “I should have listened to them” or “why didn’t I just stay at home,” etc. This type of thinking is toxic and can lead us to go into a “shame-spiral” that prevent us from chasing after our goals and dreams.

When we heal our trauma, we no longer waste precious moments of our lives shaming ourselves for the painful experiences. This newfound self-love allows us to bounce back from stress.

5. New Sense of Self
By healing your trauma, you will believe that things are possible that you would never have thought about before.

You will no longer find yourself scrolling through social media, seeing other successful people, and thinking, “they have something that I don’t.” Instead, you will say, “I have the same ability to be successful; I just need to nurture it.”

As an entrepreneur, it can be difficult to balance the demands of running a business with the need to heal traumas from your past.  Believe me, of all people, I get that.  But prioritizing your mental health and well-being is essential for setting yourself up for success in both your personal and professional life.

If you believe that you have past traumas that are holding you back and don’t know how to begin resolving them, I have two ways you can work with me at this time. You can either join my self-paced course Inner Compass Accelerator, or schedule one-on-one sessions to work with me directly.

Anxiety Relief, Mental health, Personal Development, Trauma Healing

5 Types of Trauma Responses

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Have you ever wondered why you act or respond the way you do during stressful situations?

This is something I ponder a lot, then one day, while I was attending a training, it hit me: most of us are just reacting to being triggered by trauma!

Trauma comes in all shapes and sizes and is something we all deal with regularly, regardless of where we are currently in our lives. Trauma at its core is something you perceive to be a negative past or present experience. Trauma causes a knee-jerk reaction in our nervous system that ultimately decides how we respond to the situation.

A typical example of this that you may have heard of is the “fight or flight” response. Often, this example is described as a situation such as a hiker accidentally running into a bear in the wilderness and is left with two choices: fight the bear or run.

However, it may surprise you to find out that there are five different trauma responses, not just these two choices. 

Before diving into each of these responses, it’s essential first to understand why these automatic physiologic reactions occur at all when we perceive stress.  
The prefrontal cortex of our brain controls judgment, decision making, personality expression, planning complex behaviors, and moderating social behavior. When trauma occurs, our brains go offline, and we rely upon our autonomic nervous system to take over. 

In the case of our hiker analogy, when the hiker hears or sees the bear, their prefrontal cortex doesn’t have enough time to interpret, process, and analyze the situation. Instead, it interprets and then immediately reacts. 

Our emotional trauma responses are similar to this mechanism. Whether the trauma happened five seconds ago or five years ago, our brains are wired to have instinctive reactions.

It is absolutely essential for entrepreneurs to be aware of the signs of their trauma responses so they are able to identify and react appropriately when they occur.  Otherwise, trauma responses can lead to decreased productivity, missed deadlines, hostile work environments and impacted team morale. 

My hope with this blog post is to provide you with an understanding of each of the five different trauma responses. Comprehending each of their signs and tendencies allows us to illuminate our negative behaviors and unhealthy coping habits. 

In no particular order, here are the five different trauma responses:

Fight:  When experiencing the “fight” trauma response, individuals develop a need for control and become combative and vigilant. Maybe you will notice you’ve become more argumentative with a loved one than usual. Or that you have become more mistrustful or judgmental than you had been in the past. This response can lead to self-destructive or self-sabotaging tendencies.

Flight:  With the “flight” trauma response, individuals will find themselves doing anything possible to avoid or escape a situation. Whether it’s distancing yourself from friends, refusing to commit to plans, or consuming social media rather than creating your own life experiences, this trauma response can be just as harmful to our mental health as any other.  

Freeze: When someone is in the “freeze” trauma response, they are consumed by fear and will only see the bad in situations. Generally, people will be overwhelmed with anxiety and the desire to fly under the radar and be more passive in social settings.

Submit: The “submit” trauma response is precisely what it sounds like: the person has submitted themselves to defeat or shame from the situation. Often those experiencing this will have an attitude of “why bother, I know I have lost” to whatever stressors present themselves to them. This manifests into self-hatred and causes them to stop working toward personal goals.

Attach: Those who experience the “attach” trauma response will do anything to help themselves feel connected. Whether it’s remaining in a toxic relationship or having promiscuous sex, this trauma response is fueled by a fear of abandonment. Many will feel like they need a connection with another human to help them navigate them through the day. 

These trauma responses will ebb and flow throughout our lives depending on the situation. Our bodies rely on them to protect ourselves from traumatic experiences.  

I encourage you to give compassion when you check in with your body during stressful situations and understand that these trauma responses are normal!
If you have made it this far and are interested in exploring this topic further, check out this video!