Hi. I have a lot of psychological trauma and I'm still quite unstable, but whenever I look back at how I was doing a year or two ago, I see that I've made tremendous progress (which is in itself healing and gives me a lot of hope). So hopefully some of my own personal experience will be useful. YMMV, it's all... well... personal.
Hey, so, the qualifier 'on your own' is strange. So many of the best things you can do to heal from trauma are not on your own, even though personal healing is super important. I've been particularly traumatised by a lifetime of abuse, so avoiding people is my natural inclination. The best way to override that trauma for me and dilute my very physical and hormonal fear response to others is to have healthy interactions with others and slowly acclimatise to a new sense of 'normal'. If I fear someone's anger and I talk to them and it's okay and they don't hit me, that went well. I should process that. I should be happy. I should allow myself to grieve that I've come to tense up and my heart's come to beat faster in expectation of blows or verbal abuse whenever I try to speak up for myself. I should remember that most of the experiences I've had since getting out of those abusive environments have been similarly healthy, and this is my new normal now. Trauma is a warped normal.
Even if I can't be openly vulnerable with people sometimes, or shouldn't, just being around them, feeling grounded in the real world and learning to actively enjoy the present, overwriting my strong mental associations of [good thing -> violence] with [good thing -> nice time], allowing myself to be happy, balancing out my emotional range, making sure I'm not alone and cooped up and paranoid and locked in self-destructive thoughts or repeating the past, is good.
What can we do when we're alone?
We can think. We can try to talk through our problems with ourselves. We can write. We can reflect on our progress, remembering that progress is not linear and even if we have a setback or everything stalls for awhile, what matters is we keep trying to move forward ultimately, that we can always get back in the saddle. We can do things that vent our feelings in positive ways like art. We can cry. We can try to figure out what normal is. But all that relies on being part of the world and letting society in. We can't be alone alone and withdraw fully like we might want to.
Part of that is expanding our comfort zone. So some days we might feel a little adventurous. Maybe that backfires and we retreat into the safest part of the safe zone for awhile, just like anyone else. But then we're ready to try again and little by little we expand our own boundaries.
And a therapist and a friend are both invaluable perspectives and guidance in these processes, and neither can be disposed of. A therapist is qualified to help nurture you, is a third party whom you are allowed to dump anything you want on without feeling guilty, and is experienced with your shit. A friend will love you and accept you and your baggage and pick you up and understand why sometimes you're not okay and let you talk through some of the bad stuff, and also let you experience affection and care for others in positive ways. Both will provide different perspectives that will help one's own mental journey (and any therapy absolutely has to be done with lots of soul searching).
Therapy can also be done in a group, and for many people and people with particular disorders, group therapy is an important component of treatment.
Having goals, both for your recovery and for things you'd like to do (because at some point in the healing process you have to accept both that you're going to live on in the world with this as part of your life inescapably, and also that you're going to get better, be able to function, and not even think of it every hour, even if that seems unimaginable) can be a powerful motivator. Some of my coping techniques include 'having an outing on Saturday to look forward to so I can deal with a painful anniversary' or 'planning to do something new long in advance so I have a reason to keep on going' or checking up on others and making sure others are checking up on me, or sitting and crying with music, or colouring in, or hugging my stuffed toys (I find things that help me feel simultaneously safe and child-like very comforting, as being unguarded is difficult for me now), or making sure my hands are busy with work, or cleaning, always cleaning my room out, throwing out useless papers and reminders of bad things, finding things I forgot I had and remembering good things because of them, experiencing the catharsis of letting go of some of those objects and their meaning... sometimes you just need to get by. And other days I function because I'm going to university and I want, more than I want even to succumb on the bad days, to be a neurogeneticist. Loving the world and learning to find things beautiful and moving everywhere has revitalised me. Some days I'm just happy because I'm treading water and doing okay considering everything that's happened, or because I'm a lot better than I was.
Most of all you have to be gentle with yourself, and accept that things will have ups and downs, that sometimes you won't be able to distract yourself from intrusive memories or reactions but you can find ways to get through it, that some days you'll just want to cry and cry and cry, that you're going to be happy some days too and that's completely okay after an experience of loss or tragedy and doesn't invalidate your suffering or anyone else's, that you're human and trauma is a form of neural conditioning and you'll make mistakes but you can also do better and you're determined to, and that it'll take a long time, maybe even be something you'll go through forever in drastically altered forms, but that you won't recognise yourself in five years.
