Anxiety is a common symptom many experience as a result of unhealed trauma. When considering a holistic approach to recovery, healing might be facilitated by supporting your body with a focus on specific nutrients. Mindfully incorporating foods high in these nutrients or supplementation can make sense to provide your body with the nutrients it needs to manage the effects of traumatic stress. Magnesium is one of these nourishing and soothing nutrients that can support your body in being able to calm down, and in managing your blood sugar.

What is The Role of Sleep in Trauma Recovery?

Sleep is essential for healing and wellbeing. During your sleep your body gets to regenerate, heal, detox, recover from the day. Cell regeneration, promoted by the so-called “growth hormone” mostly happens during the REM phase of your sleep, which is the deepest sleep and the time you are dreaming. Under normal circumstances, your brain processes your day and everything that happened during your sleep. It makes new connections and transforms negative thoughts and sensations into lessons learned during the deep sleep phase (called REM). But why is sleep an issue when you’ve made traumatic experiences? And what is the role of sleep in trauma recovery?

Elevated, Soulistic HealingSoulistic EndeavorNovember 10, 2021Sleep, Trauma Recovery, Holistic Healing, trauma-informed careComment

How What You Eat Triggers Your Trauma Response

Food is an often overlooked link in the realm of mental health, especially when it comes to trauma and recovering from trauma. But what you eat during recovery can make a difference: Research that goes back as far as 1982 shows that the sympathetic nervous system responds to changes in caloric intake. Certain foods can trigger your nervous system acitivity and along with it your trauma response.

What Mental Health Means

In this day and age, we have become fond of the term “mental health”. There’s a mental health awareness month and celebrities engage in openly sharing their mental health struggles online. The bravery to share is applauded, but the focus on mental health as a disease is still incredibly narrow.

So, what exactly does mental health mean? How do you “have” it? How come someone does not? How can you really heal?

What is Trauma?

Trauma still has a reputation of being something haunting, dark, an almost abstract thing that we humans only go through when faced with extreme situations. What do you immediately associate trauma with, if someone was to ask you what it was about?

Being Seen is No Small Joy

We heal in community, because community provides the space for us to show up wholly, to practice setting boundaries, to learn about ourselves and our needs and communicating them. Willingness to comprimise is an essential, but willingness to compromise ourselves is misery.

When Trauma Has Shaped You

It was a coping mechanism, clearly: You know that saying “no” would be regarded as bad, but you want to be good, because you want to be loved, so you abandon the part of you that would authentically say “no”. It’s a form of self-protection to survive. And it’s a trade-off. This trade-off is how trauma shapes you in the long-term, because coping mechanisms become so automatic and ingrained in your behavior, that you can’t even tell where you begin and where the self-abandonment begins. Others begin to consider these as your identity, and you might do so yourself. When in truth, you are so much more than the behaviors you created around your self-protection.

Nourishing your Brain with Nuts to Heal from Trauma

Just as your brain and nerve function can be negatively affected by trauma, you hold the power in your hands to consciously contribute to your brain's healing. You can positively influence your brain's structure through nutritional nourishment. Find out how and get my personal nut butter recipe.

How to Let Go of the Past

Chasing freedom is like chasing a butterfly. It is always ahead of you if you're not free within.

Shifting from People Pleasing to Living Your Truth

People pleasing is a symptom of whatever painful lessons you learned as a child. It’s a coping mechanism rooted in beliefs of not being good enough, not deserving, not being lovable. If you find yourself in that repetitive loop of feeling torn between what you actually want to (need to) do and what others expect you to and end up choosing what won’t disappoint others over your own needs, all you want to know is: How do you learn to speak your truth? Live it? How to you feel free? Read on to finally learn how as I share a valuable tool for transformation with you.

Ginger Tea as a Natural Pain Remedy

Learn why ginger (tea) is so helpful and soothing both for healing from chronic stress as in trauma and for balancing the impacts of stress on your immune system and get my ginger tea recipe here.

Why Vulnerability Needs to Go Hand in Hand with Setting Boundaries to Heal from Trauma

“Vulnerability” has become a popular topic among entrepreneurship, leadership and mental health discussions. It is a term that is omnipresent these days: We are encouraged to be vulnerable in order to connect, to succeed, to attract what is (good) for us. Yet, what we exclude from this narrative of vulnerability and its benefits is that boundaries are part of being vulnerable, too. Vulnerability does not translate to sharing our most painful trauma with the world in detail. It means sharing it with those who deserve to hear our story.

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