The Role of Self-Compassion in Trauma Recovery
A healing journey is full of difficulties, obstacles, and new challenges, and one of those challenges, for many trauma survivors, is finding and practicing self-compassion. Whether it’s giving yourself the grace to observe and learn from your mistakes or it’s acknowledging that healing isn’t a linear process and that you may have times that are less productive in your healing than others, self-compassion plays an important role in your trauma recovery journey. Keep reading to learn more about self-compassion and the certified trauma specialist courses we offer to help survivors nurture this skill.
Working With Your Inner Critic
Through self-compassion, trauma survivors can take important steps in recovery, including the ability to be your biggest ally, your progress, or your thinking patterns. During the recovery process, learning to recognize the inner critic with self-compassion can help you to prevent feelings of fear, self-hate, hopelessness, and disgust while still making room for yourself to validate those thoughts and feelings.
Improving Mindfulness
Mindfulness and self-compassion go hand-in-hand to help you improve your thinking by reducing the instances of rumination and spiraling thoughts. While practicing mindfulness can help you identify the cyclical patterns and thought processes that foster negative feelings, self-compassion is the next step, allowing you to acknowledge that these patterns and thoughts are part of the healing process and don’t define your progress or your ability to heal.
Optimizing Self-Care
The connection between compassion and care is a strong one, so it’s important to remember that having self-compassion will allow you to take better care of yourself. While self care can feel indulgent to trauma survivors on the path to recovery, self-compassion helps to work with that feeling of indulgence by acknowledging that self care is a necessity and is integral in a recovery journey.
Creating Better Thought Patterns
One of the benefits of fostering self-compassion is that it helps to change your thought patterns for the better in terms of general compassion. Many trauma survivors don’t realize that their lack of self-compassion can tinge the way they think about others and leave them feeling negative about the things, people, and situations in their life. With self-compassion, those in recovery can improve their ability to understand themselves, which in turn helps to improve the way they view the actions of others.
Self-compassion can be difficult to foster, especially for survivors of trauma and PTSD, but taking the steps to improve your compassion for yourself can greatly improve your mental state and help you along the journey toward recovery. Kerri Coaching can help with certified trauma specialist services and certified trauma specialist courses, so if you’re struggling with self-compassion on your recovery journey, contact us today.