Trauma Healing: Why the "How To" Is in the Listening

Written by Roland Bal

I am often at a bit of a loss when I am asked HOW to go about resolving trauma, more so when I have just explained at length the mechanism of dissociation; invariably, someone will ask "but how do you get rid of x, y, z?"

That very question itself negates everything I said prior to that question.

Why Healing from Trauma Is So Hard

Let me explain: When you study a language, you set aside time to learn the different words, the grammar, the pronunciation. With time and practice, you start to make progress and get better at it. There is a movement in time from A, not knowing the language, to B, knowing the language a bit more.

We carry that principle of overcoming over to our psychological issues, thinking that the same methodology can apply, but it can't. The reason healing from trauma is so hard is not that something is wrong with you — it is that the very mindset you bring to it is working against you.

With language or math, the subject matter is outside of you. You can observe it, study it, apply effort to it. But with anxiety, with dissociation, with the emotional residue of trauma — you are not separate from it. You cannot step outside of your own nervous system and "work on" it the way you work on a skill. And yet that is exactly what most approaches to healing try to do. They ask you to apply effort, discipline, and strategy to something that requires the opposite: presence, attention, and the willingness to stay with what is uncomfortable without rushing to change it.

The Dissociation and Anxiety Cycle

When you are anxious and that anxiety overwhelms you, you will try either to avoid or to overcome that state. Consciously or unconsciously, there is an internal voice that says "how can I not feel anxious?"

The very "how to" here is dissociative from what is — you being anxious. When you feel continuously dissociated, that is a protective response, but it also keeps you from meeting the anxiousness and working through it. The "how to" in this context is a state of inattention, and through the act of attempting to overcome, you are actually perpetuating the very emotional state you are trying to resolve.

When you feel continuously dissociated, that is a protective response, but it also keeps you from meeting the anxiousness and working through it.

Let that sink in for a moment, because the subtlety of it might easily slip through the cracks.

Layers of Dissociation Behind Your Anxiety

You might have noticed that when your anxiety is too high for some time, that you will have a period where you move into feeling dissociated, numb, and disconnected from the anxiety. With that, there might also come some fatigue, exhaustion, depression, and chronic pains or immune system issues. Those dissociated states are an outcome of anxiety. They are directly related.

If you are attentive, you can listen into the dissociated state and feel that just below it there is still the raging anxiety. That knowledge — that the dissociated states of depression, fatigue, numbness, and chronic pain are an outcome of anxiety — puts you back in the driver's seat. If and when you can be in touch with your anxiety, your symptoms of dissociation will diminish.

Suppressed Anger and What Drives Anxiety

Furthermore, anxiety in and of itself very often is a symptom of other unprocessed emotions. When you weren't able to act, speak up, and be authentic to yourself in either a very intense moment or multiple experiences spread out over a period of time, that inaction compromised your boundaries, your sense of self, and self-worth. Anxiety will be an outcome of that; a symptom.

As you explore and go deeper, you might see that anxiety isn't the core issue any more. When you keep trying to overcome anxiety, it stays in place and, furthermore, creates secondary symptoms of depression, fatigue, chronic pains, and so forth. What often sits underneath the anxiety is suppressed anger — the healthy boundary energy that was never allowed expression.

Why Attention — Not Overcoming — Heals Trauma

When you start to be attentive, as opposed to dissociating, you start to be able to shift your attention through the various layers of emotional build-up.

It is the very seeing — cognitively — and the very feeling through the emotional layers — somatically — that help you to start healing. The "how-to" question, on a psychological level, then becomes obsolete and redundant.

This is the core paradox of trauma healing. The part of you that asks "how do I fix this" is the same part that keeps you dissociated from what needs to be felt. The listening — the willingness to be with what is, without rushing to change it — is not a step before the healing. It is the healing.

That does not mean you sit passively and hope for the best. It means you develop the capacity — through containment and through somatic awareness — to be present with your own experience without being overwhelmed by it. The "how to" dissolves not because you gave up, but because you finally met what you were running from. And in that meeting, something shifts — not through force, but through attention itself.