Trauma Healing Insights: Roland Bal on Recovery and the Nervous System

Written by Roland Bal

These are insights drawn from my clinical work with trauma over two decades — on dissociation, nervous system regulation, coping habits, boundaries, and what recovery actually looks like in practice. They are not prescriptions. They are observations from working closely with people navigating the complexity of what trauma leaves behind.

Insights on Dissociation and Trauma Healing

Dissociation is both a lifesaver, as it attempts to regulate the overwhelming emotions, and may form an obstacle to healing, as it keeps the emotional inner storm from being fully met. This is the conundrum of trauma. Understanding these mechanisms and then slowly, gently allowing them to unfold within a safe setting will help bring about its resolution.

When states of disconnection persist, the disconnective state becomes an identity in itself — and thus it becomes very hard to move out of it. The fear of reconnecting and working through the trauma also means death of the trauma identity. We thus tend to stay with the known, even if it is painful and destructive, rather than face the unknown and potential healing.

Holding the disconnection, feeling it, becoming intimate with it, starts to make it more fluid, less frozen — this paves the way for connecting again, for feeling the body, the sensations, the pains.

It is the therapist's role to help engage the client in active meditation. It is that state of non-attached observation that processes emotional residue. The therapist helps to hold the space, contain emotions, and gently curb attempts to escape.

Insights on Nervous System Regulation and Trauma

When healthy boundaries have been breached we swing between hyperactivation — fight and flight responses — and hypoactivation, or freeze response, each with their own set of distinct symptoms.

When the brain is still developing and the identity of a person is forming, patterning of the nervous system and brain tissue might be impaired or impeded due to traumatic experiences. Working through these early patterns will take significantly more time and dedicated work than traumas experienced in adulthood.

It's that middle ground — of neither indulging or drowning in emotion, nor holding it in or suppressing it — that starts to discharge and digest the high energy charge of the nervous system.

The longer traumatic residue stays in the body and the mind, the more complex and rooted become the coping mechanisms originally adopted to deal with the emotionally overwhelming experience or period in life.

Insights on Coping Habits and Addiction

Addictive behaviour or addiction to substances has altered our relation to our pain-pleasure centers in the brain and creates an additional problem of craving. It masks and perpetuates the underlying post-traumatic stress which is often at the origin of it all.

The emotional charge of trauma coupled to a coping habit — drink, drugs, shopping, sex, and so on — reinforces an unhealthy cyclic build-up and release of energy in the nervous system.

There is the assumption that a change of habit will change one's emotional well-being, rather than realising that a change in emotional well-being will facilitate making a change in habit patterns — and in turn promote better health.

Realising and bringing into awareness that the persisting coping emotion and coping habit are part of an identity structure prevents infusing past history with emotional rebuild-up. To look at the identity structure, you must also address the sense of control the coping habits have had for you — and do a reality check to see if the need to control is still valid.

Insights on Boundaries After Trauma

Guilt, blame, shame, embarrassment, pride, and self-reproach are reactions people engage in to deal with an overwhelming emotion. They are an intrinsic part of a traumatic experience.

Guilt, blame, or self-reproach, in terms of trauma, is intrinsically linked to the story of what happened — as in flashbacks, replaying of events, or reenactment.

To find out what you want, you need to learn to express and act on what you don't want. It is that which helps you to clear your boundaries and intentions.

It's imperative to remove yourself from an abusive environment before you can start your healing process.

Insights on Trauma Recovery and Rhythm

Recovery from trauma has its own rhythm. You will have to feel yourself where you can "up" your efforts or when you might be doing too much. Sometimes doing more is less — because you might not be ready or receptive just yet.

I think we need to healthily balance our efforts to address post-trauma, within containment, and to leave enough space to not get too focused on it. It is so easy to either fall into resistance to it, or get overwhelmed and drown in its symptoms. Part of the work is to keep finding that dynamic middle — that dynamic balance of not too much and not too little, of rest and activity.

Going through a traumatic experience or period in life disconnects us from embodiment, from a sense of integrity. It is through connecting to self and others that we can reestablish that sense of integrity, capacity, and healthy boundaries again.

Insights on Perspective and the Healing Process

The process of overcoming is endless. Overcoming is not resolution. Overcoming is a looping process where a dominant emotion has to be overcome by its opposite — and it is the opposites that are bound together.

Perspective is so vital in how we interpret reality, as well as in our healing process. A change of perspective demands a flexibility of our belief systems — and this can be challenging but very rewarding in the long run.

In most cases, post-traumatic stress is not caused by a stand-alone incident. It is highly linked to developmental issues that have formed character structures, which causes individuals to attract situations that can be retraumatising.

When we are overwhelmed by emotion it either turns inward through suppression, or overflows outwardly. Think of blame and hatred as an overflowing response of anger, and self-reproach as anger acting on the sense of self.