Why Healing from Trauma Is So Hard

Written by Roland Bal

We seem to be suffering from so many health issues in our lives that are affecting us on many different levels — mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. We seem to have lost that sense of creativity, playfulness, and connecting to oneself and to others. What is it that we can do to feel safe again and get our health back?

The answer starts with understanding what keeps you stuck.

Continuously overwhelming emotions have a specific set of binding factors present that tie emotion to the story of what happened to you.

These binding factors are guilt, blame, shame, self-reproach, embarrassment, pride, regret, self-righteousness, and self-pity. It is these that tie up core emotions of anger, sadness, and fear. It is those thought patterns and emotions that keep regurgitating the hyper and hypo activities of mind and body.

Shame, Guilt, and Self-Blame: The Binding Factors That Keep You Stuck

It is these binding factors that make it so hard to move out of a traumatic state. They act as a buffer to help you deal with feeling overwhelmed; at the same time, they keep the whole wheel of suffering ongoing. They are the lube that oils the wheel, for better and for worse.

If you look closely at your thought patterns, these are the intermediary — the glue — between your thoughts, which go over an event, place, person or circumstance, and your emotions, which will be some form of anger, fear or sadness.

Self-righteousness and pride are the toughest ones to work through because of their tendency towards self-indulgence and disconnection from others, though all of these are tough to sit with in their own right. Each binding factor serves a protective function — it keeps you at a distance from the raw emotion underneath. But that distance is also what prevents the emotion from being processed.

How Self-Blame and Shame Look from the Inside Out

Let us put this in perspective through some examples:

Gautam's parents split up when he was young. His parents were forever fighting with each other, and he didn't get the attention he needed as a child. As an adult, he has periodic outbursts of anger that get projected onto anything and anybody through his impulsive wish to blame.

Suzanna was molested as a child by a family member. She has never really talked about it. She knows what happened was wrong, but self-blame and shame prevent her from addressing her deep anger and fear of fully acknowledging what happened to her.

Jim was drafted for several duties and has seen buddies die on the field. He is fed up with the injustice, hyper-stress, and helplessness of it, but pride — you weren't there, you don't know what I went through — ties up his anger and prevents him from seeking help.

These are straightforward examples of already great inner complexity. It gets more complicated after having been subjected to long-term abuse or neglect — incidents in childhood that were severe, issues over several different periods of time and different in nature. The more layered the history, the more binding factors stack on top of each other, and the harder it becomes to see where one ends and another begins.

How to Stop Feeling Stuck: Working Through the Binding Factors

Negation is being aware, first of all, of what is occurring. Secondly, it is then feeling into the movement underlying the thought process that stimulates your personal story, the emotions within it, and its binding factors.

It is body sensation that helps you to observe without splitting into opposing states. It is the refusal of engagement with blame, guilt, self-reproach, shame, and the rest that shifts awareness to the core emotions. And when the capacity grows to hold these, they can then be processed.

This is not about suppressing the binding factors or pretending they are not there. It is about recognising them for what they are — intermediaries that buffer the real emotion — and gradually learning not to feed them with fresh energy. When you stop fuelling blame, the anger underneath it becomes accessible. When you stop reinforcing shame, the grief it was covering can surface.

This process requires patience. The binding factors have often been in place for years or decades. They feel like part of who you are — which is why feeling stuck after trauma is so common. But they are not you — they are the structure your nervous system built to manage what it could not yet hold. As your capacity for containment grows through somatic work, these intermediaries begin to loosen, and the core emotions they were protecting you from can finally be met and moved through.

The way out is the way in.