BRIDGE THE GAP Healing Workshop

We survive trauma. We are resilient, so we find a way to carry on despite the PTSD symptoms that kick in. Days or weeks or months - even years - pass before we or someone who knows us recognizes the PTSD symptoms. More time passes until we are ready for help and the healing process. By then, we are in the grip of a tight PTSD vice. We try and fail at various therapies. We feel frustrated, more depressed and hopeless. Our feelings of powerlessness increase while our sense of self continues to slip away. We increasingly see ourselves only as ’survivor’, and also: someone who cannot be healed; someone who is damaged, broken, untreatable and doomed to life in this warped way.

We go from doctor to practitioner and back saying, Heal me!. No wonder this approach doesn’t work: We lay the power to heal at someone else’s feet. We give the power of recovery to a professional and ask him or her to bestow magic on us. Healing doesn’t happen this way. The more we give away our power the less we can heal. It is when we take back our power - when we say, I want to be healed! - that things begin to happen for us.

At the crux of the PTSD experience lie two things:

1 - A powerful identity crisis.

2 - A powerful trauma addiction.

Neither of these things, of course, are voluntary. They develop as a consequence of how we cope with traumatic experience. However, both can be addressed, answered and worked out when we decide to bridge the gap between: 

  • ourselves and the rest of the world
  • past and present
  • present and future
  • survivor and thriver
  • Before and After
  • pain and joy
  • who we have been, who we are, and who we can be

We need to resolve the identity crisis, which gives us the strength to end the addiction.

We need to relearn how to see our whole selves, not just our survivor selves. And then we need to be that whole self and relegate the survivor to a much smaller role. We cannot become free in the present and move toward the future if we continue to define ourselves by the past. We must redefine ourselves.

Are you ready to construct your post-trauma identity? You can do this one of 3 ways:

First, you can head over to our blog, Parasites of the Mind, and join the workshop already in progress.

Second, you can dip into the Parasites of the Mind archives and start from the beginning yourself with this post, 12 Healing Resolutions. (Feel free to email us with questions as you go along).

Third, you can practice a combination of both! Join in the workshop today so that you move along with other survivors and benefit from their comments and thoughts on a daily basis. And in your private time, go back to 12 Healing Resolutions to read an overview of the entire workshop process. Then, take a look at The Top 2 Things You Need to Heal, which is the first post in the BRIDGE THE GAP series and chronologically work your way toward today.

Healing awaits you! You do own the power to choose to shed your trauma/survivor identity. It will not be easy. You will not feel 100% comfortable right away. Your survivor identity has become comfortable and familiar; letting it go will feel strange, dangerous and (some days) just plain crazy. But the truth is that it’s the survivor identity that is, to put it bluntly: strange, dangerous and just plain crazy. It holds you back from living the life you are supposed to be living. Don’t let that continue to be so!

Rise up. Take back your power. Begin to define your post-trauma identity today.

If you have questions about how to begin, join or follow the BRIDGE THE GAP healing workshop, visit the BTG in action overview, or  Contact us for guidance.