This is how we heal trauma. And once we do that we find that our true selves have the greatest allies imaginable: our conscious minds, our natural intuition, and our passion.

When we become traumatised, we split off from our true selves at a level equal to the degree of our trauma. This disrupts our whole system. Our intuition gets damaged and our sense of ourselves gets damaged. We become stunted in our developmental process, but to put it better, we get warped.

Then, because of that, when we make decisions to try to take perfect care of ourselves, we are lost, because our inner compass becomes damaged. Our decisions, to the degree that we are traumatised, become faulty. And what’s worse, we may FEEL like we are taking care of ourselves, and will defend our actions to the hilt, but our decisions are faulty and we end up only hurting ourselves worse. This happens in a myriad of ways, including through sex, food, drugs, personal hygiene, relationships, romance, money, and even through seeking help in the helping profession. We trust people who are not to be trusted, because at a deep level they cannot trust themselves.
And the longer we go without healing our traumas, the more our problems in self-care compound. Our lives become more and more damaged and more and more off-course. Our bodies, our relationships, and our very connections with ourselves get more and more broken. Our very decisions only end up traumatising ourselves more. This is the tragedy that pays out a dividend of more tragedy.

And none of this is a great mystery. We all hear stories of people who have been severely wounded in childhood who end up living the most hurt, suffering-filled adult lives.

Meanwhile, the repetition compulsion fits right into this model. The repetition compulsion – the inner drive we have to reenact our traumas in an unconscious urge to somehow solve them – is part of this. The repetition compulsion is an urge that so often dooms us, because it, like all bad decisions, just sends up careening back into more pain, suffering, and trauma.

But, like all bad decisions we make, even our reenactments offer us a chance to learn. And here is the hope, the simple hope for all of us: self-reflection. We can learn from our bad decisions. We just have to study ourselves. We have to study our motivations. We have to study our histories. We have to study our feelings. We have to become honest with ourselves. This is at times invariably painful too, but if we can tolerate it long enough to be able to sit with it and trace it to its origin, then we can grieve it and we can ultimately reconnect with our true selves. This is how we heal trauma. And once we do that we find that our true selves have the greatest allies imaginable: our conscious minds, our natural intuition, and our passion.






And with those allies how can our future decisions, and therefore our self-care, be anything but excellent?



The Ten Stages is a studied recovery course. It is a source of reconnection a method of unlearning and a reintroduction to our child within which leads us back to our one true intuitive voice.We start to learn and come out of our protective dysfunctional shell and reclaim our lives.