When trauma isn't ‘post’ traumatic stress but ongoing, how do we heal?

Feel Better Every Day

Are you dealing with trauma? PTSD? Complex PTSD? ADHD? Feeling overwhelmed by what’s going on in the world?

In this PTSD awareness episode, trauma therapist Eve Menezes Cunningham shares some of her personal journey from PTSD diagnosis to healing, and uses the Feel better. Be better. Do better method to support you in navigating personal and collective trauma.

‘Instead of being consumed by hate, his hope was that Israelis and Palestinians and Christians could live in peace and harmony. And he created this school, Hope Flowers.’ Eve also reflects on an interview she did 20 years ago with, Ibrahim Issa, the son of the Hope Flowers School founder in Jerusalem regarding ongoing traumatic stress.

About this podcast

Feel Better Every Day! Learn from the self and Self* care practices the professionals depend on.

With a mixture of solo and interview episodes, your host, Eve Menezes Cunningham (author of 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing) shares trauma-informed and VAST / ADHD-friendly self and Self* care ideas to help you:

• Feel better (regulate your nervous system and do the things that help you create a life you don’t need to retreat from)

• Be better (accept yourself completely with love, compassion and kindness – you don’t need to do a thing) and

• Do better (turn what hurts your heart into action to support your family, organisations, communities and the world at large)

Thanks for listening or watching.

New episodes come out every Tuesday morning (Ireland time) and if you subscribe (via your favourite podcasting app or by joining the Sole to Soul Circle), you’ll be notified about each new episode.

Sole to Soul Circle members get deeper dives each Wednesday morning.

Want to work with me?

• There’s the book – 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing – and all the book bonus videos.

• All the free resources (for trauma, ADHD, menopause, solopreneurs, anxiety, sleep, confidence, resilience, finding purpose, meaning and joy and more) across my platforms and the library of self-care ideas and practices at https://selfcarecoaching.net

• You can join the Sole to Soul Circle on Substack (https://evemc.substack.com ) and get bonus interviews and content specially designed to help you dive deeper into each week’s theme.

• If you want to support my work but don’t want to commit to a membership, even for a month, you can choose any amount at https://ko-fi.com/evemc

• While my private practice for one to one work (trauma-informed and ADHD-friendly therapies, Self care coaching, clinical supervision and supervisor’s supervision) is almost always at capacity, if you’re based in Ireland or the UK, it’s still worth completing the short form at https://selfcarecoaching.net/contact to book your free telephone consultation in the hope that we can find a mutually convenient time to work together.

Want to connect with me on social media?

You can find me almost everywhere – please say ‘Hi’ and tell me what you want to ask or say:

YouTube @evemenezescunningham

Substack @evemc

Bluesky @eveimc

TikTok @evemenezescunningham

Insta @evemenezescunningham

Facebook @FeelBetterEveryDay

And if you’d like to leave a review and/or rate this and other episodes you’ve enjoyed, your feedback and support helps me help more people (of all genders) with trauma histories and/or ADHD take better care of their whole selves and create lives they don’t need to retreat from.

Chapters

(0:03 – 0:45) Welcome and purpose of the podcast

(0:46 – 2:12) Sole to Soul Circle and resources for healing

(2:13 – 4:05) PTSD diagnosis and the power of language

(4:06 – 6:28) Ongoing trauma: A story of hope from Jerusalem

(6:29 – 8:36) Global crisis, collective trauma and marginalised communities

(8:37 – 10:32) Self-care in the midst of ongoing trauma

(10:33 – 12:14) Feel better. Be better. Do better: Rest, regulation and compassion

(12:16 – 12:41) Grounding with what resonates: Feel, Be, or Do better

(12:42 – 13:20) Healing through love, protest, and the ocean

(13:21 – 14:00) Upcoming Circle content and community nourishment

(14:00 – 14:36) Next week’s theme

Resources

Hope Flowers School article: https://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/content/news/teaching-peace

Disclaimer

The content I share is not a replacement for one to one trauma therapy (etc). While you can do an enormous amount to support yourself, please always seek appropriate medical advice.

Thanks for listening. Please subscribe / follow and share with someone who you think will benefit from this episode.

Full transcript

Hi, I'm Eve Menezes Cunningham and you're listening to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. Every Tuesday, I share trauma-informed and ADHD-friendly self-care ideas to help you take better care of yourself. That's that highest, wisest, truest, most joyful, brilliant, miraculous part of yourself.

I do this to help you create a life you don't need to retreat from. You can find out more at thefeelbettereverydaypodcast.com and you can, if you're interested in taking a deeper dive each week for the Sole to Soul Circle, which you can join, there are bonus interviews and deeper dives into the practices that have come up through that week's episode from that week's theme.

This week, it’s grounding practices to support trauma recovery.

And you also get immediate access to a rich archive, including the entire Love Your Whole Self chakra journey. You might also find the book, 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing of interest. And there are book bonus videos and other self-care coaching resources for trauma, ADHD, and all sorts of areas at selfcarecoaching.net. Today's episode is for PTSD awareness.

And with everything that's going on in the world, it's like, much as I know that PTSD, its inclusion in the Diagnostic Statistics Manual and the DSM, it was life-changing for so many people, myself included, when I got a PTSD diagnosis back in 2008. It was after a house fire, and it gave me the language to help me understand my complex PTSD from very early childhood. It helped me learn to heal.

It helped me learn to ground and resource and to end up becoming a trauma therapist. And I love my work because I love that there are so many ways in which we can heal. And I'm also aware, I keep thinking of an interview I did, like when I was newly freelance, 2004, it appeared in Nursery World, a UK magazine for nursery people, in 2005.

And I just found a link, I will link to it in the show notes. https://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/content/news/teaching-peace

But I never forgot this man I spoke to in Jerusalem. He was the son of Hussein Ibrahim Issa.

His name is Ibrahim Issa. And he ran the Hope Flowers School in Jerusalem. I'm not going to cry.

I'm not going to cry. They are bringing together, since his father's work as a Palestinian born refugee who had lost everything after World War II, instead of being consumed by hate, his hope was that Israelis and Palestinians and Christians could live in peace and harmony. And he created this school, Hope Flowers, where all three religions and people of no religion were educated.

And they were being bombed, like this is back 2004, 2005, when I was interviewing him. They didn't know one week to the next, like I think a wall had just been destroyed a week earlier. And I said something about PTSD very naively.

And he just said, really sadly, it's not post, this is ongoing, the children, they're tiny, tiny children. And it was ongoing. And of course, with everything that's happening in the world, I'm doing my best focus on the people who are working towards building peace and healing and trauma recovery for everyone rather than endless cycles.

But I thought there's no point doing something about post-traumatic stress as if you've survived the trauma. And that's all you have to worry about, just focus on the reflection, the healing, the all of it.

I think everyone is traumatised right now, I don't want to name any situations, because I don't want to be triggering anyone.

But at the same time, it's having to navigate life at different levels. And I know that marginalised communities have had to deal with this for so much longer, ongoing onslaughts to the right to exist, and then having to be professional at work, having to like wanting to bring their dreams into reality.

And I thought rather than doing an episode on post-traumatic stress disorder for post-traumatic stress disorder awareness, I would just name it and just encourage you, however you're feeling, whatever global situations or local situations.

I really don't want to name local things and global things in case that's not something that's making you cry at the moment. But I'm sure you have your own situations and they might be personal as well. People are struggling, individuals are struggling.

And I just wanted to use this episode to remind you that healing from trauma, when it's ongoing, is harder when you can't ground yourself as easily and remind yourself that you're safe when you don't feel safe when you're being triggered on a regular basis when you're actual thinking about what I said.

I'm not going to name places, I'm not going to, but you could think of many parts of the world where just the most basic things are suddenly very, very dangerous for so many people and people are laying their bodies on the line for peace and for healing and for progress where others are attempting to destroy that.

As we think about the feel better, be better, do better model, in terms of feeling better, the more you can make those self-care practices as bite-sized as possible, the more likely you are to actually do them. When life is so busy, when life is so hectic, when you feel potentially traumatised, it can feel not just self-indulgent, but it can feel impossible to do something that make you feel better.

For me, I talk about sitting underwater as my medicine and whether that's the pool or yesterday in the ocean and it just feeling so healing and it sets me up for several days at a time, but I don't always have the time to go, I can't swim every day, it just doesn't work with my schedule.

I can't do a longer yoga nidra every day, much as I would love to, but I can make time for a 10-minute yoga nidra and that just helps me. I can make time to connect with my breath, but less than a minute even, any time during the day.

I can make time for strong movement, I don't have time today, for example, to do my normal five kilometre walk, so I did a brisker two kilometre walk earlier and I'll do the other 3km later.

Think for yourself, think about your everyday self-care tools and practices, think about what helps you feel better, those regulatory things and think about one thing you can do when you're feeling traumatised, watching the news or scrolling on your phone or dealing with personal stories, hearing phone calls, talking to loved ones or what you're facing yourself. Think about one thing you can do that helps you feel better, that helps you regulate and do that as much as you can.

As we move into then the be better, that sense of there's no need to improve yourself, there's no need to do anything, you're fine, pull the duvet over your head if it's safe to do so. It can be incredibly hard to be, to relax, to give space to what might be coming up for healing when you're feeling very hypervigilant and unsafe and when you might be unsafe.

If you're able to, creating space to cry, creating space to talk to loved ones and other like-minded people, helping you heal in that co-regulation way, creating as much time as you can to allow yourself to nap, allow yourself to sleep, allow yourself to rest.

I realise that can feel really challenging where things are so busy, things are so hectic, but by creating pockets of space, even if you can't sleep, even if you can't nap, you can still rest, you can still notice that hypervigilance, you can still send yourself enormous love and compassion and recognise that anyone would be feeling stressed, let alone when you've been through what you've been through and how it might be triggering you right now.

Remind yourself you're doing amazingly, you're living through very challenging times, and allow yourself to be in whatever way helps you ground and remember that you have every right to joy and peace and freedom and love and safety and all of that. And if you want to just put an eye mask on or pull a jumper over your head or put the duvet over your head and just shut the world out for even a minute or a few minutes or have that nap if you can or cry, let it out.

Again, I'm moving back into the Feel better, but I guess the Be better, let yourself know that it's normal to be feeling traumatised, it's normal to be feeling triggered and what we are hearing about, what we are observing, what we are seeing, what we are feeling, it's too horrific for our nervous systems to navigate in normal situations.

The more you can do to just let yourself be and feel overwhelmed and feel hopeless and all of that, not saying to stay there, but acknowledging where you are and sending yourself enormous love and compassion will help you more than beating yourself up for not doing more.

But we are going to move into the Do better phase where we turn what hurts our heart, we transform that into action once we've stayed in that be better phase for as long as it's needed.

And I'm going to just say this week, just know that you are enough and you don't have to protest, you don't have to write letters, you don't have to do anything. If it's too much to even be kind and hold a door open for someone, just be kind to yourself and recognise that the more you are taking care of yourself, the more empowered you are yourself, the more you will be able to do in terms of supporting your community, helping heal the world, helping heal your family, whatever that might be.

But if you were to think of one thing you would like to do, if you had more energy in order to bring more peace, more healing to yourself, your communities and the world this week, what might that be?

Even imagine fantasising about it, giving yourself permission to not do a thing, to just kind of get through the day. But beginning to think about how might you turn that trauma into healing for yourself and others. If it feels good, it can feel empowering, it can also feel like too much pressure so honour what's feeling good for you.

To ground today's episode, I want you to think in terms of the Feel better, Be better, Do better method. What resonates most for you right now. For me, it's very much the Feel better. I'm amping up all my regulatory self-care tools, the practices that help me function, that help me get through the day.

I am still very much making space to be. It's an ongoing process. I find it more challenging.

And the doing, I'm protesting where I can. And most of all, I'm trying to be a force for love. I'm trying to connect with Divine Love as much as I can and keep reminding myself that we're all connected.

I was very much doing it in the ocean yesterday. The ocean reaches the whole planet. And just trying to do better by taking care of myself so that I'm at peace and not contributing to like projecting out all my own unhealed stuff and making things worse locally or beyond that.

Think for yourself what resonates most for you today, this week, whenever you're listening to this. Whenever you're watching this. And for our deeper dive in the Sole to Soul Circle, we're going to come back to some grounding practices to meet you where you are.

And I'm going to be asking members to give me some ideas for what would be most nourishing for you for this week. And so at time of recording the podcast, I don't know what that will be. But you can always find more resources at the website, which you can choose from.

Next week, it's going to be a lighter episode on the power of play. Episode 65. I hope that you have found today helpful.

And I hope that you will remember that you are enough. You're doing great. You're doing just surviving right now is taking an enormous amount.

Do what you can curate your feed. Notice what you're watching, what you're listening to and make it as soothing and supportive for yourself as you can. And just sending enormous love.

Thank you for listening.