What Healing from Emotional Trauma Actually Looks Like
A metaphor, a memory, and the slow rebuilding of identity
About a year and a half ago, I asked my counselor, Mary, if I’d ever feel normal again.
“Your emotions are a ball. A pinball-sized ball. The ball is in a jar, and right now it keeps hitting the sides of the jar—pinging back and forth. Sometimes it hits shock. Sometimes, anger. Sometimes, sadness. The goal isn’t to make the ball smaller. The goal is to make the jar bigger.”
Mary knows I love a good metaphor.
After a season of betrayal and emotional trauma—what I can now name as spiritual abuse—I was hoping for resolution. Maybe an easy five-step plan, a checklist, a self-help book that would practically read itself—ideally in a soothing British accent. I wanted to get over it. But what I got instead was an invitation to stop trying to fix my feelings and start making room for them.
“How do we make the jar bigger?” I asked.
“We expand it with understanding,” she said. “With community. With new experiences. And not just new experiences, but remembering old ones. Who were you before?”
I was so overwhelmed by trying to understand and fix what I had just been through that I didn’t feel like myself. I was consumed with thoughts of Erik and the exhausting effort of trying to close the cognitive dissonance he ripped open when he disappeared.
At the time, I didn’t know how to answer her question about who I was. But I’ve since come to understand what she meant—and why remembering who you were before the trauma matters.
Trauma disrupts identity. It collapses your sense of self into a single storyline: the betrayal, the abuse, the loss. You forget that you’re someone who also loves poetry, tells good stories, makes people laugh, takes walks, mentors students, and sings in the car.
Recovery isn’t about returning to who you were—it’s about reclaiming what was good and true, and integrating it with what you now know. It’s about gathering the buried pieces—confidence, intuition, lightness, agency—and allowing them to take new shape. Remembering them helps stretch the jar, but transformation happens when you carry them forward with more clarity and purpose than before.
It widens the emotional space. If you can recall a time before the betrayal or abuse—a time when your joy, self-trust, or creativity flowed more freely—you remind your nervous system, “There is more to me than this pain.” That realization alone becomes part of the healing.
It’s been more than a year since that conversation, and the metaphor of the jar has become a quiet companion. Whenever I find myself pulled backward into old memories or straining forward into what-ifs, I stop. I imagine the ball. I breathe. And I ask myself: What is the ball bumping up against right now?
In the early days, the answer was almost always “shock.” Then it shifted into sadness. For a long time, it bounced back and forth between the two. I missed Erik. And because he told me he would come back for me, I waited. Sadness, shock. Sadness, shock. There were times when the ball was pinging with such ferocious speed that I began to feel depersonalized—like I was outside myself looking in. Anger came later, and only for a short while.
The story my emotions were telling me, I realized, was one of grief.
We often talk about the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—but as writer Ranata Suzuki once noted, “What they don’t tell you is that you’ll cycle through them all every day.”
Emotions, like stories, move. There’s exposition. Rising action. Reversals. A climax. A dark night of the soul. Healing doesn’t travel in a straight line, but it does move. And the present moment is the only space in which that healing can take place.
The irony, of course, is that to understand the past, we first have to accept the present. Even when the present aches.
And here’s something else I’ve learned from another space in my life: the acting studio.
As an acting coach, I help students learn how to connect thought, feeling, and action—the same circuit we navigate in life. In performance, we talk about the mind-body connection: the idea that our thoughts produce emotions, emotions lead to actions or words, and actions inspire new thoughts. A living circuit. A loop of human experience.
The key insight? You can’t enter the circuit through emotion. You have to come in through thought or action, because those are the parts of the circuit we can consciously access. The emotion follows.
Emotions are reactive, not generative. They’re responses to something—a thought, a memory, a physical sensation, or an action. You can’t just will a feeling into being and expect it to take shape authentically. That’s why in acting, trying to “play sad” usually results in something flat or forced. But give the actor a strong thought or a truthful action, and the emotion often emerges organically.
In trauma work and somatic therapy, this concept holds up, too. Practitioners will say that you can’t regulate or access emotion just by focusing on the feeling. Instead, you need to engage either the body (action, breath, movement) or the cognitive frame (narrative, belief, memory). These are the “entry points” to the emotional circuit.
I once gave a very demure student a hammer and told her to smash a pile of two-by-fours as hard as she could, in character, for thirty seconds. Afterward, I asked how she felt. “Fierce. Frustrated. Mad.” She named emotions she hadn’t been able to access moments before. The action unlocked them.
I didn’t feel my way into healing. I lived my way into it. As I watched the ball move over time—sometimes frantically, sometimes gently—I began to understand that growth wasn’t about gritting my teeth and pushing forward. It was about softening. About making space. Space for the emotions to rise and fall without swallowing me. Space to sit with what I felt without having to fix it. Space to live in the present without needing all the answers.
Healing from trauma is not heroic or flashy, but slow and honest.
Annoyingly slow. But I digress.
Still, I’ve learned this much:
The ball is the ball. The jar is the jar. The story is the story.
You don’t need to shrink your emotions. You just need to make more space to feel them without fear.
The more space you make, the more you begin to move forward—with clarity, with truth, and in your own time.
Keep going.