There was a time in my life when I didn’t know what calm or safety or joy felt like.

Not emotionally, or physically, or spiritually. I had spent over a decade in survival mode; battling anxiety, insomnia, eating disorders, and a digestive condition so unpredictable I stopped making plans. On the surface, I was “high-functioning.” But beneath it, I was unraveling.

The root? Trauma. Not just one event, but a stack of them: an assault in my twenties, a toxic romantic relationship, chronic job stress... layered on top of a childhood built on narcissism and emotional neglect.

This is the guide I wish someone had handed me then. Not as a diagnosis, but as a path toward repair—one that involves your nervous system, yes, but also your mind, your body, and your sense of connection to something larger.

What Is Trauma, Really?

Trauma isn’t just the “bad thing” that happened. It’s what happens inside you when your ability to cope is overwhelmed and no one’s there to help you recover. And it doesn’t always come from big, obvious events.

Sometimes trauma comes from the absence of what we needed most: emotional attunement, stability, boundaries, or protection.

It lives in the body as much as the mind. In the tension you can’t release. In the spirals you can’t interrupt. In the way your system overreacts to things you “should” be able to handle... and underreacts to things that should never have been tolerated.

ACEs and the Long Reach of Childhood Trauma

If you’ve never heard of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), it's worth looking into. These are the kinds of early-life traumas—neglect, abuse, household dysfunction—that shape the developing brain and nervous system. The more ACEs, the more likely we are to develop chronic illness, depression, autoimmune conditions, and even shorter lifespans.

But here’s the good news: trauma is not destiny. Neuroplasticity (aka your brain's ability to change) is real. Nervous system regulation and homeostasis is possible. And healing doesn’t have to come from a clinic—in fact, I healed myself completely outside of conventional medicine and psychiatry/psychology.

How Trauma Shows Up — and Why Talk Therapy Alone Isn't Enough

Although the true healing happened outside my therapist and doctor's office, there were some breadcrumbs dropped by my therapist. She was a brilliant, trauma-informed practitioner who guided me through exposure work, cognitive tools, and somatic practices. I learned how my past shaped my present, and I finally heard someone say: “What happened to you wasn’t okay.”

That mattered.

But even with great therapy, I still felt trauma inside me. I was still looping through the same thoughts, reacting explosively, waking up in panic. My gut still twisted for no reason. My sleep was fragile. My nervous system was stuck, yes—but so was my mind, and my body, and my deeper sense of self.

That’s when I learned: you don’t heal trauma through the brain alone. Or the nervous system alone. Or through spirituality alone. Trauma is a multidisciplinary condition and therefore requires a fully integrated approach—one that works on all four layers.

The Four Pillars of Wholebody Healing

Looking back, every meaningful breakthrough I had fell into one of these domains. And when they began to work in harmony, that’s when real, lasting transformation took hold.

1. Cognitive Rewiring: Untangling Thought Loops

Trauma shapes how we think. I had beliefs so deeply embedded I didn’t even know they were running the show: “I’m not safe.” “I’m too much.” “It’s my fault.” “I don’t belong.”

Cognitive work—through therapy, journaling, and later, affirmation and narrative work — helped me slowly disrupt those loops. Not overnight. Not perfectly. But enough to stop defaulting to shame every time something went wrong.

When I started to hear myself saying things like “That’s not about me” or “I’m allowed to feel this,” I knew something was changing. My inner narrative was becoming more spacious.

2. Nervous System Regulation: Training the Body to Feel Safe Again

This is where I got the most external validation; heart rate lowering, sleep tracking data shifting, panic attacks stopping. But this pillar wasn’t about biohacking. It was about remembering what safety felt like in my body.

Breathwork became my daily ritual. Simple tools like cyclical sighing or holotropic patterns helped discharge stuck stress. Cold showers, vagus nerve practices, and slow grounding walksin nature trained my system to respond with less alarm and more resilience.

But nervous system regulation only went so far when other parts of me—my thoughts, my muscles, my gut—were still holding trauma.

3. Somatic Release: Letting the Body Speak

Even with all the cognitive and breathwork tools in place, there was tension I couldn’t talk or breathe away. That’s when I discovered somatic practices like trauma release exercises (TRE), tapping, somatic experiencing, and movement rituals that helped me release trauma, not just manage it. These were all things I could do at home, by myself, without the need for an expensive therapist. I did try Kambo as well—a powerful indigenous medicine that results in a physical purge.

At first, it felt strange. Shaking, weeping, tingling, vomiting. But it was like my body had finally been given permission to tell its version of the story—the one words couldn’t touch. I hope this makes sense. Some of these experiences are pretty ineffable to be honest, and the English language doesn't do them justice.

I remember one specific day as I took myself on a hike after a session and realized that, for the first time, my gut was soft, unguarded... that I wasn’t bracing. And I cried. I hadn’t felt that way ever before that I could recall.

4. Spiritual Wellbeing: Reconnecting With Meaning

For a long time, this particular pillar felt unreachable. I didn’t trust people, much less the idea of anything larger than myself. But when my brother—a 4x war veteran with severe PTSD—told me how therapeutic psychedelics had helped him, I became curious.

He introduced me to an experienced healer in the Boulder, CO area. We started with an in-depth Human Design reading, which at the time I didn't quite understand or find applicable to be honest. It wasn't until I participated in a profound ayahuasca experience he was guiding that something shifted in me at a foundational level. It was euphoric. For the first time in years, I felt calm. I woke up without panic. My digestion normalized. I stopped feeling like I was in constant defense mode. The medicine had revealed to me that all the trauma I had experience was actually for my greater good; it was "catalyst" if you will for my soul path, and for the greater mission of healing other people once I healed myself. The message was "the reason you've been so sick and imbalanced is because you haven't processed/alchemized/integrated the emotions from your trauma properly." Instead, I was sitting in my own victimhood and projecting my pain onto other people. I can go on about this for days, but TLDR = truly transformative and deeply healing.

This was about the 12 month mark for me, and it was a turning point. In combination with all the other trauma-focused practices I was engaging in, these intense somatic releases marked the end of my symptoms. Full stop; I was experiencing true, sustained holistic health for the first time in forever.

I feel like spiritual wellbeing isn’t about belief. It’s about connection — to self, to others, to nature, to purpose. That sense of connection gave my healing work a deeper Why. It still does.

What Worked — and What Didn’t

I tried everything. Not all of it helped. Some things felt promising but never landed. Others seemed insignificant until I looked back and realized how much I had changed. This is where the Listening and Tuning In to our inner voice is critical.

What made the biggest impact:

• Therapeutic psychedelics (with professional preparation and integration of course—super important!)
• Trauma-informed mental health coaching, including somatic and exposure modalities (this helped me get out of my head, which was a dangerous place to be)
• Peer and group support (trusted friends that can offer real love and affection are powerful medicines!)
• Breathwork and meditation (my friend once told me that "meditation reveals the toxins in your brain, which is the first step")
• Somatic movement and yoga (I am very dedicated to my vinyasa yoga practice, with long muscular holds that are known to release trauma)
• Books that helped me understand what I was feeling (This was huge on so many levels - knowledge is power and empowering)
• Daily affirmations (yes, they felt corny — and yes, they worked)
• Slowing down, listening inward, and not forcing myself to “get over it” (long days spent on my couch just nurturing myself, going inward and being less social was amazingly helpful)

If You’re Starting Your Healing Journey Now

My humble advice would be to start small. Start curious. You don’t have to do everything at once. You don’t even have to “believe” in it all. You just have to notice:

• Did that practice or experience help me breathe a little deeper and feel a little calmer?
• Did that moment of stillness feel even slightly less threatening?
• Did I respond differently—even once—to something that used to wreck me?

That’s healing. Not a before-and-after photo. Not a perfect life. Just sustained safety, space, peace and yep—JOY!!!

I would start with this 10-minute test: Something we encourage our community to do if they're newer to meditation:

1. Set a timer on your phone for 10 minutes and place it about 10 feet away from you.
2. Ground down on your back or seated in a comfy position and start to become aware of your breath.
3. Experience the silence and sensory deprivation, and make mental note of where your mind wanders.
4. Don't try to control your thoughts; just witness them and be curious.
5. When the timer goes off, write as many of the thoughts down as you can remember.

Where your brain goes when it's not stimulated is SUCH great learnings. If you're stuck in anxiety and depression as a result of trauma, your brain is not always your friend; it will take you to dark places, To Do lists, constant worrying, overanalyzing situations or focusing on drama with people (let that shit GO!) or other thought patterns that don't serve you. For now, just take note. This practice marks the start of the seeds of your healing journey being planted.

Final Word

Healing from trauma isn’t about fixing yourself. You were never broken. You were adapting—brilliantly—to circumstances that no one should have had to survive. This world is complete chaos after all; we're surrounded by violence, stressed out individuals projecting their stress onto us; injustices and inequalities... all of this takes root in our subconscious.

You deserve to feel safe in your body. You deserve to trust your thoughts, to rest, to connect, to grow. You deserve joy.

And I promise you: it’s not only possible, it’s already underway. It starts by engaging with the Four Pillars, releasing your trauma bit by bit, and slowly learning to become your own Healer, your own Safe Haven, your own Guide. This, I tell you from experience (5 full years symptom free, baby!), is the most powerful medicine of them all.

~ Diana, cofounder @ Catbird

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