What My Brain Needed While Healing

#11 in the series: What I Wish I had Known Before Beginning Therapy

Photo by Daniele La Rosa Messina on Unsplash

Last week, the Creative Thursday post was about being creative while healing from childhood trauma and highlighted some of the puzzles I have worked on over the years. What I didn’t understand before beginning therapy was how the process would require me to be intentional about healing or rewiring my brain. My solution to this was often working puzzles, as the following excerpt from Jeannie’s BRAVE Childhood explains: 

Working jigsaw puzzles was an ever-present part of my healing. I sensed it was helping my brain rewire itself. One day, while considering how children learn to put puzzles together, I realized they worked the puzzle again and again until mastered. At that point, the pieces would fly into the puzzle frame—as if by magic. I didn’t think board puzzles would be very challenging, so I decided to do the same thing with one of my favorite 500-piece puzzles. The first time I worked it, it took two days. The fifth time I put it together, it only took two hours! I tried two more times, but never beat that time. I mastered it. I felt the sense of accomplishment deep inside me.

The puzzle I mastered!

For me and many others, the deep work of processing trauma often requires a brain reset. Many talk-based therapies emphasize changing brain patterns in the thinking part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Trauma-based therapies do the deeper work of healing the emotional part of the brain (limbic system) and the brain stem. Bessel van der Kolk in the book, The Body Keeps the Score, explains it this way:

If we want to change posttraumatic reactions, we have to access the emotional brain and do “limbic system therapy”: repairing faulty alarm systems and restoring the emotional brain to its ordinary job of being a quiet background presence that takes care of the housekeeping of the body, ensuring that you eat, sleep, connect with intimate partners, protect your children, and defend against danger. (303)

As I look back on my own healing process, I realize that the intensity of this healing process often consumed the energy I had previously used to live above the impact of trauma and complete tasks that required executive functioning.

It often felt like I had lost my brain. I wish I had understood that better!

Others impacted by childhood trauma were unable to fully develop executive functioning skills. Either way, jigsaw puzzles provide an opportunity to develop or re-access executive functioning skills.

What are executive functioning skills? The following is a list I gathered and illustrated with my version of jigsaw puzzling skills:

• Defining and achieving goals (I will work on a new jigsaw puzzle this week!)

• Organizing (Clear the table, get out the piece sorter cups, and open the box.)

• Initiating and focusing on tasks (Try not to miss border pieces as I sort!)

• Planning and prioritizing (What areas are the most obvious to start on.)

• Retaining and using information (Begin to recognize and use patterns.)

• Keeping track of what you’re doing (Where did I put that face piece?)

• Observe, reflect, and problem-solve (Time to start sorting by shapes.)

• Flexibility in thinking (Green isn’t just the color of the trees.)

• Regulating emotions (How many times can I try to put that piece there?)

• Self-restraint/inhibition (This puzzle is impossible and I quit!)

• Stress tolerance (The puzzle is done and I am missing one piece!)

• Time management (Maybe other things need to be done!)

What I wish I had understood was all the ways I could help myself heal between sessions. Reading books wasn’t easy—so I returned to children’s books. Organizing my thoughts was difficult—so I worked on jigsaw puzzles. Many of the most difficult memories needed reframing—so I began creating collages.

I wish I had better understood how these activities would help my traumatized brain heal! I was fortunate to have a therapist who encouraged me to return to many of the activities I had enjoyed as a child and the added benefit was regaining the brain that I thought I might have lost!

Recovery from trauma involves the restoration of executive functioning and, with it, self-confidence and the capacity for playfulness and creativity. (van der Kolk, 302-3)