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Nope.  No, this isn’t a book or movie recommendation.  For this topic, I aim to help you build a resource of goal setting.  We talked last week about how childhood trauma (or really any age trauma) steals away creativity, dreams, and joy.  In that week’s Mindful Monday meditation, you thought about a dream you used to have that for whatever reason didn’t get achieved.  Did you spend time after contemplating something that dream wanted you to know?  Maybe you resurrected a childhood dream and wanted to see if there was still life in it. Dreams, fantasies, ideas – they are all wonderful.  The difference between dreams and goals are dates.  To turn a dream into a reality, it takes planning, step-by-step preparing, setting a date you aim to complete the goal.  If you haven’t spent much time thinking about this, I invite you to do.  Achieving even small goals is a momentum to boost you into bigger wins down the road.  As trauma survivors, we need that extra confidence in ourselves.  So if you haven’t dreamed in a while, goal set ever, or just are feeling nervous about this – start small.  You can build some self-trust as you go. 

The reason I consider this topic a therapeutic intervention is because even giving yourself permission to dream is filling a big hole in our trauma survivor hearts.  From there, planning and preparing to accomplish something that you actually want to do is huge for your healing.  Recognizing you have something in your spirit that is YOURS, that is making itself known and is being expressed through wishing and wanting is huge.  Actually, writing it down and finding the steps to realize it is amazing.  You are working on repairing the intrapersonal bridge inside of yourself that has been damaged by your trauma.  Listening to your soul’s soul, hearing, acknowledging, and then acting on that is brave.  Finding time for yourself to work on this goal is self-focused.  As you make small steps, you can practice self-praise.  If you fall off the preparation trail or miss a deadline to the goal, you can practice non-self-judgment and get right back to it. 

Trauma recovery coaching is based on client-led goals.  The client and I collaboratively come up with positive mission statements that they want to see become true.  This doesn’t have to be a Julia Roberts production.  These are things like “I want to care for myself more this week.”  That goal then has to have action steps attached to it – where the client can set themselves up for opportunities to show themselves care.  A goal could be “To be most true to myself, I want to leave this job and find one that serves my mental health better.”  The action steps below that are more involved and take more time than one week – but they start small with maybe ‘make a list of options I need at a job to feel safe’ (i.e. flexible hours, work at home, unlimited vacation) or ‘figuring out what field of work I would be most fulfilled in’ (since a purpose driven day is most likely to have a good impact on MH) or ‘make a spreadsheet to see if I am able to leave this job and take a hiatus to breathe and figure out what I want to do’ (because if this is possible, the client can take a 2-3 week hiatus with savings money if they job is so stressful they can’t even find time to search within themselves).  Without the goal setting objective, some may get stuck in the loop that they don’t like their intense and high-powered job but they can’t even find space in their mind to figure out what they want to do to even begin this new journey.   This is where coaching is there to lend a helping hand.

So I invite you to take some space, somewhere, however long, whatever that looks like for you – and ask yourself what you want to Eat, where you want to Pray, to who and how do you want to Love?   (And obviously you are finding your own version.)  Not everyone desires to sail off to Bali to work on themselves.  What does this look like for you?   Can you think of a few dreams – big or small, from your childhood or as an adult, easy or simple – just imagine them for a while?   

I’d love to help you walk through healthy goal setting to improve your current situation. Whatever blocks you may have right now may be due to unresolved trauma or unhealed traumatic responses and fears.  The wounds you carried years ago, may be haunting you today by not letting you live your fullest life.  Trauma Recovery Coaching may be a beautiful relationship to help you find dreams, write them down as goals, design the action steps, and deal with the emotions that come up on each of those tasks.  It doesn’t matter if you want to Drink, Sleep, and Laugh or Dance, Cry, and Shower – your trauma healing road is within your grasp right now.  Let’s start walking together.