How Did I Escape From My Trauma to Heal?

June 3, 2026

Running For Healing Blog

Tom O'Connor, Author

Escaping trauma and finding healing is an active, nonlinear journey of managing memories, regulating the nervous system, and rebuilding a sense of internal safety. Healing begins with re-establishing physical and emotional safety. This often involves physically distancing yourself from danger and practicing nervous system regulation techniques.

Trauma survivors integrate their traumatic events into their life story so those events no longer dictate their present reality. There are many healing tools available for processing traumatic events.

At the time, unbeknownst to me, I selected three healing tools: writing, running, and professional support.

Writing As My Trauma Healing Tool

Growing up in a dysfunctional, alcoholic environment, I sought an escape. I did not feel loved or safe in my unpredictable home. My first escape was to retreat to my bedroom and reread Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I shared Holden Caulfield's teenage quest for identity and his profound alienation, loneliness, and confusion. I related to him because he ran away.

After Catcher in the Rye, I fell in love with reading and then writing. Salinger wrote and published it in 1951, adopting the language, slang, and ideals of the post-WWII era—my time. I wanted to start writing down my feelings because Salinger's storytelling made it feel as if he had looked inside my head and written down everything I was thinking. 

Reading fiction became a way for me to connect with people from other places and eras who are struggling with the same feelings I am. Books offer me solutions to so many problems - solutions I couldn't even think of on my own. They give me a way out of my own world and into someone else's.

It was in high school that I started my version of Catcher in the Rye. I also wrote short stories and poetry, many of which were published in our town's newspaper, whose publisher was my former sixth-grade teacher, who praised my reading and writing skills.

Unfortunately, I didn't finish my novel, Outrunning the Past: A Novel of Family Scars, Survival, and Redemption, until this year. It's available on Amazon. That project took over 60 years of intermittent work to publish my Catcher in the Rye.

Throughout my challenging childhood, my parents hovered near the poverty line. They wanted me to enlist in the military after graduating from high school and fight in the Vietnam War. My father was a WWII veteran who dropped out of school in the 6th grade to fight in that war, landing in Africa and traversing Europe until the war's end. After my military service, my parents wanted me to become a sheet-metal worker and work alongside him at his employer, a contractor.

I had a different career path in mind. I earned a full athletic scholarship to a college by excelling in cross-country and track. I had an academic mind and an athletic body, which helped me shift from a state of traumatic survival at home to happiness and success away from my family and to heal.

During college, I majored in English and Psychology. Since then, I have continued to write almost every day. Throughout my professional career, I have written countless articles as a contributing writer for trade magazines and have published a professional non-fiction book, Strategic Planning for Distributors: Execution Isn't Everything – It's the Only Thing.

Upon retirement, I started a mental health blog, Vital Voyage Blog, which publishes 4 articles each week by 70+ mental health experts to over 700 global subscribers. I also published a non-fiction book, Discover Your Adult Child: Survival Skills With An Alcoholic. In this book, I merge my research on the Adult Child of an Alcoholic Syndrome with personal anecdotes to help others overcome childhood trauma inflicted by an alcoholic parent.

Running As My Trauma Healing Tool

Running was an incredibly powerful tool in my healing from trauma. First, it was a desperate "flight" response to survive circumstances I felt helpless to change. Almost every night, I was abruptly awakened by my mother screaming and sometimes slapping my father in the face after he stumbled home drunk in the early morning hours. I felt so frightened that I could rarely fall back asleep.

One night, I told myself, "Enough is enough." When their warfare quieted, I filled my backpack with clothes, approached the front door quietly, and ran away from home. Fleeing into the night, I started sprinting, then jogging, and eventually slowed to a walk. While walking, I realized I was abandoning my little brother in our unsafe environment. I turned around, returned home to protect him, and decided I had to devise a different strategy to escape.

Running became my escape. Run longer, harder, and faster than everyone else. Strive to win every race. That is where others valued you for your performance on the track. Besides earning a full ride through running, I discovered that healing comes from both the chemical release of a "runner's high" and the rhythmic nature of the movement itself.

After my college running career ended, running became a sustainable habit. I still run nearly every day, albeit much slower, finding purpose beyond medals, PRs, and external validation. 

Professional Guidance As My Trauma Healing Tool

While self-care strategies help, working with a professional is often critical for safely processing deep-seated or complex trauma. My two self-care strategies for healing from my trauma remain writing and running, almost every day. Your self-care strategies will be different from mine. 

Other self-care strategies could be:

• Yoga is a gentle, trauma-informed movement practice that helps you reconnect with your body at your own pace.

• Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR) is a guided audio protocol (often found on platforms like Insight Timer) that helps calm your central nervous system through deep relaxation.

• Art Journaling combines your love of writing with visual elements (like collaging or sketching) to process emotions that are hard to put into words.

• Music Therapy includes creating highly curated running playlists or learning to play a low-barrier instrument such as the ukulele.

• Cold Water Therapy involves taking short, invigorating cold showers to jolt your nervous system into the present moment.

• Aromatherapy uses calming essential oils (like lavender or bergamot) to create a sensory anchor during your most stressful moments.

• The 5-4-3-2-1 Technique helps you anchor yourself when triggered by naming 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste.

• Deep & Box Breathing involves slow, diaphragmatic breathing or the 4-4-4-4 method (inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4) to manually lower your heart rate and signal safety to your brain.

• Sensory Anchoring involves carrying a comforting object (such as a textured stone, a soft blanket, or a specific scent) to help bring your focus back to the physical present.

• Nervous System Soothing uses weighted blankets or intentional moments to rest and close your eyes, helping relieve hypervigilance.

• Stretching or walking helps release physical tension and reconnect you with your body.

• Aerobic workouts like running, cycling, and swimming provide sustained cardiovascular exercise, elevating your heart rate and prompting a heavy release of endorphins. They also increase levels of the brain protein BDNF, which helps your brain adapt to stress and process trauma-related fear. 

• Safe Connections means spending time with supportive, trusted individuals. You don't always need to talk about your trauma; just being around safe people restores a sense of trust.

• Self-Compassion recognizes that healing is not linear and celebrates small victories, like getting out of bed. 

One key to seeking professional guidance is that everyone who experiences traumatic events can benefit from a licensed, experienced, trauma-informed specialist who uses highly effective approaches such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), or Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to help reframe traumatic memories.

The second key is that timing is everything. Finding the right therapist often requires trial and error, and as noted, timing and a therapist's specific expertise in trauma are crucial. Many traditional therapists are not equipped to handle complex or developmental trauma. Six therapists have treated me, but I wasn't ready for the first five, who lacked experience helping individuals like me who were still suffering from earlier trauma. My sixth therapist was a licensed, trauma-informed specialist who diagnosed and effectively treated my adult-child syndrome (ACS) and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). Working with that therapist, I have become happier and healthier.

If you are struggling with any form of post-traumatic stress disorder, are you working with a licensed, experienced, trauma-informed therapist?

If not, you should find and work with a therapist/counselor. If you need help finding the right person, please contact me at: discoveryouradultchild@gmail.com.