Helpful Capacities on the Journey of Healing

In her book ‘Healing from Trauma”, Jasmine Lee Cori outlines the following list of personal resources that help when healing from traumatic experiences. Personal resources are inherent capacities which individuals possess, such as their strength and abilities, healthful activities, the ability to regulate affect, a caring and trustworthy support system, and so forth. Cori additionally states that personal resources are healthy patterns, ones which create a sense of feeling good and accepting oneself in ways that are truthful, and not based in self-deception or indulgence.

If you are just starting your healing journey, or even if you are well into it, please review Cori’s list of helpful capacities below. Each capacity reflects something which can further or enhance our healing. As you read through the list, consider which capacities you possess, and which you  might like to develop.

How might you build and develop these capacities  in your life?

• Awareness: the capacity to recognize what is going on around and within you. Awareness is the key to much healing and change
• Curiosity: the interest to know more, to look at your own experience with free, interested eyes rather than from a stuck perspective
• Courage: the willingness to face what is difficult
• Discernment: the capacity to see what is so. To know when to back out of something (such as an unfolding emotional process) and when to go through it
• Compassion: the capacity to hold your own hurt (and others hurts) with a kind heart
• Prudence: the capacity to make healthy choices for yourself and avoid what is harmful
• Hope: a sense that things can get better
• Humor: the capacity to look with amusement at things that might otherwise get you down, to hold a larger perspective
• Love: the capacity to receive and extend caring, to bond
• Resourcefulness: the capacity to identify and locate resources that would be helpful, as well as fully utilize your own capacities
• Resiliency: the capacity to pick yourself up and try again, to bounce back after being hurt
• Strength, Persistence, Will: the capacity to run the marathon, to follow the journey through trauma and not give up or collapse into a trauma-ridden life
• Trust: the capacity to let go of worry and feel some confidence that things will turn out okay

Learn more in Jasmine Lee Cori’s book, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor’s Guide to Understanding your Symptoms and Reclaiming your Life.