The Pyramid of Healing - Why Healing in Order Matters

Did you know that there a sequential order to healing? In this episode of Regulate & Rewire, we explore "The Pyramid of Healing," and it's 4-phases that support your healing journey. If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, or like your healing efforts aren’t working, it might be because things are happening out of order. Discover the four phases of healing—Education & Awareness, Regulation, Rewiring, and Resourcing—and learn how following this sequence can create lasting change.

Key Takeaways:

1. Healing happens in phases—trying to skip ahead can make things harder.
2. Build a strong foundation of regulation before diving into deeper healing work.
3. Healing is cyclical—each time you revisit the phases, you’ll find more resilience and ease.

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Transcript

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welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here now. Let's dive in. 

Have you ever felt like this concept of healing is ambiguous and messy and unstructured and frustrating? I once had a client come into session, and they shared exactly this, that this concept of healing felt overwhelming for her. She had questions like, What is healing even mean? Is it even possible? What does it look like? Where do I start? How do I know if it's working? And part of this conversation was me laying out for her our four phase neuroscience and trauma informed pyramid of healing, and she shared at the end of the call that that was the most helpful thing for her, because it was not only validating that she was on the right track and where she needed to be, but it also validated why she had felt so stuck in Previous healing modalities and attempts that she had made. Did you know that there is a particular order to holistic healing, and trying to heal out of that order is exactly what kept me stuck for a really, really long time, and at one point, left me with this narrative that maybe I was too broken to heal. I wondered what I was doing wrong, that I had tried everything and nothing seemed to work. And what I eventually learned to be true was that it wasn't that the things I was trying wouldn't ever work. It definitely wasn't that I was too broken to heal. It was simply that I was doing a lot of these things out of order. 

Now, last week, on the podcast, we talked about trauma and how there are many layers to trauma healing. There's the physical, the psychological, the nervous system, cognitive, behavior, social and how different modalities work to integrate and to heal these different layers that trauma creates for each of us, and today, I want to help you organize your healing further by discussing these four phases of healing and their order that helps you to See the results that you want in your healing journey. And this is something I have seen echoed in a lot of different healing spaces with small variations. And what you'll hear is our specific version of this at rises, we what I refer to as this pyramid of healing with its four phases. 

And quick side note, if you are somebody who has bought my book healing through the vagus nerve, you will see an illustration of this pyramid starting on page 84 and for those of you who haven't bought my book yet, I will link it in the show notes. It is often on sale for less than 20 bucks. It is written to be accessible and actionable. It's beautifully illustrated, so I'd really recommend getting it in print versus a Kindle or audiobook, but absolutely get it however. You'll consume it, and if you want to take your experience with this book a step further, I also created a book course it's like you are in a book club, one on one with me. There's a video for each chapter, printable worksheets and a whole library of guided video regulation practices to match the ones that I give you in chapter six. So that book is there as a really tangible healing resource, if you don't have it already. 

Now back on track to today's podcast conversation. Let's talk about this pyramid of healing, and this concept represents the order in which we need to move through healing to experience deep and lasting change. It is the way that we are hardwired as humans to move through healing. So if you have ever felt like your healing journey is frustrating or ineffective, or like you're spinning your wheels, it might be because things are happening out of order. So let's talk about how to move through healing in a way that supports your mind and body rather than overwhelming them. And before I get into a detailed description of each phase. I want to bring this concept to life through an analogy, one that I have personal experience with. 

So if you don't know, I have dislocated my left shoulder 11 times and had surgery on it twice. Now, after surgery, I didn't jump straight into doing push ups or getting back into weightlifting. I started off by resting it extensively, leaving it in a sling and icing it for a few days before going to physical therapy. Then in physical therapy. We started slow and small. We started with gentle movements, focusing on range of motion, gradually working our way up to some resistance, bound work, eventually building enough strength and stability to push my shoulder to handle more intense exercises or to sit through sessions really focused on breaking up scar tissue. Those were the worst. But it was only after building up this initial strength and stability that I was able to push my shoulder to handle more intense exercises, and if I would have skipped those early stages and come straight to doing a push up or heavy lifting, I would have reinjured myself, at the very least, further delayed my healing. And it this all makes sense. This feels really intuitive. When we're talking about a physical injury, we understand the sequential order that's needed. 

And today's conversation is about how trauma healing and healing our mental health in a holistic way also has a sequential order that makes sense, and if you jump too quickly into the deep emotional work, trauma processing, trying to overhaul your life with big behavior changes before you build a foundation of regulation and stability, it can feel overwhelming and effective and even set you back in your healing journey. It is about pacing and building capacity and resilience gradually, so that when you do decide to tackle the harder stuff your system can handle it without breaking down or being overloaded. And this is where understanding this healing pyramid comes into play and takes this, you know, big concept of healing, and makes it less ambiguous, gives it some sense of tangibility and process and flow, there is an order to how we need to approach our healing, and that order is crucial for making sure that we are building a foundation that supports real and lasting change. 

Now to break this down, I am going to give you a quick introduction to all four of the phases, and then I'm going to go back through them in detail. So phase one. So if you can imagine a pyramid with four sections the foundation of this pyramid phase one the bottom is education and awareness. This is where you learn about the mind body system and then create more awareness around your unique mind body system. Phase two is regulation. This is where you learn tangible tools to navigate your nervous system with more agency. You learn to create more space between trigger and response and create a little bit more capacity overall in your system. Phase three is rewiring. This is where you do the hard stuff, where you do the deeper trauma healing and integration work. This is where you might rewire old beliefs, unburden wounded parts. Do attachment work, the limit does not exist to the various modalities and layers of work that you might explore or find supportive in this rewiring phase. And then finally, is phase four. This is a phase of expansion, continued integration and proactive work to increase your capacity and resilience over time. 

So now that you have that overview of phase one through four, I want to take some time and expand on each of these phases a little bit more, and then end this conversation by talking again about why this order matters. And as I give these more detailed explanations of each of these phases, I want to invite you to pause and ask, what does the healing work I'm doing right now look like? Does this feel helpful or productive for me right now, did I skip one of the foundational phases? And I also want to preemptively give the context that healing is not linear. It is cyclical. Sometimes you will be doing a little bit of phase one, little bit of phase two, little bit of phase three, in some various capacities. You may also be in phase four, where you feel like you're you're resourcing, you're keep on, keeping on. You're in maintenance mode, and life hands you something that's hard and tricky, and you find yourself back at phase one for that particular thing. In every other area of your life, you might still feel pretty good. You. But now I'm in this awareness phase around this new circumstance or this new situation. I'm learning how to regulate around that, and so just know that while this gives structure to your overall healing journey, we're gonna find ourselves cycling through these phases for as long as we're human and alive. 

So phase one is education and awareness. This is where you learn how your mind body system works, how your nervous system works, specifically understanding the science behind it, the role that it plays in your overall well being. And this knowledge is foundational, because the state of your nervous system determines the lens that you view and experience your entire life through. If you are stuck in an activated survival mode state, you are going to apply that to every interaction, every circumstance in your life. If you are more in a shutdown state, same thing and this phase one, like I mentioned previously, has two parts, the education and the awareness. The education is understanding the nervous system, and awareness is understanding and building a relationship with your nervous system. And in our practice, we also introduce our clients to the concept of parts here. So this is where we understand that there are protective parts and patterns that we all have, and then help our clients to build some awareness about their own protective parts or patterns. So in this phase, you are not actually trying to change anything beyond how you understand and relate to your symptoms, to your thoughts or behaviors. 

And this is really hard for people, because they join a program, they sign up for sessions with a practitioner, and they're immediately okay, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? What are we going to do? And there needs to be a moment of we're not actually going to try to change or do differently. Let's try to get a new lens to experience exactly what's happening right now. 

And this podcast, for many of you, is part of phase one, and in some ways, it provides the education and the awareness. It provides the education and new context for your experience through the conversations that we have in each episode, and it provides some of that awareness when you choose to pause and reflect on the questions that I offer or download the worksheets that I give and do some of your nervous system mapping. That awareness is also what some of you experience when you join our one on one coaching program, or join us inside the membership where we get to support you in that personal application of this education, when you personalize what you've learned, that is when you can start connecting the dots between theory or science and your lived experience, and that's where that awareness begins. 

So quick summary of phase one, it is about learning first how the mind body system works, and then exploring the uniqueness of yours from a place of curiosity and compassion. And what's interesting is that even though we don't actively work to change anything in this phase, it is amazing to see how often clients experience and begin to navigate their lives and situations differently, simply through this new lens of understanding. 

This brings us to phase two, which is our regulation phase. So once you have built this foundation of awareness, the next step is regulation, and this is where you continue learning the language of your nervous system, and you learn to navigate your different nervous system states to create more capacity. I often boil nervous system regulation work down to three questions. Question number one is, what state Am I in right now? What nervous system state Am I in? Question two, how do I know that I'm in that state? And then number three is, do I want to do anything about it? Do I want to shift my state at all questions one and two are part of phase one. You learn to in any given moment answer the question, What state is my nervous system in? And how do I know what's my unique tells that that's the nervous system state that I'm in. And that third question falls in phase two, do I want to do anything about it? What are the tools or the practices in real time that can help me shift to a more regulated or different state? And this phase has to happen before we move into the rewiring phase. And most of the time what goes wrong is. We skip this phase of stabilizing the nervous system and instead just jump right into rewiring and reprocessing trauma, and that can overwhelm our system. It's often too much too soon, and that was my experience when my very dysregulated nervous system started talk therapy, where by session two, I had already retold all of the worst and most vulnerable moments of my life. 

And I will caveat this with this isn't necessarily a universal experience in things like cognitive behavior therapy, CBT, a CT, but it was mine with multiple different therapists, and it's a similar experience that I have heard now from countless others that I've connected with as a practitioner. So before we get into deeper healing work, we need to regulate and stabilize our system. We need to create some capacity there. If you are hanging on by a thread in your daily life, there is a good chance that you don't have the capacity to do the deep trauma healing work without your system becoming overwhelmed. And so this phase of regulation is going to include a few different things, and it's going to look different for everyone, but the main goal is to bring stability and capacity to your system, your mind body system, and it's in this phase that we help our clients recognize when they're feeling dysregulated, and what specific tools or strategies or resources help to bring them back into feeling more grounded, more regulated. This is where you'll also build more awareness around the things that trigger you and how you typically respond, and start to insert different tools or practices that allow you to respond differently, to respond more intentionally. And in our practice, this is where we help our clients with their regulation game plan. That is a worksheet I've provided and an exercise I've talked about in previous episodes on the podcast. And this is also where we help them build out their own regulation toolboxes. This might also be where you practice being with uncomfortable emotions or sensations to build your capacity to be with them so you're not as easily overwhelmed by them. 

We often do this through a technique called pendulation. So pendulation refers to moving back and forth between states of distress or discomfort. Maybe that's activation, maybe it's grief, maybe it's anger, with states of groundedness, calm and regulation. This is a practice that I do in my monthly release class, often in that guided container. Let's find something that feels not overwhelming for your system, but uncomfortable. Can we get curious about it? Can we be there? Can we show our mind and body that we can stay with discomfort and be okay and that we can, with agency, move back towards regulation, so this helps the nervous system release tension without getting stuck in the intensity of our traumatic experiences. In summary, skipping this phase or rushing through this phase of stabilization and regulation is oftentimes where a lot of people get stuck in their healing journey, when they might jump straight into cognitive or other work without first building the capacity to handle difficult emotions, discomfort and regulation is about developing that capacity to notice states of dysregulation, to confidently have tools to be with it, to soften it, and that helps to ultimately create a system that has more capacity, but also it cultivates more self, trust and confidence and empowerment within you. 

Then we have phase three. This is rewiring. After you've built this baseline of regulation, you are more ready for that deeper healing work, what we call rewiring. This is where modalities like cognitive behavior therapy, hypnotherapy, parts work, ifs EMDR, limitless, other things can come into play. And this is another reminder that jumping into this rewiring too soon before you've built the capacity to regulate this work can actually backfire. This is why it is so so important to work with providers that are trauma trained, and why I personally love working with coaches and therapists who are trained in. A variety of modalities, both top down and bottom up. Who can help you figure out which path might be the best fit for what it is that you are struggling with, what flavor of trauma, what layer of trauma it is that you want to work with right now. So rewiring is the process of creating new neural pathways. It is retraining your brain and your body to respond in healthier, more adaptive or accurate ways given your current life circumstances, instead of living through these old patterns of responding, this is where you might work to unburden younger parts, reprocess or integrate trauma, do attachment, work behavior change, but before that can happen, we need to stabilize the system. And this rewiring work. It's hard, it's hard work, and it adds a stress load to the system to do that work. 

And so if we come back to the stress bucket analogy that I talk about often on the podcast, if you are living life where your stress bucket is already full, imagine dropping a big boulder into that. It is going to displace, it is going to overflow your bucket, you are going to become even more symptomatic. And so we need to create some space, because taking on this deeper healing work, it is going to add a stress load to the system, and it's okay that it does that, so long as we have the capacity for it. And if we have skipped phase two, that regulation, or even phase one, that education and awareness, we don't have context for how our mind body system works enough to really work with it. This deeper work can overwhelm and reinforce our need to stay stuck in survival mode. 

And then phase four. This is that final phase. And I say, you know final phase in quotation, because this work is cyclical, and there's never really an end. You don't get to phase four and stay in Phase four, but this is what we call resourcing, and this can be a stage of maintenance where you simply keep on, keeping on with the supportive coping skills or habits that are supportive for you. Once you have gone through the previous phases, you will have a new baseline for yourself, and this is where you continue to engage in the practices that help keep you there. This can also be a stage of intentional resilience building, where you proactively work to increase your window of tolerance. So this is where you take a season of, hey, I'm pretty good. I'm pretty grounded. I'm feeling regulated more often than not. And I'm going to use this good to test my limits. Just like you wouldn't take an injured body into a weight room and do an intense workout, you are going to wait until you have a healthy body injuries healed, at least to a good enough extent, before you start intensely exercising again. So you are taking a season of good and healed enough to test your limits so that you are stronger the next time you are faced with some challenge because we're pesky humans, and we live pesky human lives, and more challenges are going to come. And so testing your limits could look like physiological limits, cold plunges, intense workouts, things that push you into that sympathetic state and you learn how to control and manage yourself there. Maybe it is testing the limits by stepping into a more authentic version of yourself, even if you know that that might ruffle feathers of some people in your life. Maybe this is where you push limits by setting intentional boundaries in your relationship or taking bigger risks in your career. So this fourth phase of resourcing is also about expansion. So it's about expansion and continued integration and this proactive work to increase your capacity and resilience. 

So I want to pause here for a moment and invite you to reflect on where you might be in your healing journey right now. Do you feel like you are in a season of I'm doing pretty good. I've done a lot of the deeper healing work, and I'm at a new baseline, awesome. What do you want to do with that? Do you want to just allow yourself to be in some ease and calm amazing? Keep on, keeping on. That's more that maintenance mode, that integration. Do you want to use this good to increase resilience, to expand what could that look like?

Maybe you are doing some rewiring. We're. Work, and you're feeling kind of overwhelmed by it, and you're thinking, Oh, maybe I want to take a step back where or what feels like the right place for me to do some education and awareness. What does it look like for me to stabilize my system? And stabilizing your system could be just as much about learning nervous system regulation tools as taking a step back from deep trauma work and instead working on, how do I just have less stress in my life, doing some stress management, taking some things out of your stress bucket, so that you then have the capacity to step back into that deeper work without it being overwhelming, and so just pausing for a little bit to self reflect on what you've heard so far and how that might apply to where you are and what you want out of your healing right now. And I think it's important to remind you that healing is cyclical. You won't stay in any of these phases forever, either because life is going to hand you something or because you see a pattern showing up in your life, and you decide you're going to step back into that rewiring phase to take on that pattern so that life opens up for you in an even bigger, more authentic way. 

And as we wrap up, I want to reiterate that if you are feeling stuck in your healing, it could simply mean that you're not with the right therapist or coach. It might mean that you're not with the right modality that's the best fit for what your system needs right now, or maybe it's that that particular modality is going to be an amazing fit a little bit later, just not right now. So often I hear things like, I feel like I've tried everything and nothing has worked. Or my friend said, EMDR changed her life, so I tried it, but it was overwhelming. Or my friend loved her therapist who specialized in ifs or a CT, so I worked with them. Or I found a career coach, and it just didn't work for me. Why is it working for other people? And it's just not working for me, and maybe it's that some of those things just aren't a good fit for you, or maybe they are coming at the wrong time, at the wrong place in your healing journey. 

And I also want to note that a trauma trained practitioner will understand these phases. They will understand the need to build interceptive awareness and safety in the body before trying to get you to feel big feelings or retell hard things from your past, a good EMDR, or ifs, or whatever modality therapist who is trauma trained and also understands the nervous system can take you through these phases. You don't necessarily have to find a whole new practitioner with each of these phases or with each new modality you might want to explore. And sometimes the reality is it sometimes is tricky to find a therapist who is trained in both these bottom up and top down modalities, because most master's programs really focus on cognitive therapies, which means that post graduate school therapists need to invest their own time and money into additional trainings in the fields of somatics and trauma to be a more all encompassing practitioner. 

And more than anything, this whole conversation is an attempt to give you the context that if you are feeling stuck or like you are doing something wrong because you're not seeing the results you want from a particular practitioner or modality, it might not be you or your fault, or that you're doing anything wrong and you are definitely not too broken to heal. And while healing is not a linear process, it can be helpful to know that there is an order that our system is designed to follow, that it needs to follow the same way that there's a sequential order to healing a physical injury, there is also a sequential order to trauma healing and rewiring and regulating our nervous systems. And by moving through the phases of education and awareness, regulation, then rewiring, then resourcing, we can avoid some of the most common pitfalls of feeling stuck or overwhelmed on our healing journey. 

Okay, today's three takeaways. 

Number one, healing happens in phases. There is a necessary order to the healing process. Our pyramid of healing starts with phase one, education and awareness, phase two, regulation, phase three, rewiring and phase four, resourcing and jumping ahead can overwhelm your system, but following this sequence supports lasting, sustainable change. 

Number two, build. Strong foundation first, before you dive into deep trauma work, at least to some extent, you have to first have developed the ability to cultivate a felt sense of safety in your body, to have some of these regulation skills to stabilize your nervous system, to know how to be in and with the hard, without it being overwhelming, we need to have some room in our stress bucket before we can add the load that comes with that deeper trauma healing work. 

And number three is that healing is cyclical, not linear. You are going to revisit different phases of healing throughout your life, and each time that you cycle through that phase will feel more familiar. You will be more confident that that phase doesn't last forever. And every time you cycle through these phases, it's going to bring you to a more authentic, more regulated baseline. It's going to bring you more strength, more resilience, and overall, more ease in your whole healing journey. 

All right, that's it for today. 

Thank you for being here, and I am sending so much hope and healing your way. 

Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes, again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai