How Psychosomatic Trauma Healing Helped Me Move Beyond Spiritual Bypassing
- Tanya Master
- Sep 8, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 26
For years, I thought I was healing.
I meditated, ate clean, practiced gratitude, and journaled daily — with my higher self, my future self, even external guides. On the outside, I looked strong, grounded, spiritual, positive. But inside, I was quietly collapsing.
Since childhood, I’d lived with cyclical depression and anxiety. I hid it well, partly because I was raised to see pain as weakness. I learned early that if I wanted to belong, I had to appear fine. So I became disciplined, mindful, and endlessly self-aware; yet completely disconnected from the parts of me that were suffering.
When the next wave of depression hit later into my adult life, everything I’d built spiritually came undone. Despite years of devotion: meditating daily, eating intuitively, cutting out toxicity, working on my “frequency”, the darkness returned, louder and stronger.
That was when I realised: I wasn’t healing.
I was coping spiritually.
When Spirituality Becomes Survival
For a long time, spirituality was my life raft. It kept me afloat when I was drowning. But over time, I began to see that much of what I called healing was really control.
Every time I tried to stay “high‑vibe,” I was rejecting a part of myself. Every time I tried to transcend pain, I was abandoning the body that still held it. Spiritual tools helped me survive my symptoms, but they didn’t touch the roots of them.
The Turning Point: Facing What Couldn’t Be Meditated Away
Eventually, I found my way to a trauma‑informed practitioner. I cried through almost every session that first year. It was messy, raw, human... and deeply reparative.
For the first time, someone didn’t ask me to fix my feelings or find the lesson. They helped me feel them. I realised I had never been witnessed in my grief, rage, or shame without being asked to transform it. That experience changed everything.
It showed me that real healing isn’t about staying calm or positive. It’s about feeling safe enough to be real.
Why Spiritual Practice Isn’t Always Healing
This isn’t a rejection of spirituality. It’s a reorientation. Spiritual practices can connect us to meaning and resilience. But when they become ways of avoiding the body, they reinforce the same fragmentation trauma created in the first place.
Healing requires what spirituality often bypasses: the messy, embodied, emotional truth that lives in the nervous system. We can’t meditate pain away. We have to meet it where it lives: in the body.
Learning to Feel: Entering the Body
Through trauma‑informed, psychosomatic work, I learned to track sensations rather than suppress them.
To pause instead of transcend.
To breathe, shake, cry, and allow what was once overwhelming to finally move through.
The more I listened, the clearer it became that the body wasn’t my enemy, it was my teacher. Every symptom, every contraction, every shutdown was a story waiting to be heard.
The Birth of Psychosomatic Trauma Healing
Over time, this process became not just personal but professional.
My own healing journey evolved into the Psychosomatic Restoration Method™ — a trauma‑informed approach that integrates body, mind, and relational awareness.
Psychosomatic coaching isn’t about fixing or forcing change. It’s about listening; to the body, to the parts that protect us, and to the systems that shaped our survival.
This is where real transformation begins: not in ascension, but in integration.
A Different Kind of Transformation
If you’ve been doing all the “right” things; meditating, journaling, visualising your higher self; and still feel stuck, it might be time to shift from self-improvement into real, grounded integration.
I work with high-functioning, spiritually aware clients who are ready to move beyond coping and surviving, and into embodied, psychosomatic trauma healing.
If that resonates, book a introductory session below, or explore how my Psychosomatic Restoration Method™ can support your next chapter.
