What is a trauma-informed approach, and why is it the future of healing?

I knew about CBD, but I didn’t know why it was good for me, what standards to look for, or how to proactively use it for healing that lasts far longer than one good nights’ sleep.
Sound familiar? 

I spent 21 years in digital media climbing the corporate ladder, trying to out-pace the rat race. Eventually, burnout led to health symptoms that kept getting worse. 

I saw specialists, alternative practitioners, and healers of all kinds, but no one could figure out how to treat my symptoms. This ultimately led to a vested interest in dissecting modern medicine. 

Here’s what I learned:  The complications of unmanaged stress have caused a health crisis in our country. And we need to redefine and reclaim healing, so that people can get access to alternative formats of healing, faster. 

As I dug into the culture of care we’ve become accustomed to, I learned that a trauma-informed approach to psychological care is not included in the DSM-5 (the handbook used by healthcare professionals as the guide to diagnose mental disorders). 

What?! 

You’ve likely heard “trauma-informed” before a wide variety of activities and approaches in the last few years, which is why it’s so shocking that it’s still a largely unrecognized criteria for treatment in the western world. 

Why does this matter? 

At Wonderfull, we leverage trauma-informed psychology as a partnered mechanism to the endocannabinoid system. 

In other words, we don’t just create CBD products. We’re changing the conversation on healing. Because you can’t express agency or advocate for your healing if you’re in fight or flight.

Why? Our body is biologically designed to heal itself (more on this here), but modern day exposure to stress overloads our system, making it harder to heal. By creating, delivering, and educating about our products through a trauma-informed lens, we’re able to give your body the boost it needs to get back to balance. 

We think the pairing of these two mechanisms is exactly what’s needed to make the world a bit more Wonderfull. 

Why trauma-informed? 

Studies show that psychological trauma is correlated with physical symptoms — including things like alcoholism and drug abuse, depression and suicide attempt, smoking, sexually transmitted disease, and severe obesity, cancer and lung, heart, and liver disease. 

In other words, psychological adversity can manifest into physical symptoms. When we experience trauma, even psychological trauma, it can have physical effects on our bodies and minds later in life. 

So when we present with symptoms in adulthood like cystic acne, cyclical vomiting, burnout, and chronic joint pain — like I did — it can often be tied back to earlier life experiences that stressed our systems.

As adults, we tend to jump right to healing the physical symptoms we’re experiencing — by visiting specialists, analyzing lab test results, and even trying supplements, cleanses, and expensive beauty products. 

This approach leaves the psychological paper trail, that led to your symptoms in the first place, untouched. 

Enter: trauma-informed practices to help you heal from the inside out. This is why Wonderfull offers CBD products, paired with trauma-informed exercises and education. Because together, these two modalities can help you heal. 

What is a trauma-informed approach, exactly?

A trauma-informed approach recognizes the impacts of trauma and its signs and symptoms, not only provides options for recovery for an individual, but also uses knowledge about trauma to actively work against re-traumatization. 

A trauma-informed approach includes creating a sense of safety, building trust and offering collaboration, creating opportunities for choice, and responding with cultural context in mind, all of which can help a person respond to, heal from, and prevent future trauma. 

While most often used in a therapeutic setting, we’ve applied the principles of trauma-informed approaches to how you consume our products, including curated rituals that accompany each product, coaching and self inquiry programming, combined with well-being education.