Tenacity: The Hidden Power Behind Trauma Healing
From Tragedy to Tenacity
In the INSPYRD Beyond Trauma series, we’ve explored the progression of human suffering: • Tragedy – when something devastating happens to you, by you, or in front of you.
• Theft – what trauma steals: your sleep, peace, focus, and sometimes your sense of self.
• Torment and Torture – the mental and physical anguish that follows when trauma goes unresolved.
Today, I want to talk about what it takes to heal. Two things are essential: tenacity and the right treatment program.
When Trauma Becomes a Thief
Unresolved trauma is not just an emotional scar—it’s a biochemical hijacking. When your nervous system’s fight, flight, or freeze mechanism stays engaged, it steals from you in ways most people don’t realize. First to go? Sleep.
You can’t heal if you can’t rest. Your body floods with adrenaline and cortisol, your mind races, and deep restorative sleep disappears. After 30 days of disrupted sleep, the mind begins to fracture. That’s the threshold where PTSD can take root.
“Trauma is a thief—it steals your ability to sleep, to focus, to trust, and to connect.”
Left unchecked, that mental torment often becomes physical torture. Chronic pain, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, IBS—Dr. Gabor Maté reminds us that unresolved trauma is the root of most chronic illness.
Why Tenacity Matters
Healing from trauma isn’t a straight road—it’s a climb. Most people start by seeing their family doctor. And while physicians do remarkable work, they’re trained to treat symptoms, not trauma.
A doctor might prescribe a sleep aid or antidepressant. Yet, there isn’t a single study showing that medication heals trauma or enhances restorative sleep. These tools can manage pain or help you cope—but they don’t complete the healing.
That’s why you have to be tenacious.
You’ll meet resistance. You’ll encounter systems and professionals still using outdated modalities—brick-phone methods in a smartphone world. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), once the gold standard, has less than a 45 percent success rate with over 80 percent recurrence. If your car only started 45 percent of the time and broke down 80 percent of the rest—you’d stop driving it.
Yet, the system keeps sending traumatized people back to the same old model.
Tenacity in Action: The Case of Cat
When I first met Katarina MacLeod, she said, “I’m good. I public speak—I’ve dealt with it.” But beneath that strength was exhaustion. It wasn’t until she hit the edge of breakdown that she said, “Okay, I want to try that thing you do.”
What made the difference? Her tenacity. She was ruthlessly persistent and open to possibility. That combination—tenacity plus openness—is the turning point in every healing journey.
A Broken System—and a Better Way Forward
Let’s be honest: The system isn’t designed to heal you. It’s designed to manage you.
There’s no drug that heals trauma. Even the newest psychedelic therapies work not because of the drug, but because of the therapy performed under the influence.
For most citizens, there’s no public funding for effective trauma interventions. If you’re lucky, you might get a few sessions of CBT through an Employee Assistance Program. But genuine healing requires deeper, neuroscience-informed methods—approaches that resolve the root, not the residue.
That’s why tenacity matters. The system may not be coming for you—but healing is still possible.
Ask This Question
When you seek help, ask your clinician one powerful question:
“Do you believe trauma is an injury that can heal—unequivocally?”
If the answer isn’t yes, keep searching. Because trauma is an injury. And injuries—like broken bones, infections, or scars—can and do heal.
The Takeaway
To heal from trauma, you need:
1. Tenacity – the willingness to keep going when others give up.
2. The Right Program – a neuroscience-informed method that restores calm, sleep, and self-trust.
At INSPYRD, we see people heal every day. The human nervous system is built for recovery. Your job is to stay tenacious long enough to find the path that works.
Call to Action
If this message resonates with you—or with someone you care about—join me every Wednesday at 12 PM ET for INSPYRD Talks, where we dismantle outdated ideas about trauma and explore modern, evidence-based paths to healing.
Follow me on LinkedIn | Subscribe on YouTube (@allen.kanerva) | Learn more at inspyrd.com
Because trauma is an injury that can heal—and your tenacity is the medicine.
