Trauma Analogies, Part 3: The Puzzle

This post was written by Life Psych therapist Mike Rodgers, as part of a four-part series he authored on trauma.

Michael Rogers, LPC

September 2025

This is the third in a series of posts about how I view trauma. I give these analogies to clients when we begin talking about the healing of trauma in their lives. And I encourage them to begin to believe that trauma can be healed, not simply processed.

Imagine that you walk into your home and find a huge jigsaw puzzle just strewn across the family room floor. The first thing you do is begin looking for a box to which the puzzle belongs. Searching everywhere, you soon realize there is no box, no picture, nothing to tell you anything about the puzzle.

You return to the family room, look at the mess on the floor, and begin to feel overwhelmed. Stepping over some pieces, one of them catches your eye and you reach to pick it up. Grabbing ahold of the piece, you notice what looks like a knife with blood on it. Without thinking, you toss it back to the floor in fear. Stepping further, you pick up another piece. This piece reminds you of colors of your childhood bedroom. You suddenly feel sick and drop this one too. This continues on until you become so overwhelmed you turn, walk out of the room, and shut the door. 

A month later you realize you haven’t returned to that room. It has taken some getting used to, but you simply don’t even look at it. You have begun using the back door to enter your home. You take the back stairs, rather than the main stair way. You even use the small bathroom because using the large one requires walking by the family room. Eventually you get so used to the new “routine” that you don’t even sense the amount of extra time and energy it is taking. 

This goes on until one evening you have a visitor at the front door. Going to answer the front door brings in a flood of memories as you are forced to go past the room to open the door. This is bad enough, but then the visitor insists on sitting in he family room. You are confronted by all that you have tried to forget and you find yourself drowning in fear.

The reality is, if we pick up the pieces, begin to organize them into meaningful pieces and put the puzzle back together, we will be stepping into the realm of healing. Once healthy, you will have use of the whole house, no longer wasting time and energy avoiding the area. This is what I do as a counselor. I give you back all of yourself in a way that allows you to live life fully!