Healing from the Past & Trauma Recovery
What is trauma?
A lot of people are realising that they may have been traumatised by early life experiences, relational wounds that are intergenerational and/or present throughout their family system, or events have occurred that have been challenging to deal with. Though it is very common to be unaware that trauma is the cause of people’s suffering.
Trauma isn’t just a set of symptoms to be fixed—it’s the imprint of a nervous system doing its best to protect you from what felt overwhelming.
When our capacity to experience something is overwhelmed our system protects itself in a number of ways - what initially protects us becomes the experiences that people report getting stuck in after trauma. For example, disconnection/isolation/shutting down, depression, anxiety, anger and frustration, grief, and even physical illness.
We are highly resilient and capable of surviving incredibly challenging experiences. What is also hard is learning how to live in the aftermath. How to trust again, reconnect with their authentic self, be grounded in the body when they don’t feel safe in the world? Often there is also a lot of shame that needs healing.
How to heal trauma?
While there are many evidence-based ways of working with trauma, the success of any treatment will depend on a strong therapeutic relationship - an important part of the healing process of trauma is having it be seen, heard, and tended to with compassion and safety.
This is also why it is difficult to heal in isolation - the person who has gone through traumatic experiences often needs to go through the process of opening up about their experiences without being retraumatised.
As someone who has experience working with traumatised populations and has also grown up around traumatised individuals, I have a deep appreciation and compassion that lends to providing a nuanced and collaborative approach to each person’s unique experience of trauma, rather than a cookie-cutter approach that applies to all clients.
How can therapy help?
Since trauma limits one’s ability to tolerate certain aspects or types of relationships, this means that effective therapy restores one’s relational capacity. This means that positive change is seeded in the container of a safe, trustworthy, and deeply attuned relationship.
Depending on the person and the nature of the trauma, some people need approaches that require thought, analysis, and developing understanding and insight. Others may require or prefer approaches that work at the level of the body and felt experience. Often with trauma, both are needed.
What does a typical first session involve?
A first session is a good opportunity to explore your concerns and get a feel for how we work together (remember the importance of the therapeutic relationship).
Although I will want to have an understanding of your experiences, I won’t press you to talk about anything that you are not ready to or don’t want to share. It also means pacing the sessions appropriately and meeting you at your current capacity, including talking about things in a way that doesn’t retraumatise you. This also means is that we don’t have to spend too much time going over experiences you may have already tried talking about at length with no resolution.
Getting some understanding of your concerns often includes:
How have your challenges developed over time?
What is helping you - including your strengths and available resources?
What is impeding you or adding to the difficulties being faced?
What expectations you may have about how therapy can help
You are welcome to ask any questions you may have about the process or if you feel you need direction or encouragement. I will be able to offer some initial impressions, and we will agree on how best to ‘contain’ the work together - how often to schedule in, any particular needs or preferences you may have, etc.