What is wrong with you?"
Quite often, therapy can focus on trying to work on behaviour, change or improve symptoms, which can be associated with the question, “What is wrong with you?”.
Experiencing trauma often leads to a sense of shame, a feeling that, somehow, there is something wrong with you.
"What happened to you?"
Instead of seeing someone in terms of being flawed and needing to be fixed, trauma-informed therapy comes from the perspective of “what happened to you?”, acknowledging that issues are often a normal and natural response to past experience.
These responses have often helped someone to survive, but they may get in the way of living life now.
Trauma can impact wellbeing, coping, and relationships
Trauma can impact a person's wellbeing, for example, experiencing low mood, anxiety, and overwhelming emotions. It can also impact relationships, such as having difficulty trusting other people. It can also affect how someone copes in life, for example using strategies like avoidance, withdrawal, or even substance use
Exploring the impact of trauma
Trauma-informed therapy helps to explore these impacts and develop awareness of how they show up in your life physically, mentally, emotionally, behaviourally, and in relationships.
The importance of trust and safety
Trust and safety are especially important in trauma work and they are integrated into all aspects of trauma-informed therapy. This can look like: -
- Transparency - explaining why a different approach might be used and why
- Choice - offering and clearly communicating choices about how we work together in therapy
- Collaboration - working alongside one another and allowing healing to take place within the relationship by sharing power and decision-making
- Empowerment - acknowledging and supporting your resilience and ability to heal yourself
Trauma-informed therapy doesn't mean talking about traumatic experiences.
Sometimes, this can be re-traumatising, and it's not necessary to revisit events in order to process and heal from them and to work on the impacts that it is having on your life now.
Sometimes, for some people, it can be helpful and many clients have said that they have felt as though a weight has been lifted once they shared their experiences.
Letting go of shame
Part of the reason for this is that we can hold a lot of shame around things that happened to us that weren't our fault and through sharing at the right time and under the right conditions, we can realise that we have nothing to be ashamed of.
This is a very personal and individual process that can take time, though, and this is something to discuss in therapy.
Preparing to explore trauma
Trauma informed therapy often also involves preparing to explore traumatic experiences through learning how to self-regulate and ground oneself and, importantly, developing a warm, trusting relationship within which it feels safe to share.
If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch!
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