A few small but important things I keep in mind to help my clients recover
Learning new skills to help you in your recovery takes lots of practice and repetition.
The process of trauma recovery is much too vast to reduce to a single blog post. What helps us recover? What do we need? What do we not need? These questions are the kinds that get answered only with practice, experience, and repetition. For my personal journey of recovery, I can say there’s been a whole tapestry of techniques, people, books, ideas, songs, moments, and even breakthroughs that have helped me. I’ve had many “go arounds” of figuring out what I need to get through the tougher times.
For this post, I wanted to share a few tidbits from the mind of a trauma therapist—things I’m thinking about in session or during treatment planning that might not seem obvious or intuitive but in my experience, can be quite impactful. There is an emphasis on learning here, as these are not things most of us know how to do automatically. There’s always lots of space for growth and not knowing in therapy!
1. Learning to sense the difference between past and present experiences
Trauma is a wound from the past that continues to show up in the present. It “shows up” in ways that are often unexpected, non-linear, and difficult to make sense of. For example, we might be doing regular, everyday things and suddenly feel a deep sense of dread, rage, or doubt with seemingly no reason. As a result, we might start thinking negative thoughts about ourselves or feeling low. Sometimes this happens so often, and for so long, it becomes hard to tell the difference between beliefs and feelings that belong to the past and those that belong to the present.
Something I try to help my clients with is differentiating between “stuff” that belongs to the past and “stuff” that belongs to the present. The goal is not to disregard the impact or severity of the past, but to be able to stay in the present as much as possible, even when the past tries to intrude. It’s the difference between, “I am [insert negative self-belief]” and “I’m feeling like I am [insert negative self-belief] because of what I went through back then”. In the first example, the belief is true. In the second, there is a little bit of space to challenge that belief and keep other possibilities open.
The result is with lots of practice, the intrusion of past “stuff” becomes less intense, less frequent, and a little easier to manage.
2. Learning to better tolerate difficult emotions
Trauma-related emotions are understandably very difficult to tolerate. Without learning how to tolerate them, most of us learn to avoid or shut down these emotions in order to function. It would be understandable to think that the solution to this distress is to learn how to not feel those feelings anymore, but unfortunately we don’t have total control over what we feel. Trust me, I’ve tried :).
So, if we can’t get rid of difficult feelings, what do we do? We have to get better at feeling them. This involves increasing our ability to tolerate difficult emotions. We each have a baseline threshold of what we can tolerate—think of this like blinds on a window. At the start of trauma therapy, the blinds are barely open or totally closed, meaning that very little input can come through. Slowly, with time, our intention is to open it a little longer, a little wider, and then learn to close it again too. We experience the emotions in bite-sized chunks, not all at once, until we start to feel that it can be safe to feel our feelings. This “widens” our threshold of emotional tolerance. The result is that when the emotions do come, they’re not as sudden or unexpected or intense, and we can take care of ourselves in ways that help keep it contained. This brings me to the third and final point.
3. Learning new ways to self-soothe or self-comfort in times of distress or discomfort
Even as we’re figuring out how much we can open the metaphorical blinds, there are going to be times we experience distress or discomfort. This is part of being human. However, most of us have not learned how to safely and effectively self-soothe or self-comfort during times like this. Once we start to learn that emotions are things we can tolerate safely, I like to help my clients expand their repertoire of resources that bring comfort and safety to feelings that were once unsafe. This is going to look different for everyone, so I like to discover this in an experiential way rather than tell my clients what techniques they should be trying. We take note of what’s helpful and useful and use them as much as possible in session to repeat the process of self-soothing over and over until it starts to feel a little more natural and attainable.
All of these tidbits require a lot of practice and repetition. Expectations of perfectionism or mastery do not help! When you’ve learned to respond to your internal experiences in a certain way and utilized these same strategies over perhaps an entire lifetime, it takes time and commitment to learn new ones. I’m there to walk alongside you as you learn!
