Making the decision to heal your childhood trauma can be terrifying! I want to help make the idea of starting this journey a bit less scary by telling you some about the process and dispelling some myths.
The General process of healing childhood trauma:
- Pick out a therapist. I recommend you interview (preferably in person) 2 or 3.
- Do they know about the issue you are wanting to work on?
- Do they make you feel heard?
- Do you feel that they care about what has happened to you?
- Do you feel that you could come to trust them enough to share?
- Remember you can always change your mind later. You always have the right to discontinue therapy or change therapists.
- Paperwork and history taking
- The first session will probably involve filling out paperwork and getting some basic history. I find that clients with extensive trauma histories should not share an in-depth history of their trauma right away because it is very upsetting for them. In these situations, I will ask my clients to share less for right now. Not because I don’t want to hear it, but because I don’t want them becoming so upset that they are re-traumatized.
- I will ask you to complete an in-depth intake form before the second session. This asks a lot of questions about just about everything else in your life. This information will help me have a more complete picture of your life. It will also help me know more about how to best help you. For example: if you have a deep abiding faith that is an important part of your life, then I should be helping you use your faith in your healing process.
- I will also ask you to either come in before or stay after a session to fill out a questionnaire that will help me know some of the work we will need to do before we start working on the actual trauma stuff.
- Treatment planning: we will spend 1 or more sessions determining how to proceed. This is a decision we will make together. We will talk about where you are and where you want to go, then we will create a map that will help guide us toward your goals.
- Preparation phase:
- During this part of therapy, we are usually working to create and fill your toolbox. We will work to give you a bunch of skills and tools that will help you make healing your history will far less pain and upset.
- We will also work on fixing any other problems that need to be resolved prior to working on the past trauma. If you are currently in crisis, having flashbacks or dissociation issues these will need to be addressed first.
- Healing your history phase:
- How we proceed during this phase will be impacted by the type of trauma, the extent of the trauma and what is a doable speed for you.
- This stage of healing only works when you are working within your therapeutic window. This is when you are connected to your past but not lost in it. Think of it like a beach. If you are back in the parking lot (aware of the past but totally disconnected from it) you are outside of your therapeutic window because you’re not connected enough. If you are in the ocean being grabbed by the riptide (so into your past you are drowning) you are outside your therapeutic window because you are not enough connected to the present. Being in your therapeutic window is like walking on the shore with the ocean lapping at your ankles. You are connected to your past but still firmly on the shore. If the water gets rough, you are just a few steps away from being on dry land.
- We work here until we’ve healed what needs to be healed or until you decide you have healed enough for now.
- Present & Future work: Once the past is healed then we move up into the present and future.
- When you grow up with trauma you may fail to learn healthy ways of being in the world. During this stage we work to get you on that better life track you desire.
- We also work to resolve trauma habits. When you’ve lived so long with trauma, the habits you develop to manage the trauma can actually keep standing even once the trauma is healed. For example: A person has a trauma history connected to a bad car accident when they were a child. One of the trauma habits we may need to address may be that they feel anxious just as they grab their briefcase and leave for work. This doesn’t mean the trauma wasn’t healed it just indicates that there’s a left over remnant that needs to be cleaned up.
- The future part is how we expect the future to happen and how we expect ourselves to be into that future. When we have unresolved trauma, we expect life to be hard and the future to be bleak. Once we heal the trauma we have to check to be sure how we look into the future also shifts. Often it does, and we don’t need to do anything. Sometimes we need to do a little clean up around this too.
- Building healthy life skills.
- As you get healthier you will discover that behaviors and ways of being in the world just don’t feel like they fit anymore. But knowing what doesn’t work is not the same as knowing what does. This phase is all about learning to live that healthier future that you are building for yourself.
- Termination. At this point it is usually appropriate to end our time working together. It can be really beneficial to take a session to look back over all that we have done together.
Myths about healing childhood trauma
- You can’t do anything about it so why talk about it
- You can’t go back in time and make it not have happened. But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing you can do. Going back to the past to heal and reprocess can help a great deal. One person described it as “It’s going away. I mean I still remember it, it’s still there but it’s back there – in the past!” The current pain and upset that you feel when you remember those awful events doesn’t have to be how it is. “It stops BEING awful and becomes – it WAS awful!” and that is a world of difference.
- Healing past trauma is overwhelmingly painful
- Not if it’s done right! There are therapies out there that believe you heal trauma by repeatedly going back into the traumatic memory and stay there until your body just gets to tired to keep freaking out. THAT IS NOT HOW I WORK! I work from the AIP theory (Adaptive Information Processing). When I help you heal trauma I work with you, so you are in the present with me but touching the past. Only when you can stay within your therapeutic window will true healing occur.
- I tried to heal my trauma history once, it didn’t work. I can’t heal my trauma history.
- In order to successfully heal trauma, you must find the right therapist for you. Even a really good trauma therapist may not be the right one for you. Do you feel they understand where you’re coming from? Or are you frequently frustrated and having to correct them. Do you feel that they are trustworthy? Trust can be hard for people with childhood trauma histories. Even so try a little. I recommend having your therapist earn your trust. Share something really small – how does your therapist handle it? If they did pretty good, share something a little bigger. If they do good with that then keep sharing a little more each time. If they fail early on (or even later) then go find another therapist. They may just not be the right therapist for you.