As trauma specialist Gabor Maté puts it – trauma isn’t what happened to you, it’s the wound you’re left with.
This is an important distinction, because one half of that is in the past – unreachable, unchangeable, whereas the other is very much in the ‘here-and-now’, and absolutely can be worked with. What happened to you is in the past. But how it still affects you now, that’s the wound you’re left with. That’s the trauma, and that’s what trauma therapy focuses on healing.
What is trauma?
We should clear up some terms here, as trauma is talked about a lot and it’s not always clear what people are referring to. Trauma used to be thought of as a single incident big ticket event – an assault, a war, a rape, a near-death experience – one that was so catastrophically distressing that the mind became stuck in some way, and has not recovered. This type of trauma certainly exists, and is often labelled “Big ‘T’ trauma” – it’s objectively awful, and would be awful for anyone experiencing it. This type can lead to a diagnosis of PTSD – post traumatic stress disorder – when the body’s stress response is stuck on, even though the threat has passed.
More recently, a different type of trauma has begun to be recognised – complex trauma. It’s not complex because it’s more complicated, but because it involves not a single incident, but a complex of many ‘small ‘t’ traumas’, often taking place over many years, that stack on top of each other, gradually wearing the nervous system down until it retreats into a persistent threat response. This is often diagnosed as CPTSD – complex post traumatic stress disorder.
Very loosely, PTSD can be thought of as a response to a bad thing that happened, CPTSD is more a response to a good thing that should have happened, but didn’t.
What does trauma feel like?
There is a spectrum of trauma responses, and they will depend on what particular type of threat your nervous system is trying to protect you from, and what resources it thinks it has, or doesn’t have, to do that job. Depression and anxiety can certainly be trauma responses – anxiety trying to activate you (the racing heart, shortness of breath, sudden urge to run or to freeze), and depression trying to keep you hidden away from it (the collapse, the withdrawal, the body that feels drained of all energy).
Some other key experiences of trauma are feelings of being ‘triggered’ – when the nervous system reacts in a way which is out of context for the situation. This can be flashes of unreasonable anger, extreme fear or panic for little reason, emotional numbness, a feeling of detachment from yourself and your surroundings. We become triggered when some external event (being in a certain place, or with a certain person, or experiencing a certain colour/object/sound/taste) causes an abrupt shift in our inner experience, that doesn’t seem appropriate to the ‘here-and-now’. This can be terrifying to experience as it can feel as though your body and/or mind has been hijacked and is acting in a way that’s inexplicable to you. This can cause feelings of guilt and shame, even though the responses make complete sense once the context is understood.
The common component is a loss of control – these responses happen to you, outside of conscious control. Your body seems to make decisions for you and you just get swept away – panic consumes you, anger possesses you, or you might become completely detached from your outside environment. It can be a terrifying feeling. Your nervous system feels like it’s been hacked, or is malfunctioning, and you can’t explain it to yourself, let alone others. So where does it come from?
Why do I feel like this?
You may be wondering why the effects of trauma persist, even though the event has passed. You may be told by others to “just get over it, it’s in the past”, and wonder how exactly you’re supposed to do that. The truth is that trauma, by definition, leaves a wound. It is the wound itself that is the trauma – the legacy burden of a nervous system that can’t reset, and won’t allow you to be in control. Focussing on what happened is only helpful if it hasn’t yet been understood and explored. Once that’s happened, we move toward cleaning and dressing the wound.
So trauma therapy starts with asking not just “what happened”, but also “what did it mean to you at the time?“. This is a crucial distinction, especially when childhood issues are at the root. Children simply don’t know what adults know, they don’t have the same power, or resources, or understanding. It’s common for a child to normalise that which they don’t understand. Abuse and neglect can become normalised to the point that they are not recognised as such. Many clients will say things such as “I had a pretty normal childhood,” before going on to describe parents that were absent, important care that was not given, and an environment that was seriously lacking in safety, protection or love. If you’re experiencing trauma symptoms and don’t know why, it may be worth us exploring what your early experiences of the world were, and what lessons you took from them when you were young.
How does therapy help with trauma?
The outer world of friends and family often want us to forget about it and move on. The inner world of our nervous system pushes back and forces us to stay in it, even though it’s passed. What we need, and what therapy can offer, is a middle ground – acknowledgement and understanding of both what happened, and also that you survived it. This is where processing happens – we need to be able to witness our own stories, our past experiences, and make sense of what they meant to us at the time. Trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk says “you have to know what you know, and feel what you feel”. Therapy offers a place to do both, safely, contained in a regular and predictable 50 minute session, so that it can be felt without overwhelming, and your nervous system gets a chance to process and integrate it.
But processing doesn’t mean endlessly talking about the past, or about feelings. In fact, going over traumatic histories can be re-traumatising! We always work at your pace, establishing safety anchors as we go, and when we go deep we come back to the surface before the session ends. Your nervous system needs updating – it needs to witness and explore the wound from a place of safety so that it can feel protected, resilient, and that the familiar trauma triggers don’t need to be activated. Your body needs to understand that you have resources now that you didn’t have then, and it needs a space to practice using them.
My approach to trauma therapy
I work face to face in Bournemouth and online across the UK, drawing heavily on Internal Family Systems (IFS). This is a modern approach that focuses on our inner world, and it proposes that inside all of us, we have an ‘Internal Family’ made of ‘Parts’ – some of which are known to us, and some are not, but all of which bring different skills, values, goals, and strategies to look after us. We all know this to be true every time we experience any indecision such as “should I go out or stay home tonight?”. We might say “Part of me wants to go out, let my hair down and have fun, but another Part wants to get some rest and wake up fresh tomorrow”. It can feel as though there are two distinct sub-personalities within us having an argument, and that’s healthy. This sort of inner conflict is how we make decisions in an uncertain world. How it shows up in trauma though is that one Part takes over – it decides that based on past history, and the job that it does for you, that it should engage the panic systems, or the fear systems, or cut power to the whole system, and it does this automatically, without your consent. Whereas many people label this part as “my gremlin” or similar, IFS understands it’s not a gremlin at all, but a valued part of you that’s trying to keep you safe the only way it knows how. IFS is about welcoming it to the table, giving it a voice, understanding its motivations, and then helping it to find a new, better way to get its needs met and keep you feeling safe.
In order to do this work we need to hear its story – you have to know what you know. This is the exploration stage – talking about your experiences, their impact, the lessons that you drew from them and what Parts of you then came into being to help you deal with them, using the resources you had at the time. But then we have to reframe the story as “something that happened then” not “something that is happening now”. Over time we’ll help the part of you that becomes triggered to understand that it survived the past, it has resources now that it didn’t have then, and that in trying to keep you safe it’s actually making things harder. We find that when the triggered part is acknowledged and listened to, it’s usually quite happy to stop what it’s doing and find a new way to help you.
Take the first step
If any of this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. I offer a free 30-minute consultation — no obligation to continue, just a chance to talk about what’s going on, ask me any questions you have, and see if working together might help.