Trauma therapy

What is trauma therapy all about?

Where some forms of therapy will help you feel heard, and to explore your issues, trauma therapy goes a stage further. It treats the issues you have, in a way that you can dissolve them and live a free life. This is no simple task, it requires hard work from both therapist and client, and a clear knowledge of how trauma interferes with our normal functioning, and how to detach it.

Imagine a plant that grows from a seed. It bursts through the soil, takes on nutrients of water, minerals, sunlight, and the care of the natural world. Whilst being fed and cared for this way, it broadens in strength, in substance, it expands in height, it reaches it’s potential and lives as it’s fullest form.

Now imagine that very same species of plant, should a solar flare erupt during its early days of life. It would feel the scorching, the pain and the damage of the excess of solar heat and radiation. It might shrivel and cower before the furnace. After some time the solar flares would subside, and the body of that plant could continue to take on all the nutrients and begin to grow anew. Only now its very fibres are imbued with a memory of that solar flare. The warning is in proportion to the warmth of the sun. It develops a defensive husk against the sun. It will only let a little of it in at a time, in preparation for the chance that it could erupt again. This plant does grow to fullness, but it is in part distorted, ever stooped in anticipative fear of the sun.

Yet solar flares of this magnitude might only come once in a lifetime. The penalty for growing the defensive husk turned out to be greater in terms of distorted and stunted growth than the theoretical benefit of being protected from another flare. Yet the adaptations happened as a reflex. They weren’t thought about and decided upon, the plant’s organic form just set rules and determined a new formula for life based on a very limited knowledge of solar flares. Based on fear and reflexive self preservation.

Now imagine it were possible to go back in time. Hang out with the plant shortly after the solar flare. Soothe it and provide care, but also to provide education and wisdom. Something it had no access to at the time. Perhaps it had blown into the area on the wind and had no nearby elder plants to tell it that the likelihood of another such solar flare was virtually non existent. Suppose that it were possible in this time travel expedition to help the plant mature and make choices based on a much expanded knowledge of the world, and at a point in time where things were calm and reflexive instantaneous decisions were not required.

This is the essence of trauma therapy. Whilst my knowledge of horticulture might be somewhat flawed, my example illustrates how our bodies and spirits form locked in beliefs during crisis moments of traumatic events. They are beliefs based on our best understanding of the world at that time, and their purpose was to help us survive. In that, they were entirely successful, you are here today! However over the course of a life mostly devoid of the original dangers, the beliefs and fear driven mechanisms create havoc and damage to relationships, life balance and aspirations. We respond to safe situations in highly stressed illogical ways. We run away, we create conflict, we hide, the list goes on. A life with unprocessed trauma can be miserable and lonely.

However, if you apply the model of the plant story, if we visit your seedling self at the moments of the solar flare and grant them love, support and wisdom of a magnitude they could only ever have dreamed of, they will be more than willing to let go of the no longer needed defences and misfiring responses that came from the trauma. No one part of us wants to continue living this way, they just currently know of no other way to keep safe. We can change that.