To think you don't have to relive/revisit trauma to process it?

[doritstew]

I have had quite a bit of trauma in my life. I think I've turned out okay, I am aware it has affected parts of my life. For instant, I am terrified of rejection, I have low self esteem and I have trouble controlling my emotions, as soon as I feel a hint of hurt I will lash out on that person to the point I say the most vile things I can to hurt them straight back, its like an out of body experience. I see myself doing and saying horrible things and can't stop, it's like a protective instinct.

I wanted to change this as I share a child with a man who I react to in this way. Our child has seen it and it's not right. He caused me a lot of hurt in our relationship, he now claims he never loved me and his new relationship is his soulmate. It's so hurtful, I wish I could just feel the hurt and accept and work through it, but I can't, all I can do is lash out and hurt him or attempt to. So I started counselling.

My counsellor thinks that the only way to process previous trauma is to relive it and revisit it and think about it. But thinking about it causes me physical pain. I walk around for a few days after therapy feeling even worse than when I went in. I feel sad, depressed, crying all the time. I was always quite happy compartmentalising my trauma. Packing it away in a box and not thinking about it, if it ever popped into my head I would push it away. I just can't deal with the pain. My therapist thinks this is normal.

I'm not sure. Am I being unreasonable to think there must be a way to deal with my trauma, past relationship and pain without feeling all those horrible feelings? If not I honestly don't think I can continue, I would rather continue to suppress it to avoid this.

Bump

Yes you do need to revisit it but you can take a break, talk about other things for a while until you feel ready again. There are different types of therapy available for trauma too.

therapy is exhausting. Sometimes I’m shattered for days after too. Definitely on the day I really struggle. I’m very tired

I believe you have to revisit it to heal. I had to.

I tried to avoid talking about something significant in therapy as well to avoid the pain of it. My therapist didn't push me to talk but did point out that I was feeling that pain anyway, it was just coming out in a different way. I chose to talk and while I can only manage a tiny bit at a time, and there are some weeks we'll stick to lighter topics, I do think that the only way out is through.

I'm so sorry you're struggling with this. I'm no expert, but having been through counselling myself I think this is quite normal. But it should be pain with a purpose. So if you want to change your behaviour, then you need to revisit your past to understand and get to the core of why you react as you do. That is painful and you have to work through a lot of difficult emotions, but your therapist should be helping you process those memories and feelings.

Absolutely theres large schools of thought that traditional delve into trauma type therapy isn't always helpful

If talking about trauma is helpful then it often has to be done at the right time. It is always destabilising, so it only can be done when the person is well enough and in the right position to cope if things get harder eg. I'd be reluctant to consider trauma therapy with the mother of a small baby who's got high demands on her, and has limited support

OP, think of your trauma as a past infection, that has left a deep seated abscess in your body. It will always be there, will never heal on its own, and will flare up with episodes of sepsis when you are tired and run down, with low immunity.
The only cure is for a surgeon to incise that abscess, drain all the pus, and allow the cleaned tissue to heal.
Yes, surgery hurts. So does therapy. The former physically, the latter emotionally. But the relief afterwards is enormous. You cannot go round, under, or over trauma - you can only go through it, to come out the other side, healed.
Your therapist will work at your own pace, and help you. Please take the first step and book an appointment.

There is no way on this earth I could relive my trauma. Boxed away and will take it to the grave.
Works for me.
Therapists strike me as complete weirdos to make people do this.

Who decided it must be relived?

trauma should be released in a gradual,
controlled way. Imagine a bottle of coke which has been shaken about. If you just take the lid straight off, what happens? It fizzes up, overflows, goes everywhere. If you gradually, slowly unscrew the lid, it's much more controlled. A good therapist will keep you safe and dip in and out of it,
gradually increasing your tolerance to it, thus your ability to process.
(I'm a therapist)

can I also recommend this amazing book, really explains trauma and how the brain works.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Body-Keeps-Score-Transformation-Trauma/dp/B07XYFYJDM/ref=mpssa111?crid=FSX55K8TTKJV&keywords=the+body+keeps+the+score&qid=1678974916&sprefix=the+body%2Caps%2C90&sr=8-1

I think it’s worth remembering counsellors have a vested interest in repeat custom. I’m not saying that this is why your counsellor has said this is what you ‘need’ but as a model, counselling works on the assumption that certain truths are facts, cannot be questioned and these facts are the ones that generate business.

What @Babdoc said makes sense to me.

I had years of hideous childhood trauma and tried to look beyond it, look to the future and sugar coat life, but it didn't work. Trauma is like a beach ball - you can push it down, but it'll just bob back up to the surface. Hide it all you want, but your subconscious will, at some point, very likely insist that you pay attention and will rub your nose in all you've tried to ignore. That's what happened to me until I realised that 'the only way out of this is through it' and started doing The Work. It is work too, immensely hard work and painful, but very much worth the effort.

Whatever happened, get in touch with your younger self and give her/him the attention that was missing at the time. This is a good place to start: www.mindful.org/healing-the-child-within/

Yes there is, NLP. They will ask you to think a specific event/ trauma, but they don’t want to know what it is. Then they get you to do specific exercises so that it changes the feeling. It’s very effective.

I did ‘Rewind’ therapy for trauma and it was very useful (and for me was just one session, as I had simple ptsd rather than complex). It didn’t feel at all like reliving anything - in fact it felt a lot less like reliving it than the intrusive memories I’d been experiencing. It involved guided visualisations and it was specifically not reliving but enabling me instead to encode the memory normally - as something I could reflect back on if I chose to think about it, without feeling at all like I was back ‘there’ experiencing the trauma again.

I'm a therapist who works with dc who have experienced trauma.
The psychometric tests at the start, middle and end of the work indicate that the work undertaken is effective.
We don't make the dc talk through their trauma experiences, they may choose to do so.
We do a lot of directed exercises which clearly name the trauma they have experienced as well as lots of play and art which they direct.
So my experience is that it isn't necessary to relive the trauma with your therapist through speech but education around your thoughts and clear naming of the impact of the experience is helpful.
As well as a space to process emotions.

You need to refile your trauma memories in the same way as normal memories and there is more than one way of successfully doing that.

You absolutely don’t need to revisit trauma to heal. All that does is re traumatise you. Have you looked into emdr. It a reprogramming of your neural pathways. I’d also recommend the book the body keeps the score. Very interesting.

Brilliant advice. I hope you take it @doritstew.

@doritstew speaking as a clinical psychologist with trauma therapy training, I would say it's important for you to be on board with any therapeutic approach taken. Just reliving a traumatic event risks retraumatising you if it's not handled well. Does your counsellor have training in a particular therapy? I would suggest you have a read of what therapy options are recommended and what they involve. In your case, i think there should be a lot more work done with helping you build coping strategies so that you can manage your symptoms before going into the trauma itself. It also sounds like you have a lot of negative thinking that stems from your traumatic experience that it might be worth addressing - trauma focused CBT is a good approach for this. EMDR has good results with dealing with trauma symptoms like flashbacks but isn't quite so good with negative thinking patterns.
(From experience, many people end therapy after building their coping ability - some because that's as far as they're ready to go, others because feeling more able to cope helps them just to naturally process the trauma without direct work.)

I don't think this analogy works so well for multiple traumas. People with this experience tend to build a view that the world is dangerous and unsafe and they really struggle to let their guard down. This means that just reliving the trauma makes them feel even more unsafe, their symptoms can worsen, and they can then lose trust in their therapist as a result.
The best way to approach multiple traumas is to help someone reach a place of psychological safety and stability in their current life, help them to start to trust in those around them and reduce their arousal levels through building coping strategies. It is far far easier to face a traumatic past if you feel safe in the present. But at the same time, for some people feeling safe in the present is 'good enough' and they never feel ready to go back to the past. It might still be there, but they feel able to reduce its impact on the present and that feels ok for them.

Different therapies place different weight on processing past events and also approach it in different ways, its important for people to find the way that works best for them - and exposure isn't always the way.

I understand. I've gone down the revisiting route and it makes me upset, feel unstable and drink too much after!

It's very hard but it is helping

Not all therapy is like this. SFBT (solution focussed brief therapy) works by looking at where you are now and how you can take increment steps to get to where you want to be. The philosophy is that we can't change the past, so we don't have to relive it. It worked brilliantly for me.

Yes, I’m sorry but your therapist is right. Think of your mind as a house, you’ve put all the messy stuff into a room. You can’t tidy that room without entering the room. Trying to tidy the room without going into the room isn’t feasible.

Thank you for asking this question. The answers are also very helpful. Hope you are okay op.

I was in a similar situation. Trauma from childhood which was affecting everyday life. I was adopted as a baby and although my childhood was great I was sexually assaulted in my teens (more than once) and lived with a violent boyfriend in my 20s. My life has been calm since.

I then had another traumatic event last year. I hit rock bottom. I allowed myself to feel every emotion there is. I couldn’t not. I was a mess.

But it’s helped my anxiety. I no longer get anxious. Those feelings of dread rarely appear. I don’t get as angry. It’s very very odd.

I had a bit of counselling but I was hard work, I am a master at looking okay and saying the right thing. The counsellor recognised this too. I stopped in the end but read everything I could and listened and watched material instead. I struggle to process and think about it quickly I’m better reading what I’m meant to be doing and understanding what others have done and analysing and filtering the information/theory.

I repeated and repeated and repeated what happened. Cried, screamed, raged etc.

I was saying only this morning I’d love to know what happened. It’s most perculiar but quite pleasant. I feel like a weight has lifted.

Hope you are okay Op and sorry to jump in on your thread but it really resonated. Happy to PM if you want to chat anytime.

There are multiple ways of approaching trauma, it may be this method doesn't work for you or it may be that you need to work through this pain as part of working through your trauma - that is something to discuss with your therapist/seek alternative advice/research other techniques about.

But please don't fool yourself that 'Packing it away in a box and not thinking about it' is working, when by your own admission your current approach involves viciously lashing out at anybody and anything that reminds you of your trauma. What is going to happen when your child is the one to hurt your feelings or do something to make you feel rejected (and it will happen, disagreements are part of growing up and kids don't always act perfectly) and you can't stop yourself saying and doing horrible things to them?

Some trauma you can pinpoint, because it was one event, or a series of, that you remember. Some trauma is more insidious, think early childhood stuff you’re not even aware of.

I am one of those people with an extremely abusive childhood, and I ‘dealt’ with it all by boxing it and storing it in my brain, till the whole thing collapsed and there was no more loft space.
I read The body keeps the score about 7 years ago, and it came as a shock that my physical symptoms are related to my mental state. So I first learned to breathe, by doing breathing work, meditation, swimming, running. One by one, I really looked into all my ailments and tried to find a connection to the brain short circuit that.

With some stuff, I had no idea what to do. So I went to counselling, which I perceived as putting a mirror in front of myself and taking a hard good look.

At one point I realised that I seem to have a pattern, and even if I was conscious of it, I had no idea how to break it. Reliving the same trauma by talking about it was no real good, because I wasn’t doing anything with it, bar picking off the scab and going ‘this is not a wound I inflicted on me, this is not my fault. I suppose it gave me a bit of perspective? I had 4 sessions of CBT to help reframe the whole perception of what was going on, but the minute I took my eyes off the ball, the old patterns came back.

Linking the whole body-mind thing, my biggest problem was pain, which equals fear, which equals the whole thing going to hell in my head.
So I looked into forging a new neuro pathway, so when I’m in pain, I don’t go the same path. I needed a machete to cut through the jungle in my brain.

So I found BWRT.

I had BWRT, 6 sessions. They absolutely worked for me.
HTH