Can anyone explain very simply to me how therapy is supposed to help heal childhood trauma?

[bewilderberrie]

I'm going to a kind therapist I feel comfortable with. She is very experienced in one of the issues (relinquishment trauma) I'm seeing her for and I have generally a good impression.

However, I feel like I just talk about stuff and then feel even worse when I go home again?

What am I supposed to be doing that heals myself via the therapy process? I'm not sure I'm doing it correctly. I don't get it.

I've asked her if generally it is supposed to start hurting less at some point and she said yes, the act of airing the traumatic stuff and talking about it typically does make it hurt less at some time. Also that sometimes when trauma is pre verbal it can be very tightly locked in and hard to get at - so what am I supposed to do in that case?

I think we’re all different and actually therapy doesn’t suit everyone. I felt like you - after every appointment I just felt more and more drained by it all. I’ve been under several different therapists, different approaches, nhs and private, psychiatrists etc, all utterly unhelpful and shite to be honest. I - like many here- had a very abusive and traumatic childhood, won’t bore you with it all but definitely the stuff of other peoples nightmares. The most healing thing that happened to me was that my Mum (the main person I had issues with) died in 2019 and I felt I was finally able to pretend that none of it had ever happened and just sort of push it all to one side. Others would see that as unhealthy, but I’ve spent my whole life (I’m 43) going on and on about it and I don’t want to anymore. It doesn’t change anything. Maybe in some ways that’s my own form of CBT / desensitisation. Who knows. I just push the thoughts of it all out of my head. I certainly don’t want to keep talking about it in depth all the time. But obviously if that helps other people then that’s great.

How many sessions did you have OP? Just wondering because this unbearable stage could be a (horrible) phase in the process. One that could be possible to navigate through with a therapist you trust.

Maybe not of course, maybe talk therapy isn’t right for you - just a thought.

I also have pre-memory trauma from adoption and I was never able to access the right sort of therapy so I cannot help on that. I had counselling and general CBT for anxiety etc which did help and then I just learned to live around the hole and over many years it healed.

But my heart goes out to you that you feel so awful and exposed, and feel like something was wrong with you. It sounds like you are staring down your greatest fear that if someone knows all this, they will find you unloveable. As another poster said, all babies are born perfect and whole and gorgeous. What happened was really, absolutely, not your fault! Please look at the little baby and small child you were, and see how precious and gorgeous and deserving of love you really were, and are.

I saw this on Facebook a while back, I did the exercise (and cried) and it was useful and helped.

fb.watch/mIRizh9yOT/

My approach has been very similar to x rays. I push it all down and pretend it never happened. I tried therapy and hated it. There are certain things I can't even say out loud to myself. I don't want to acknowledge it all happened and will never go to therapy about it.

However, I recently went back to therapy about something else (something far less traumatic) (and a different therapist) and found it really helpful. The main reason I found it helpful was because the therapist was genuinely kind and she heard me and acknowledged me. She said a couple of things which just made me dissolve because of her kindness. So possibly not standard therapy techniques but it made an enormous difference to me. Perhaps you don't need a different technique; perhaps you need to accept that therapy isn't for you or alternatively find a different therapist.

It's fine to pause therapy, if that's what you feel you need to do. But don't deny yourself the right to be heard. By saying there will be others who are more able to engage you are allowing your feelings of shame to silence you.
You've made a great start by building a relationship with the therapist where you have developed some trust.
This is huge.
Sitting with uncomfortable feelings is painful. The therapist will know that clients experience fight/flight/freeze responses to trauma.
Your flight response isn't unusual. She should come back to you to help you think about this and have a planned ending together. This is really important.

I am trying to find a way to explain how therapy can help, and it's really hard not knowing enough about your situation and experience so far. But it absolutely is possible. It sounds as though you are encountering huge shame, which unfortunately goes hand in hand with trauma.
Carolyn Spring has written an amazing book about her experience of healing her childhood trauma through therapy, called Unshame. I wonder if that might help.
The first part of therapy can be really hard, but once you have started to build trust, healing absolutely can come from it. The relationship with your therapist really important in that, so it may be that she wasn't the right one. Don't let that put you off therapy completely.
I hope you are able to find a way through this.

You've had great advice OP. One thing I heard was 'You have to dig through a lot of shit to get to the gold.' Therapy is work, hard work on yourself. You sound really articulate and in touch with yourself, you opened up but you want to take a step back now, you can choose to do that and still see your therapist (if you want to, of course) Bruce Perry's book 'The boy who was raised as a dog' is excellent and explains the power of the therapeutic relationship and the healing that can come. Highly recommend it. The preverbal stuff is very difficult and you might find a creative or somatic therapist might be a better fit for you on that.

To the pp who said they went to a psychotherapist and later a person centred therapist.. psychotherapy is person centred surely... client as expert on their own experience.

I'm having brainspotting therapy at the moment, which shares similarities with EMDR. I've had three sessions so far, and it is absolutely brilliant. I've had quite a bit of traditional 'talk' therapy over the years, which has been ok, but nothing like the effectiveness of brainspotting.

For me it gave me a much better understanding of what was going on in the abuse - as it is often confusing, as a child in particular. You can step outside of the brain washing received - I saw that my abuse was due to my parents issues/dysfunction. You can have all sorts of internalised messages coming from dysfunctional people - blaming you for the chaos in their life, treating you like you are nothing and unworthy of love - for their own purposes. Therapy helped me to question that internal narrative of self hate/blame. Realising their behaviour was due to their issues.
It helped me get in a place where I could make better choices. Feel there is more to me than what happened to me.
It’s a hard process and can bring feelings to the surface. However, I felt like I had to deal with what was going on inside me to prevent me following their path. I was making poor choices at the time.
Therapy doesn’t erase the past or take away the sadness of (in my case) pretty rubbish parents. However, it really helped me.
I’m now due to start EMDR to take away some of the more powerful memories (PTSD stuff)
Good luck - trauma often passes through generations. So I always think those people that face up to their trauma, deal with their feelings - rather than perpetuate trauma/abuse - are warriors.❤️

I had about three months of sessions.

She should come back to you to help you think about this and have a planned ending together.

No I emailed and cancelled all future sessions and thanked her for her time, and said I just need to figure stuff out independently. She replied and has confirmed cancellation and that she's happy to re-open my case if I choose to go back.

My inkling that she was feeling some disgust towards me feels like it might have a grain of truth, so I think my gut feeling to quit was correct.

So I feel relieved now it's done, but also strangely like I don't know what to do to actually fix myself independently!

Thinking I will try trauma informed yoga.

I have CPTSD from childhood and I found that talking therapy only got me so far. It began to feel like constantly reliving my traumas increased my anxiety and kept me stuck. I was lucky enough to find an EMDR therapist who really helped me “desensitize” very rapidly to the point where I am very rarely triggered. I feel more like I am observing something that used to trigger me and am able to switch off my reactivity or park it until I am in a safe place to think about it. I highly recommend this form of therapy if you are ready to leave your past behind.

Have you looked into transference and projection? Its really unlikely she is feeling disgust aimed at you. If she is feeling disgust its much more likely to be at the way you were treated.

Three months is just getting started I think. The fact you believe she is disgusted with you (when she is very, very unlikely to feel that at all) intuitively feels like you have projected your self disgust onto her and now must flee/reject her as a stand-in for your own emotions. You are ultimately rejecting yourself and your painful overwhelming feelings.

All of which is your right to do so ofc, and leaving is not necessarily anything other than the right choice for you now.

Yes, I understand about transference and countertransference but here's the thing -

In normal day to day life, I don't usually feel so disgusting? Now I feel deeply disgusting a LOT. It's interfering with my life. This is kind of separate to the actual pain from the stuff I was trying to deal with.

I can't handle feeling so abjectly disgusting basically all the time.

Plus there is always a chance I was actually correctly picking up on her own private feelings of disgust and in case that is true it is safer to not awkwardly try to keep doing therapy.

Like I say, it's as if I'm covered in cold vomit basically all the time. The shame is overwhelming.

I have withdrawn from my friends, and feel like they secretly must be disgusted and pitying towards me now too.

The only person I don't believe sees me like that is my lovely DP.

It sounds like the therapy had a very powerful impact on you OP and a profoundly painful one to tolerate day to day. But I wonder if there is a quality of the beginnings of a catharsis: everything being named and expressed increasing the intensity as a stage in a process. Maybe there could have been a next step where you share these feelings of disgust with the therapist, and discuss the fear that she is disgusted - and maybe tell her how angry you are at her for being a part in what has been activated for you.

’Love’s Executioner’ by Irvin Yalom is a wonderful set of essays about therapy journeys. There is always pain in the process before breakthrough.

But again I want to stress that I understand that only you know what is best for you.

Could you perhaps try another modality? EMDR really helped me but that was for a particular trauma

Well done @Xrays

On the contrary I think what you're done is very healthy

We've all (mostly) have got shit back there.

You've pushed it a side and are focusing on the good.

You've accepted it was shit and moved on.

Maybe it's the old saying 'what doesn't killer you makes you stronger.

I have a friend who is going through this and I think will only be able to put this to bed in the same way as you.

@bewilderberrie

I have withdrawn from my friends, and feel like they secretly must be disgusted and pitying towards me now too.

The only person I don't believe sees me like that is my lovely DP.
^^^^^^^**
You have absolutely made the right call to quit therapy.

As I mentioned what you focus on gets bigger.

Talking about this has made it bigger and is negatively effecting everything.

I have found that the voice inside your head 'lies'. But that we believe it.
So I now change the narrative with my own version.

And this took a while.

So when I hear (in my head) I'm bad / wrong / etc I replace this with my own 'lie'
I can do this / I am good / I do care / they do care.
I figure if my negative voice can lie then I can lie right back.

And seeing as we believe the voice in our head we may as well tell it something useful.
'I actually have this.
It's only an issue if I make it an issue
So forget it.
I'm calm
They do like me.
I'm ok etc'
This does take practice but does work.

Oh gosh this has reminded me how I felt at the beginning of my EMDR treatment for CPTSD. Every week I wanted to cancel my session but I am so glad now that I didn’t. CBT and counselling never worked for me but EMDR did. A year on and my life is transformed. When it was horrendously painful I would think of the trauma as like the obstacles in ‘we’re going on a bear hunt’ as in ‘I can’t go over it, I can’t go under it, oh no I have to go through it’. To heal from trauma you have to go right through and that hurts so so much. Eventually however you do emerge from the other side. So much love and support OP

I agree with the poster who mentioned somatic therapy…you differentiate your DP from others and I wonder if this is because he holds you, literally as well as figuratively? Maybe the trauma originates from, as a baby, being wrenched from someones hold?

You are attracted to yoga which is about touch and holding yourself. There is an exercise that recreates holding/being held. You begin by breathing, placing your left hand on you diaphragm. When you feel relaxed, move your right arm across your chest so the hand rests just above the left breast. Begin to pat, synching with your heartbeat, as if you are soothing a tiny baby, that tiny baby that is you.

I hope you work it out OP.

Definitely try EMDR for childhood trauma, it worked well for me and after 12 sessions, the particular statement I started with (which was an issue across multiple incidents) feels so blunt. I feel so much more confident as a result.

Talking therapies made me feel exactly as you describe - it was like scratching up old wounds for no reason. Didn’t work for me.

As someone else said look into somatic therapies alongside talking. Emdr brain spotting TRE vagus nerve work - trauma is held in the body so finding ways to address that can be really useful. Even things like singing and humming can help.

The aim of tackling things from childhood is to understand if they affect how you behave today and if so what you might need to reframe and relearn to help you have a happier more stable life going forward.
Theres a therapist called Samantha Lee who specialises in Inner Child work, who has written a book called ‘The Little Book of Help’, which is really relatable (it’s a collection of poems that talk about different issues we face in life), perhaps worth a read for you: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-Book-Help-therapy-without/dp/B09NGPWT97/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=3L32DH7ZPEBCR&keywords=the+little+book+of+help&qid=1693293673&sprefix=the+little+book+of+help%2Caps%2C155&sr=8-1

I did work over 7 years to deal with the impact of my childhood trauma. It involved a lot of talking therapy, addressing my low self esteem and the way I was harsh on myself, and a course of EMDR which helped to address the buried sub-conscious things that I didn't know were there e.g. body memories. I also felt shame and that it was my fault, and that I wasn't being grateful enough for what they had done for me.
Each session left me feeling wrung out emotionally and sometimes physically too, so I think that's not unusual.
If you're confident that your therapist has a plan and is working towards a shared goal or outcome with you, I'd stick with them.