An emerging trend in the world of therapy is for therapists to identify as “trauma informed”. This typically means they have done specific trainings to understand how trauma forms, how it manifests in clients, and specific methods with with which to address it.
This is simultaniously good news, because it means more therapists are becoming aware of the perevenalce of trauma and how to treat it, but it also highlights a certain absurdity – how much of therapy in the past, and how many therapists in the present are still not “trauma informed”.
I find this this reality both amusing and sad, because I believe that all therapy should be trauma informed therapy. I believe traumatic experiences are at the root of almost every negative behavior or habit that we have, especially ones that we have struggled to change.
The Prevalence of Trauma
Time and again I am surprised at how deep the origins of a seemingly innocuous behavior are for a client. In a state of trance, you quickly find how intensely the feel of failure is behind your procrastination, how much sadness you’re hiding behind a glass of wine, how much self-worth ties into doing your own laundry.
It is impossible to go through. life, through childhood, without negative experiences that inform our perception of the world. And we build coping mechanisms and patterns that work to get us to where we are today, mechanisms that are often deeply intelligent in their own right. But when it comes from moving from surviving, which these mechanisms excel at, to thriving, there needs to be deep work at letting go of these habits and their origin stories. And this is where I believe Hypnosis Assisted Psychotherapy really excels.
We all have trauma, some deeper than others. Some therapists call this “big T” versus “little t” trauma, but I don’t really bother with this distinction. Our experiences are so vastly different and subjective, that even seemingly small adverse experience in our past can be felt deeply and reverberate in our lives.
The Effects of Trauma
Traumatic experience lead to our brain fixating on the memory, in the hopes that it can be better prepared to handle an event like that in the future. Our subconscious has no sense of time, and so even as we move forward through life, grow from children to adults, part of our subconscious remains locked into the moment, an ever-present loop.
Your mind and body are actually spending specific energy remembering this experience and aligning your behaviors and thoughts to fit around this experience. Maybe it’s something you need to remember to do, or not to do – a way you need to talk, a smile you need to make, something you absolutely must remember (or forget – I believe that actually blocking your conscious mind from remembering a memory is a huge role that the subconscious can play, if it judges that you cannot handle the memory or its significance). The stakes are exceptionally high, and so your body continues, even when you’re exhausted.
A Trauma Informed Therapist
When healing trauma, there is so much to keep in mind, and hold with gentleness. The fact that our body is intelligent, and is doing what it does to protect us. The fact that we have been doing a certain behavior for a very long time, and that it can take some time for it to change. The fact that’s natural for us to feel in a rush to be out of the pain that we feel in our present selves. The fact that self-compassion and forgiveness, joy and pleasure can be very foreign sensations. That fear and guilt and exhaustion often permeate our existence in a way that others cannot possibly comprehend.
When your therapist understands this deeply – often from having experienced this themselves while also hopefully having worked through it and healing from it, the experience of being in therapy can be vastly different. It can be one of feeling seen and understood, accepted and validated. Let that be the standard you expect from therapy, you don’t deserve anything less. You deserve your therapist to be trauma informed.
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It is worth noting that this is still just one philosophy, one that I currently ascribe to. There are other psychological frameworks that do not see human behaviors as stemming from trauma. Some even argue that focusing too much on trauma might have a negative effect for clients. I respect the differing philosophies in the world of mental health, and invite you to arrive at your own conclusions from both empirical research and felt experience. It is when therapists are simply ill informed and don’t have a stance on the matter, that I am most bothered.
You would be shocked at how little training on trauma many therapists have, or how much they don’t have an opinion on the topic one way or the other. (I remember being similarly shocked when I asked my supervising therapists and fellow therapists in training about the origins of depression and didn’t get a clear answer).
I believe that therapist must have a strong empirical stance regarding the origins of our struggles, and choose their modalities and interventions based on these guiding philosophies.
