What is therapy?
What is a therapist?
What is the therapy process?
And how can you tell if they’re any good?
What is therapy?
- In my experience, therapy is about speaking the unspeakable.
- It’s the telling of things that you haven’t had the safety or the opportunity to tell before.
- It’s expressing your deepest feelings without have to edit or omit or pretend for the sake of someone else.
- It’s exploring within yourself to find who you are, and who the other parts of you are.
- It’s looking at the painful truths of your life, coming to grips with even the most shame-filled realities of the ways you were hurt and the ways you hurt others—and then being able to move ahead with a greater peace, more resolve, a quiet solidity, and an acceptance of what has happened in years gone by.
- It’s the process of facing the past while also allowing it to fade away, becoming free from it, instead of being consumed by it or chained to it or terrified of it.
- It requires seeing and knowing some very harsh realities, but helps you find a way to be solidly okay with yourself anyway and to live a full and happy life despite the horror and pain.
What is a therapist?
A therapist is a listening person who can hear what you have to say and help you to process your experiences and move beyond them, a companion in your pain and a witness to your truth.
A safe trauma therapist is one who can contain your feelings and experiences, however intense, and remain themselves, present in the room with you. It is one in whom you can have the confidence of knowing they are on your side, as well as the reassurance of knowing they are their own confident person who will not be easily steamrolled, bullied, or deceived.
Your listening person can’t be fooled by denial, manipulated by fear, scared off by anger, or accepting of projections. They must be strong enough to handle your pain, your emotions, your truths, without falling into their own emotional traps, and yet they need to be gentle enough to provide genuine compassion and comfort.
Your listening person must be kind, but firm. Flexible, but unwavering. Provoking, but protective. Accepting, but honest.
What is the therapy process?
Trauma therapy is not just about the recovery and processing of memories. It is also about learning to think and act in different and better ways. Emotional fallacies, cognitive distortions, controlling manipulations, and psychological defenses all have to be addressed.
In therapy, your greatest wounds and your worst behaviors both will be exposed, examined, and engaged. Ouch—that’s really hard to do. No wonder therapy hurts.
Therapy is an enormously difficult personal challenge. It requires courage and willpower by the bucketful. Beyond that, it also takes a great personal commitment on your part to hold on to the therapeutic alliance through the difficult times. Sometimes this persistence can mean going against what feels “right”—so many of you have learned through hard experience that trust is a myth and caring is a painful lie.
And although healing therapy is desperately sought out by trauma survivors, and although it can be a life-saving, heart-warming, and incredibly powerful process—within each and every trauma survivor, there will also be long lists of reasons, recognized or unrecognized, conscious or deeply hidden, why therapy is not ok, not necessary, or not helpful for them.
So it can be all too easy, when the going gets particularly tough, to turn from the onslaught of truth and from the therapy that has unleashed it. It is too easy, sometimes, to deflect the truth onto someone or something else, discard that person or thing from your life as you no doubt wish you could do with the truth and just keep running.
Your commitment to therapy will be tested again and again. I commend each and every one of you who daily move forward on blind faith, against what feels like your better instincts, to find true healing.
Externally, there may other challenges to face.
There may be others in your life that don’t want you to move forward. Maybe your family likes the status quo, and they don’t want you challenging their norm. Maybe your perpetrators don’t want you to realize the truth of what happened, or maybe they don’t care if you remember, as long as you blame yourself for their crimes. Or maybe someone is invested in controlling you now. They certainly wouldn’t want you to learn healthier ways of thinking and feeling.
It is crucial that you are willing to be honest with yourself in your healing—about yourself and about others in your life—even when painful truths are revealed.
As hard as it is to do, facing the truth is the only way to achieve full healing.
Warmly,
Kathy
Copyright © 2008-2017 Kathy Broady MSW and Discussing Dissociation
Hi Kathy, another interesting post.
A question if I may – do you think that a “trauma client” (ie one with PTSD or a dissociative disorder) should necessarily be treated by a specialised “trauma therapist” or, in your opinion, could any therapist who has the skills that you mention in your post do just as good a job with the client?
Many thanks again
BTC
Hi BTC,
Thanks for your kind words. A lot of people have found their way to this blog from your blog, so thanks for that — I certainly appreciate it. 🙂
And you have asked a good question as well. I don’t have a quick or simple answer for that, but I will do the same with your question as I mentioned to Castorgirl. I’ll spend some time working on a thought-out response and post it in the blog as soon as I can.
Thanks for asking!!!
Kathy
Hi Kathy,
An interesting post. It raises many issues that have been a struggle over the last three years of therapy…
The question whenever things don’t seem to be going well in therapy always seems to come back to – “Is this our fault?” Are we sabotaging our own recovery, misinterpreting what has been said or meant.
It always brings forward the issues from the past about the health professionals being infallible and beyond questioning. We’ve just tried to question our therapist, and it hasn’t gone well. Our first foray into challenging a health professional has pretty much come crashing down around our ears…
In a rather rambling way, we’re trying to ask what indicators can you use to see whether it’s a block from us, or a therapeutic mis-match?
Great thought provoking blog…
Take care…
Hi Castorgirl,
Thanks for writing and thank you for taking an interest in this blog. I appreciate your comment and I’m really glad to see that my post has encouraged you to think about a few things.
You have raised a very good question, so I’ve decided I’m going to take a little time to write up a detailed answer for that, and make it one of my next blog posts in the not so distant future.
I hope you are having a great day — 🙂
Thanks again,
Kathy
peoplepuzzlepieces.wordpress.com linked to this article.
What a heartbreaking read for me but I am glad I found this post. You say that my “listening person can’t be… accepting of projections.” Is transference a projection as my therapist (present moment therapy) says it is? I ask because whatever it is remains unresolved and has caused me enough pain to seek out an another therapist (childhood trauma/DID therapy) who I see in addition to my regular therapist. The first therapist recently gave me a week off to cool down after an angry outburst directed towards her for what I perceived to be her rejection of my transference which I believe holds the key to healing. She doesn’t agree with me. I want to quit and have rescheduled twice already but it hurts just thinking about it. Nearly 18 months ago, when I told her that I felt like I was falling in love with her she told me then to take a week off because things where getting too intense for me.
Reblogged this on StarryNight Journey and commented:
I wish this hope existed….that people understood, pain wldnt be as bad
I feel like i am beyond hope so i read your blog. We have been searching for a therapist cause we have no real memories for the first 24-25 years. And instead have been damaged more. We have repainted a therapist house, windows and garage, we have been used to practised hypnosis on, we have been asked to help therapists friends, we have had our signature copied to defraud social services of money,we have been used to promote a therapist jehovah witness calling and we have been yelled at, our words twisted and told lying about a memory. And always told no one can help us just them cause no one knows DID, just them. Found out after 20 yrs we actually have ptsd and no one noticed. So finally find a psychologist who did their disertation on it. First few months sounded good but seems herknowledge ended. Started wanting to fo energy circles without any work, she has been talking theories and ignored our messages preferring to talk about unrelated stuff and even totally flippant when we were upset and asked her to stop. But lately we are shutting down and so stressed at seeing her we cant finction for 3 days. She has lately been discussing and mocking clients (without using their names) and we stay quiet. Finally asked if she talks about us – to which she cheerily replied “yes, why does that bother you?”. It feels like a breaking of confidence and i just cancelled my next appt because just cant face her. Cant sleep or anything. She is supposedly the expert and no one else is but we read your blogs and have talked to you twice and they do more for us. If we quit we might loose our disability, but if we stay we will become very unstable and suicidal. All this to ask – are we reading this right or are we in a ptsd flashback? (This might be private)
As hard as therapy can be, its not as hard as keeping all those secrets we have stuffed inside. So while talking in therapy may be very painful at times, its better than not talking at all.