I AM NOT WHAT HAPPENED TO ME, I AM WHAT I CHOOSE TO BECOME......c.g.jung
Do you feel alone as if you are living self-enclosed behind a wall.....and hypervigilant to ensure your safety is protected? Do you think "I'm not good enough, I'll never be good enough"...."I'm selfish to want time for myself, it means I'm weak"....."There's no way I am saying anything, I'm scared of their reaction"....."I'm so overwhelmed I can't do my work"..?
A traumatic experience, past or present, is so personal and so painful, or so violent and/or unexpected that it cannot be psychologically or emotionally assimilated at the time of the event or series of events. The traumas may be from childhood or may happen in your present day life. Unprocessed traumatic memories can reappear in the form of nightmares, visual and/or emotional flashbacks, and/or the reliving of events at any time, even years later. And if, at the time, there was no one around who had your back, no one to talk to about the horrendous traumas....such as sexual, physical, and/or emotional abuses and neglect..... emotionally shutting down and walling yourself off were necessary to protect yourself, to feel safe. You had no choice then, but eventually you paid the heavy price of feeling disconnected and alone.
Early on you also learned that to survive childhood traumas you had to hide, sometimes physically, but you always had to hide your real true self if you had any chance of feeling loved, cared for, or of just surviving. Compliance, shutting down, withdrawal, disassociation, a freeze, fight, fawn, or flee were ways to cope and survive. Harsh, self-critical internal voices, a negative self-perception, feeling never good-enough, unworthy, self-blaming, and that something is wrong with you were unrelenting.... Yet underneath it all there remained a core self that was still needing to be seen, understood and validated.
It's in the connection with the therapist that healing and growth happen, that feeling seen, understood and validated happens. An experienced, empathic, compassionate, and non-judgemental therapist like myself will create a safe space where childhood perceptions, feelings, beliefs, terrors, and memories can surface and get worked through at your pace.....where flashbacks, nightmares, unwanted memories, and reliving events, triggers, anxieties and depressed moods are also worked through and understood slowly, a step at a time...
The heart of all of our work is the therapeutic relationship, the commitment and collaboration of both of us, and the value that we place on tuning into and acknowledging your core self and its needs and desires. Trauma therapy is the first time for many for getting a clear narrative of the trauma, processing wounds, detaching from past internal critical voices, integrating self-soothing and emotional regulation, and internalizing the positive and validating therapy relationship.
General anxiety, worry, panic, and social anxiety are understandably common and much anxiety and fear can be traced to past traumas. Our work together will include the tools and techniques to reduce and manage your anxieties as well as to understand that they are signals of imagined threats and utimately signals to pause and reflect on their underlying meaning(s).
Depression is often an outgrowth of traumatic experiences. Trauma, past or present, can squelch your aliveness, keeping you from getting your needs met and steering you into isolation and aloneness. After going down a dark rabbit hole, feeling helpless and hopeless, staying in bed all day feels safe but your sense of self feels defeated and debilitated. Often shame is the underlying feeling.
You suffer, your relationships suffer. Our work in therapy together will first focus on your emotional safety with me through sensitive exploration, empathy and understanding, building a growing, trusting connection between us.
Now that your sense of self is strengthening and you are aware of and feel your self-worth, here are some outcomes you can experience along the way in therapy, also keeping in mind that they vary in timing. You will not be deflated or defeated for long by anyone else's opinion of you. You will bounce back, get back up on your feet, you will be resilient knowing your own voice matters. You will know and trust intuitively what is in your gut, what is good and right for you and get used to asking yourself what it is that YOU want. You will care for and about others but you will not sacrifice yourself for others any longer, knowing you are not responsible for them. You are balancing your life, factoring yourself in to take time for self-care, and giving yourself permission to ask for help. Perfection, you realize, was a way to cope and you don't need it. You will pursue your interests and feel good about your accomplishments, including the so-called small ones. You are seeking supportive relationships and comfortable creating boundaries. You allow yourself to feel proud of yourself!
Traumatic memories do not altogether disappear for any of us, and they don't have to in order to have a well-lived life. They recede into the background because you heal and grow and now control them....YOU are now in control of your life and feeling free to create the life you desire...
Please call or e-mail me if you have any questions or to schedule a free Consultation.