The Paradox of Agency in Healing from Trauma
Hook: The double message clients receive—"get help" but also "do the work yourself"
Many of us who arrive at this page have experienced quite a number of adverse experiences in our lives- whether we’d label that “big T” trauma of “little t” trauma, they have affected us nonetheless. This affects us in a number of ways- we feel on edge all the time, sometimes unworthy of anything good in our lives, we can’t sleep through the night without being plagues by nightmares, we feel fragmented, sad, anxious, and sometimes completely numb. Relationships and work feel tough to maintain. We keep banging out heads up against the same wall, repeating the same old patterns. Somewhere along the way someone might tell us “you need to get help”. Then, we finally gather up the courage to talk to someone about it. We feel absolutely raw, scared, and trembling. Then, in the first meeting with our new therapist, we are told- you also have to do this work, I am just a guide”.
“Oh wow”, we might think, “I just opened up a big can of worms, I feel so scared, and now I have to do all the work?” It makes sense, as a trauma survivor, that this would be terrifying. Perhaps we’ve never actually learned how to feel our emotions in the first place, or that it is dangerous to do so- people would leave us, or get angry, or shut us out if we cried or were scared. Perhaps we’ve never learned how to regulate those emotions once we were able to feel them.
For folks who have complex trauma, there are a host of challenges to “doing the work”- we’ve learned to let go of expectations of others, because no one will ever meet our needs. We’ve learned that our efforts will never be rewarded, instead, they may be punished, and so why even try? There is a sense of learned helplessness, which then leads to depression. Many of us turn to damaging and problematic means of finding some sense of control in our chaotic lives- disordered eating, substance use, risky behaviours, and when all else fails, just exit the body completely by dissociating. When we are highly dissociative, we feel that fragmentation- maybe we can’t remember important parts of our lives, maybe we feel like we’re “outside the body”, or that the world feels alien or unreal. How are we supposed to “do the work” when we feel like this?
I want to clarify something- when a therapist says “do the work”, what they really mean is not that it’s all on you! An open and collaborative therapeutic relationship is really a middle path. It’s not just on you, but it’s also not just on the therapist to “heal” or “cure”. A healthy therapeutic relationship is like a springboard or a scaffold. We build the solid ground underneath your feet, together, first, and then work together to determine what is within your window of tolerance and what’s outside of it. We help build that felt sense of when you are past capacity, and then work also to be able to know that intuitively in yourself and communicate that to others. Within that safe window, you start, finally, to feel more confident to “do the work”, because you aren’t overwhelmed all the time anymore. You can finally breathe.
Sometimes, when there is a lot of numbing and dissociation, parts of self can interfere with the healing process, which can feel frustrating and make the healing process take twists and turns that were unexpected. More about that in the next blog post.
For today, though, here’s a suggestion:
Write a journal entry about a time in the last week that you did something (even a very small something) in service of your wellbeing.
For an extra layer of challenge, find a piece of music that represents that choice- do you notice anything about its rhythm, genre, or melody? Does it remind you or a specific time in your life, or a person, or a memory? Would you like to listen to the piece while doodling or writing what comes to mind?
Enjoy the process!