How Can Therapy Help?

[Pondering]

I don't understand. How does talking about trauma actually help? What can therapy really do?

 

[Kas_Can_Fly]

It reshuffles the trauma - if you're experiencing PTSD Symptoms the chances are your trauma is stuck, frozen. Not filed away like any other memory good or bad, but actively still in motion for you. You may have hundreds of bad memories and you might be upset by remembering them occasionally, but you don't re-experience them so completely. By talking about your trauma you essentially re-experience it but without the danger. Over time (varied depending on your trauma(s)) the repeated discussion desensitizes you and reprocesses and your brain is able to file it away normally. That's why therapy is so hard, you re-experience the trauma often multiple times.

 

[greenleaf]

To add a bit to Kas' comment: sometimes we can have sort of cognitive/emotional "knots" that keep us from even getting to this slow, safe re-experiencing & desensitization. For instance, if we learned to squash feelings related to the trauma, and don't even notice that we're doing this dissociation, we can't necessarily even get to the feelings to reprocess them... a person might need to learn alternatives to such dissociation first, which might involve grounding, noticing what makes them feel safer, etc. The dissociation is sort of short-circuiting the desensitization effort.

Just talking about the traumas over and over often won't provide these skills for a lot of folks with "complex trauma" (a person can keep hitting their head against this wall indefinitely, in my opinion), so it's great that lots of research is being done on new skills and methods -- and that lots of therapists are learning how to guide folks through these trauma-related mazes.

 

[Deleted member 1860]

Simply talking about trauma does nothing but give you a voice. And possible retraumatization. Processing is the key.

 

[Upside Down Eagle]

Depends. Sometimes talking about it, especially if you have never opened up about it before, can give you access to some frozen or repressed feelings so you can process them. At other times, a different approach (working with the body or with behavior patterns, in the present) can be more effective. It would be an idea to try a bit of both, or just try to feel which approach feels better.

 

[WillyKat]

• Helps you move the trauma memories, stored as vague sensory impressions into normal memory.
• Helps you to understand and integrate those memories into a proper narrative of your life.
• Defuses negative perceptions and negative lifetime narratives. Example: "I must have done something wrong for that to happen to me" to "someone committed a crime against me."

 

[franciemarnie]

Talk therapy enlightened, but moved no trauma energy out so after 25 years I still had the same hyper vigilance, insomnia, etc.

Somatic therapy, where you do not have to discuss details, has changed my body/brain and my life.

There are other great therapies that focus on processing the buried energy in the body and rebooting the system. I wish I had the money. I would do so much more. It can happen naturally too, especially - at least in my case - if you aren't drinking or taking numbing drugs.

Read Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine to understand how this works.

 

[Intrepid]

Talking about trauma brought it to the surface, (an extremely uncomfortable event. Don't do it alone.). It let me start loosening up the places where I was crushed. It let me start integrating those thoughts, feelings and sensations I at one time said I would never experience again. But note that JUST talking wasn't enough. I had to get to the root of the problem. That meant finding words. Trauma had taken the language away from me to heal myself. I had to find the language that the trauma took away from me.

However, I believe we all have different personalities. The way you talk about your trauma must fit your personality.

For me, all who have posted here have a piece of the truth. There's probably a way of talking about it that works for you.

 

[greenleaf]

25 years ago, talking was largely all that people knew about (or at least it's all I ever heard about and had available to me.) It was actually pretty revolutionary in a way, the books and studies were fighting against strong societal avoidance of a lot of trauma types. The "speak outs" and such were really powerful for me, on a cognitive and emotional level.

However, the physical stuff was largely untouched by that, for me... other things are helping that more (though "somatic experiencing" would count as "therapy" I believe.

Also, the understanding of trauma, including dissociation, seems to be really improving among therapists and researchers. I find that a cognitive understanding of this stuff -- which a therapist can help you with -- makes it feel much safer; it's not a totally unknown, unbounded monster that I'm all alone with. Much. Today, anyhow. :bag: