What Do You Do When Your Therapist Can't Understand Your Trauma?

[ghotiff]

For me, recognizing myself as a child meant recognizing my true powerlessness in the situation. Perceived power (and as a result perceived responsibility) felt safer than acknowledging just how powerless I truly was.

 

[Me232]

I feel that it's a way to make yourself responsible for what happened to you. When something traumatic happens it's so confusing that we take on the guilt ourselves in some aspect. That's the only way we can make sense of it. I think it's very normal for a person with PTSD to struggle with this part.

We all struggle with feeling guilty from the person who thinks they were old Enough to know better, to the person who went along with it at first and then decided they didn't want to anymore, to the person who feels they should have been strong enough to fight them off, sometimes all of these examples and more!

I just want you to know I understand where your coming from and I understand it soooo much. In my situation my brother attempted to rape me. He was a couple years older than me but he also was mentally slow. I was the one in charge of him because I wasn't slow like he was, but he was bigger and stronger than me.

How can I accuse someone who's mental faculties made them more childlike than I was? So, it was my fault. Trust me I know what it's like to "should have known better ".

Best wishes!-Me232

 

[scout86]

One of the things I realized awhile back was that I'd never forgiven myself for letting stuff happen. I was, maybe, 5? I don't remember the world seeming any different then than it does now, though. I don't remember thinking differently and it seems like I had all the capabilities then, and all the perspective, that I have now.

Something that really has an impact on me is seeing and observing kids that age, like @Junebug mentioned. It's jarring. It kind of freaks me out. They are so little! I don't remember ever being like that...... I had to come to terms with the fact that I WAS a little kid in order to find an way to forgive that kid, at least a little. Maybe you need to do the same thing? (I don't know, I'm asking.)

No matter how much freedom a kid has, there's a BIG difference between 13 & 18. There's differences, even in brain function, regardless of intelligence or apparent maturity. But, I found it kind of hard to cut myself enough slack to admit there wasn't really anything I could have done, and there was an actual reason. That I was just a kid.

 

[Lucycat]

I get that I was just a kid when I was being abused. I found it hard that I 'allowed' it to continue for seven years. Then I have that sense of pride - fleetingly- that at just 14 I worked out how to make it stop.

With hindsight I learned that when I was 14 he moved on to abusing other little girls. Not so proud of myself now.

 

[scout86]

And what that means, @Lucycat , is that you had as little control of stopping it as you did of starting it, which is pretty much none at all. I think that kid, from 7 to 14 did good, just coming out the other side.

On the one hand, it's disturbing to think that things happen to us and we can't control them. On the other hand, as my T likes to say, it's kind of ok to accept that no one is "all that" and we really don't have totally responsibility for the randomness of the universe.

 

[GWhizz]

I agree with @ghotiff - for me, it means I still have this sense of control over it all, and a belief that I could have done more to stop it. I also believe I was quite mature, even at only 11 years old, and that I should have known better or seen it coming, and been able to do something to prevent it. And so it really bugs me when my T maintains that I was 'only a child'.

For me, feeling let down by oneself means that the one person that I'm meant to trust fully cannot even be trusted to follow through on such an important promise. I am beginning to realise though, that this self-reliance is not healthy anymore. We don't have to go it alone anymore.

I'm also writing an email to my T about all of this. Glad you find writing it down a good way to reflect on it and communicate it with your T.

 

[joeylittle]

I guess I don't equate child-status with powerlessness, although I see how it absolutely could equate. Maybe that's what his reason is for constantly returning to that theme. I never really identified as a child past the age of 6; and I never spent time with any children, my peers or otherwise. It's funny you mention observing children, @scout86. I can't ever gauge how old they are. To me they just classify by size. I should try learning ages, it would likely help.

My total blind-spot about childhood is also a big issue for therapy - it's just not involved in the trauma.

Although I do have very big blocks about the powerless thing. While I am better at understanding I was overpowered, I developed a great deal of my coping around the notion that I had culpability in the events - and so I'm not entirely powerless, if that makes sense.

In general, I absorb responsibility. This thread is doing a great job of reminding me that, at least as far as my therapist goes, I don't need to be responsible for him.

It would be awesome if I could stop thinking that I have any degree of responsibility for allowing those things to happen to me.

 

[scout86]

@joeylittle , I'm no good at guessing kid's ages either. When I see one and then find out that she/he is 4,5, 6, whatever, my reaction is always something like, "You're kidding, right? THAT'S '5'???? But that's a REALLY little kid!?" I've been trying to pay attention to ages and think about this some, just to help myself absorb the reality.

Another idea that's been useful, but hard to accept, is that we all, regardless of age, are doing the best we can and the best we are able, at any given time. That doesn't mean there weren't other options, just that we, being who we were at the moment, couldn't avail ourselves of them. For what ever reason. And there might be a lot of reasons.

A few months ago, one of my best friends shot himself. I've spent a fair amount of time, since then, wandering through the land of " could have, should have, and if only." (A land I know fairly well.) This time, I'm also trying to remind myself that I DID live 1200 miles away, and there WERE things I didn't know and there WERE things he didn't tell me, because he didn't WANT me to know.... I guess I did the best I could. I'm not happy about it, but I guess it's true. I'd rather it was, somehow, my fault, because then it would make more sense. It would be easier to blame myself and hate myself than it is to accept that stuff happens. Reality is messy and sometimes frustrating.

t would be awesome if I could stop thinking that I have any degree of responsibility for allowing those things to happen to me.

I haven't read anything about your trauma (there are some places I just can't bring myself to go, sorry!) but I'm SURE you don't have any responsibility for it. You WERE a kid! But, I'm also sure that you're on the road to being able to accept your lack of responsibility as "reality" and it WILL be awesome!

 

[joeylittle]

Well, I don't think I'm doing this very well.

We talked around the issue. Essentially, I told him my concern pretty directly: that I was worried about him not really understanding what I was trying to articulate about my "worst thing"; that I was afraid if he couldn't understand what I was talking about then I feared he would not be able to lead me through it.

He acknowledged that he could not directly understand, because he'd never experienced what I had - but that he was confident in his intuitive empathy, and he felt that he understood how it had made me feel, and that having a grasp on that mattered more than having a personal understanding of the event itself.

I asked him if it made him sick to listen to it, the way I was sick talking about it. He told me no, that for him it was all just a matter of knowing the events almost from a clinical perspective. He was then quick to point out that looking at it clinically did not interfere with his ability to empathize.

He reminded me he has a very different perspective than I do: he sees all these things as bad things that were inflicted on me; I'm much more inside the detail of them and see them as things I was participating in, to varying degrees. There are a few things I would agree were "done to" me, but only a small number. The rest of it, I find a way to see myself as complicit.

Because of this, he said, he can have compassion for me constantly when I have nearly no compassion for myself.

What I wish I would have segued into is the subject of how he shows that compassion.

Is it fair for me to tell him it would help me (I think) if he would express compassion more frequently? Really, I guess express it at all, because I'm having trouble reading it. What I see is him being very very capable, together, calm, constant. These are all good. But right now it also does seem more clinical than humanist, if that makes sense.

I'm good at clinical. Or rather, I'm skilled in it. Part of my struggle right now is finding a middle way, some path where I am not drowning in it but I'm also not dismissing it.

He suggested we take a mini-break from the processing work and focus on more current issues for a couple of weeks; my night problems have increased and that usually means I'm getting overloaded.

I don't disagree, but I also don't like leaving this hanging.

Any observations? I'm just feeling off about it all, somehow.

 

[ghotiff]

I absolutely think you can do the below and I think you could even email your paragraph as is.

Is it fair for me to tell him it would help me (I think) if he would express compassion more frequently? Really, I guess express it at all, because I'm having trouble reading it. What I see is him being very very capable, together, calm, constant. These are all good. But right now it also does seem more clinical than humanist, if that makes sense.

Maybe you could work out what you need to make it feel more human. For example, phrases he could say that would help. Everyone is different in what would help them to hear, but an example might be - that sounds horrible.

 

[Mystery]

Hi Joeylittle, I'm going to have a guess at a few things, I just want to stress that, because it's all I can do in this situation, guess. I imagine that being the kind of therapist who deals with trauma that is as profound as yours, your therapist would have to find a way of protecting himself on an ongoing basis with all of his clients. Perhaps this clinical way of looking at things is what allows him to do his job every day. I don't know his personality, so I can only look for a 'logical' reason someone would be like that. I think what you are feeling is totally understandable. Maybe it's his method but maybe it's his personality? It takes a special therapist to give you a direct line to his home life too, he obviously is really invested in your wellbeing on that level and in for the hard long haul with you.

My therapist, a clinical psych, wrote her Phd on 'Self Disclosure of the Therapist'. I haven't read it, but she does self disclose during our sessions or she will give me an anecdote of another person she has seen in the past that had a similar to my story and she does it to convey that she gets me and shows her empathy and understanding when she does it. She even told me a few weeks ago how she struggles with her body image sometimes. She comes across as really human.

Once when I told her a particular story, I could see she was angry about it. Not at me but at the person who did it to me. She wasn't faking because I could see that she had to get a hold of herself for a few minutes. We are starting to get into some really specific stuff now and she shows her emotion carefully but when I look at her face when I've just told her something horrific I can see her reaction. I'm good at reading people and she's not faking it. Yesterday she lightly gasped when I told her something and said 'That's awful (My name). When she does this, I know she is with me and really importantly, I know she believes me.

I sometimes try to imagine what it would feel like to be a psychologist and a caring empathic person, then do trauma therapy with innocent people who have been harmed. To hear all their stories and process the pictures through their mind. Like, maybe they get affected and have dreams about things they have heard. They wouldn't tell us if they did. I wonder what they learn in their training that keeps them in balance.

About 8 years ago, I started reading lots of forensic science books and horrible case studies in my nursing studies. This lead me to reading a lot of horrible true stories in detail. I realized it was having an effect on me and my anxiety level after the end of the year. I wasn't trained to handle what I was reading and my mind became too filled with images from the cases I had read. I imagine therapists must have to deal with something like that but even more emotionally impacting because they are hearing it from the person, in detail.

Maybe it's a good thing that you take a step back for a few weeks and have a chance to work some things out. When all is said and done you are employing him (whether you are paying or someone is paying for you), and you do have every right to direct the course of your therapy and resolve the issues you want to before you progress to the next stage each time.

You're amazing..

 

[scout86]

Well, I don't think I'm doing this very well.

Well, I think you're doing fine! This is complicated, after all. And, I think, it's the kind of thing that comes up in any relationship of any depth. There probably isn't a cookbook way through it. You both probably have to do the best you can and flounder around until you get things worked out.

I haven't got any advice. I'm not at a point where I've talked about anything REALLY difficult in therapy. We "talked about talking about stuff" a couple of times. My T backed off. I'm not sure of his reasoning, but, for now, I'm going to trust that he knows what he's doing. When we DO get to a point like the one you're at, I can see where we might have similar problems.

The rest of it, I find a way to see myself as complicit.

You might want to consider that what you said there is part of the "problem". One of the things I think you're going to be asked to do in this process is see that differently. I suppose it's remotely possible that you WERE somewhat complicit, but I kind of doubt it. Changing that part of your world view can be hard and a bit scarey. In a sense, you have to give up on the idea that you actually had any control. That's not always easy to accept.

My T can be kind of emotional (IMO) and I have trouble dealing with that. I'm good at ignoring/avoiding emotions and am more comfortable if they don't show up. I think it would be easier, for ME, to talk about stuff is his reaction was going to be "It's nothing but a thing." more or less. He might get teary eyed (he really might) and that kind of freaks me out. I told him that, and that I was going to have a real hard time, if I thought I had to look out for him. He said that's the way he is (deal with it!) and that he was quite capable of taking care of himself. I'm sure he is, but I had to say that. Anyway, this stuff is probably, by definition, hard. It sounds like you have a good T & like you have a good relationship. I'll bet you can work your way through this.

Last, but not least, I really appreciate you sharing this part of your journey! You've given me a lot to think about and you're being a good example of how to work through things..