I want to take this time to share some quotes from some of the Masters in this field of Trauma. All of these quotes have to do with the title of this Journal Entry; the many myths and misconceptions that lead to misapplications of treating trauma. Therapists who work with trauma (well… a growing number of us!), now understand that traditional talk therapy doesn’t heal us; learning that while talk is important, we want to heal. We cannot treat the events- they are over. It’s how those events continue to affect us today that we need to focus on- how such events do not feel like they are over. We re-experience these unresolved traumas in a variety of ways in our bodies, in our thoughts, in our emotions, our actions and in our relationships.
Additionally, the idea of catharsis for healing is a misconception and can even be quite harmful and dysregulating for trauma survivors- even retraumatizing. Also, many survivors of childhood trauma tend to enter states of collapse, feel numb, disconnected, emotionally detached and/or physically detached. Thus, for many, even getting to the state required for something like catharsis, is not even possible.
Janina Fisher, PhD, co-creator of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, once said in a training I attended of hers, that in each session we can choose “catharsis or transformation,” which most of my clients have heard me say. It’s often difficult, as whether we are therapists, clients, or both, we are used to traditional modalities of treatment; we want to vent, analyze, and have emotional catharsis. However, that’s not what heals, transforms, or treats the ongoing legacy of unresolved trauma that lives in survivors right now.
*Note: All information in this Journal, and included in the following quotes, are not just opinions, they have been well-researched.
So, on with the quotes! The Masters…
“It is not the events that are the problem. And, it has been a tradition in our field- I say we are all children of Freud- so we grew up, as it were, as psychotherapists, revering the sharing of events as a vehicle for healing.
In trauma, that isn’t what works. And, in fact, it often makes things worse. And, we start to confuse the events with the people who experience them.”
“There is a myth about trauma treatment; that you have to remember what happened and have an emotional catharsis. And, somehow that combination is the cure. I mean, basically it’s what Freud, and what people before him [believed]; and actually, some of the people, even before him had a more enlightened view. But this was the idea that is a misunderstanding, or a misapplication, in trauma therapy: that you have to get the people to remember. And, remember one horrific experience after another, after another... And, to have often violent reactions with those memories.
And that’s not the answer; the answer is to be able to come out of where the person has become frozen- physiologically. Now, as part of that, the person will generally recall images, start to process images and feelings, but in a much more gentle way.”
“Digging into the trauma story, going after it, thinking that there is virtue in telling the story, is a TERRIBLE mistake. So, we become like a refueling station from a miserable life. But, the reason why the misery continues, is that the interior world continues to be a minefield, and in the end, this world is the world that counts.”
“What people often miss is that the way people relate to trauma is to split it off. Trauma is about unbearable experience. And so, asking someone about their trauma is almost an impossible question, because you don’t want to know that trauma. And, the very essence of trauma is that it’s too scary to visit, too scary to know. And so, people split off their trauma- they dissociate it. It should have been [classified as] a dissociative disorder.
”
“....I believe you can’t heal trauma by words alone. That’s not to say that words don’t play a part in it, and in fact a very important part, but trauma does not live in the speech parts of the brain, it lies in the parts of the brain that deal with unconscious processes- they have to do with the body. Then, therefore, I think one needs to incorporate the body in the healing process in order to heal the trauma.
That’s what PTSD is: replaying the emotions and the somatic experiences that are still stored there in memory, in the present moment, not in the past. It’s as if it’s still happening now.
So, trauma is a corruption of memory, that’s number one. It’s a corruption of the body’s process; the body now keeps coming back to the same patterns of self-defense. And so, that person not only will keep remembering it, will experience it, he will begin to experience symptoms in the body parts that never completed what they needed to do.”
