Misconceptions About Trauma Therapy
If you’ve never gone to therapy before, or even if you have but never to specifically work on trauma, you might not know what to expect! Here are a few misconceptions I hear a lot from new clients.
You absolutely HAVE to talk about the details of what happened.
Like most things in therapy, whether something will be helpful is different person-to-person. Some people find that going through the nitty-gritty of a traumatic event does in fact help them process the experience, desensitize them to it, or help them understand what happened in a different way. There are multiple therapeutic modalities (aka types of therapy) that rely on the notion that the details of the event need to be discussed in therapy. AND for other people, it is not helpful to do this. This should be discussed with and respected by your therapist. Healing is not contingent upon going over every detail of what happened.
2. You will be judged for what happened to you.
No client should feel judged in therapy! Especially when working on trauma. As survivors, we tend to create this yard stick on our minds with “not that bad trauma” on one end and “really bad trauma” on the other. And somehow being on one end or the other means you are allowed to feel a certain type of way about what happened. A safe trauma therapist does not have this yardstick in their minds. Our own self-judgments about what happened to us are oftentimes projected onto our therapists.
3. Healing looks like [x].
Healing looks different from one survivor to the next, even one day to the next! And remember that there is truth to the very cliche adage: Healing is not linear. Right now, it might even be hard to imagine what healing looks like for you and that is ok. You will get there, and maybe when it becomes easier to imagine, that in itself is a sign of progress. If you’re looking for signs of progress because doing trauma work can be painful and feel endless, keeping a journal can be super helpful to use and look back on how you’ve felt in the past versus present. Reflect on how you feel when you do something (like going to the grocery store alone or even just texting a friend) and notice if there is a difference in how you feel doing things now versus before. Maybe there isn’t much of a difference in how you feel doing something, but why you do something. For example, maybe you went to Starbucks on Monday mornings to avoid going to work, but now it's more motivated by treating yourself. Taking note of subtle differences can be helpful in recognizing progress.