5 Profound Discoveries You Can Make with Trauma Therapy

Ordinarily, my sense of worth is pretty steady. I can experience people’s behaviors and their perceptions of me without internalizing it to mean something about my worth or belonging.

Yet, I knew I needed trauma therapy when I knew I mattered, but I felt like I didn’t matter every time my then-partner was not texting me while out with friends. I would get sucked into a dark pit of aloneness. 

What is trauma?

Trauma is not what happened to us, but painful subconscious beliefs we took in from overwhelming, scary, alone experiences that have happened to us. They may have been true once but are no longer true, or were never true but it was important for us to believe they were true for our survival. 

The good news is, from a neurobiological standpoint, if it’s discovered inside you that the learning is untrue, it can absolutely be unlearned. You can then look back at the traumatic experience and instead of being pained by it, you can remember it as a past experience that’s no longer happening.

[I’ll be writing a future post on what healing looks like for ongoing and systemic trauma. It’s important to acknowledge that for people who experience ongoing oppression, trauma is not something of the past. Not acknowledging this would be erasure and colonial thinking.]

What is trauma therapy?

Trauma therapy is a kind of therapy that engages the experience of the body so you can unlearn painful, untrue things about yourself or life - things you know are not cognitively true, but feel true. When you unlearn these things, your symptoms, addiction, anxiety, self-criticism, shame, may decrease or disappear.

Why is that?

Because our symptoms are there to protect us from painful beliefs. Our symptoms are trying to make the pain less painful and keep us well. As long as the painful beliefs are there, the symptoms need to be there.

Here are some examples of painful untrue subconscious beliefs: 

• My needs will never get met in this world

• I never belong

• I’m only alone 

• I have no inherent worth

• Feelings are always overwhelming

What feels true might not be experienced as a cognitive or conscious thought, but a feeling, a sense, a knowing in the body that you tap into when you’re triggered. When you’re not triggered, you may forget it’s there. But it’s actually a subconscious lens you see the world through. You can’t help it because your perception of reality is more influenced by what you learned in your history than the present moment stimuli you’re taking in. 

That’s just brain science. And this reality of our brains can be so painful when hard things have happened to us in our personal history. 

So how do you unlearn trauma?

One big way to unlearn trauma is coming into relationship with yourself in therapy and start listening inside with curiosity to what your system wants you to know. When you begin to do that, you’ll be led to deeper truths about original hurts and terrors you’ve experienced. When you can hold your pain with compassion, your brain will likely unlearn the painful belief and take in new information about you or your life. 

[Content warning: mention of death]

To use my own experience as an example, I used to live with a daily terror that death would take away my loved ones at any moment and I would not survive it. I would hear loud sounds and see intrusive images of loved ones dying tragically. I didn’t know what happened to me that brought on this unrelenting fear.

When I came into contact with the terror in trauma therapy, I was led to a scene when as a toddler, my mom collapsed on the floor during a mental breakdown. My child-self thought she was dead. I connected with my child-self who blamed herself for what happened to my mom.

Once I lovingly understood how terrifying that experience was for my child-self, I grieved the terror and unlearned that it was my fault. I took in something new, that actually, I’m really good at handling terror. I began to remember key moments in my adulthood where I handled terror well. Terror is unpleasant and scary, but I know how to move through it because I’m capable and I can be there for myself.

Terror is now an okay experience for me to have. Once I took that in, my daily terror of predicting death of loves ones stopped. 

Trauma therapy changed my life. It brought on discoveries that make life more affirming and worth living. I see this being true for my clients as well.

Here are 5 profound discoveries you can make with trauma therapy:

You may discover…

1. You can feel less alone with your own kind, welcoming presence towards yourself. You’ll find that you can face scary things inside you and be okay facing them because you have belonging with yourself. You’ll see that you can be with your pain without getting stuck in the past or state of overwhelm. You’ll learn ways to hold your pain while staying in the safety of the here-and-now. Holding our pain in a loving, safe container can heal past trauma. 

2. Just how trustworthy you actually are. You’ll see…

1. how your system organizes itself to protect you from reaching pain inside you. 

2. that your subconscious brain and nervous system are clever - they have a faster processing speed than your conscious brain and are picking up on more data and using it to protect you and keep you well. 

3. there are parts of you that want to hear from you, be seen by you, be acknowledged by you, and be appreciated by you for all that they have done for you, for the hurts they carry. When you connect with these parts and appreciate them, healing will unlock and your symptoms will likely lessen.

3. More soothing inside you as your capacity for compassion increases. Our brains naturally mimic each other. So if you have a compassionate, welcoming therapist in front of you, you will start treating yourself that way too. Compassion releases soothing neurochemicals and makes emotional pain feel less painful. Compassion is medicine for our brains. Compassion turns on your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that makes you feel connected to your wisest self.

4. Your awareness of what’s happening inside you will increase. You’ll be better at tracking your thoughts, feelings, sensations, movement in your joints/muscles, images, and memory fragments that come up. These are all the ways our bodies talk to us. You’ll come to understand all this as wisdom and come to appreciate how they communicate with you as they respond to things happening inside and outside of you. You’ll begin to see yourself as your best protector.

5. You don’t need to be fixed, but to “be-with.” You’ll see that you don’t need to try so hard for change to happen. In fact, if you willfully try to get yourself to change, you might find yourself in a hard spot. If you greet yourself with the energy of “I’m here with you” something will naturally shift inside you towards resilience and self trust. 

If you’re interested in trauma therapy, reach out for a free 30-minute zoom consultation! Find out here what happens in a consultation with me. 

I also provide deepshift therapy. Curious? Check it out!

You can learn more about me here.