The London Therapist

Processing trauma is hard work – but it can be done. In order to move on, and for the trauma to become something that happened in your life, rather than the thing controls your life, it must be processed. It might sound unbelievable, when you can’t stop crying about what happened to you, when you have terrifying nightmares, or you’re stuck in a flashback, but trauma does not have to be a life sentence. And it won’t be. You can move on.

But first, what is trauma? There is no sugar-coating it, trauma is agony. It is a descent into hell. After a traumatic experience, it might feel like your entire life will be about trauma. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Events such as an accident, assault (sexual/physical) or a war situation are traumatising and people can experience something called post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD afterwards. The main symptoms of PTSD are flashbacks and terrifying nightmares. Childhood abuse (sexual/physical/emotional) can lead to something called complex PTSD, which has different symptoms and can be harder to spot. Because children need to adapt to the situations they find themselves in and are completely reliant upon their caregivers, they may not realise/remember until they are adults that something awful happened to them, and they might be full of guilt and shame about something that was absolutely not their fault. Often it is their caregivers who have abused the child and completely shattered the child’s basic sense of safety and trust in the goodness in people.

The common theme of both PTSD and complex PTSD is that during the traumatic event(s) the person felt completely helpless in the face of a terrifying situation. This absolute helplessness feels as though it is a confrontation with death – the person’s senses are flooded and there is nothing they can do to stop the traumatising experience.

As well as being frightening, depending on their nature of what happened, the traumatising experiences may also feel humiliating and shameful, as well as horribly painful.

Many people come to therapy to treat their trauma. This is the right thing to do. You should not bear your trauma alone. The trauma might feel like it will never end – the flashbacks might feel debilitating and the nightmares might be frightening in their intensity. You might feel that if you let the lid off the bottle, who knows what might come out.

I practice something called psychoanalytic psychotherapy, which goes deep into your emotions and brings things into the awareness so that they can be processed. The first task for me in therapy is to restore your sense of safety and trust in the goodness in the world, which was shattered by the traumatic experience. This is true for both PTSD and complex PTSD. You must feel safe with your therapist in order to process the trauma.

The second and very difficult task is to process the trauma. This is hard work and can take time – in the case of complex PTSD, it is possible that memories that have been long buried start to resurface. In both PTSD and complex PTSD, you might have to come to terms with all the ways in which the trauma hurt. All manner of feelings and emotions might emerge – hate, shame, guilt, rage – all these emotions need to be spoken about and acknowledged.

The third task is moving on. My job is to get you to the stage where the trauma is just like any other piece in the jigsaw of your life, rather than this overwhelming, unspeakable, unthinkable event that happened.

Trauma does not have to be a life sentence. Change can and will happen.