But the real issue is that trauma changes people. They feel different and experience certain sensations differently.
“ . . . the main focus of therapy needs to be helping people shift their internal experience.”
That’s why the main focus of therapy needs to be helping people shift their internal experience or, in other words, how the trauma is lodged inside them.
How Talking Can Distract a Client from Feeling
Now, in helping people learn to stay with their sensations, we need to resist the temptation to ask them to talk about their experience and what they’re aware of.
This is because talking can convey a defense against feeling.
Through the use of brain imagery, we’ve learned that when people are feeling something very deeply, one particular area of the brain lights up.
And we’ve seen other images taken when people are beginning to talk about their trauma and, when they do, another part of the brain lights up.
So talking can be a distraction from helping patients notice what is going on within themselves.
“ . . . some of the best therapy is largely non-verbal.”
And that’s why some of the best therapy is very largely non-verbal, where the main task of the therapist is to help people to feel what they feel - to notice what they notice, to see how things flow within themselves, and to reestablish their sense of time inside.
This is an except from a FB article that I had to go through hoops to read. I post it b/c it points to an understanding that helps me understand where I am. 24 hours aday my antennae are alert. Ready. On guard. My secondary position is retreating, fearing every demand for even basic functioning. All of it harkens back to childhood, to minor fears and traumas that added up, the incessant drip of water wearing away the stone.
Over the years I have employed countless methods to help, to heal, to relieve. Many did help - a little, for a while. But perhaps the total trauma was too great? Or the effect of the trauma caused actions and inactions which further traumatized. Maybe all of it.
But still I persist. All my knowledge, understanding, experience coming into play. Hope never ends. Small shifts bring relief. Faith endures.
Yesterday, for some reason remembrances of my attempts at EFT kept bombarding me. It, EFT, seemed to hold promise and even bits of relief. But even years ago, I saw that the traumas were too many and many unknown, not remembered, unconscious. I tried the "bundling" technique - to no effect. Why did this memory come up so powerfully yesterday? I have no idea.
But as I move forward yet again, find light rays of peace and hope yet ever strangled by that constant presence of dread, I wonder. Then I remember how my entire adult life has been a combination of retreat and conscious and unconscious attempts to find relief. Coffee, sweets, good foods, bingeing carbohydrates. Exercise, sloth. Reading. Television. Flurry of activity - organizations, membership, enterprises, projects. Nothing. None of it brought relief and much of it brought on more and more pain, more failure, more disappointment, no relief, more loss. It all seems so clear today. The rat race, the fleeing on the hamster wheel. Run faster, faster, faster and I'm no further away.
I'm still in the midst of indescribable pain. My parents are dead and I still hurt. But I have not given up. And more miraculous - I still have hope and believe there is a way out of the constant state of dread and the physical pain that accompanies it. And most important of all - I believe that the paralysis that has plagued me for decades is bit by bit breaking up and dissolving - like the ice on the frozen pond in spring. Time will tell. It either will or it won't. And with the constant state of dread, the self-hatred and self-condemnation that I was trained, encouraged, demanded to develope so many years ago by my father and silently promoted by my mother.
I have no hatred for either. When I think if my father I see him through a child's eye and find myself cowering and hyper vigilant for refuge. Hmmmmm. When I think of my mother I fall into a longing, a pleading to be seen, to be heard, to be recognized. It us not hatred but hurt. Healing will bring relief from that ancient disease. I am on that road, almost there. Resentment and bitterness broke, sorrow remains but freedom will come when the dread and hypervigilance for retreat recede as well.
