Many people who have been chronically abused and neglected have symptoms that may include:
- Difficulty regulating emotions and impulses
- Dissociation such as spacing out, blanking out, losing time, and feeling unreal.
- Substance misuse and other addiction issues
- Problems forming or sustaining relationships
- Self-harming behaviours like cutting, burning, problematic or compulsive eating
I use a three-stage model of recovery from chronic traumatic childhood experiences.
Stage 1 – Safety and stabilization
- Getting a ‘road map’ of the healing process.
- Setting treatment goals and learning about helpful approaches to reaching those goals.
- Establishing safety and stability
- Tapping into and developing inner strengths, and any other potentially available resources for healing.
- Learning how to regulate emotions and manage symptoms that cause suffering or lack of safety.
- Developing and strengthening skills for managing painful and unwanted experiences, and minimizing unhelpful responses to them.
I will work with you to manage your emotions and symptoms to ensure that you have the skills to stay in your window of tolerance. This will mean learning how to put on the breaks safely making sure that you are not too overwhelmed or shut down.
During this phase, my goal is to help you to understand what is going on in your brain that may be disrupting your ability to manage your life and your relationships safely.
We will look at developing self-care and personal resources and you may be given some work to do outside sessions to help your process along.
Once we are both satisfied that you have the skills to manage and if it is necessary we may then move on to phase two.
Stage 2 -Trauma processing
Once you have the skills to manage your trauma symptoms and if you are sufficiently resourced and stable we may move to phase two which is about processing what happened.
The main work of stage two involves:
- Reviewing and/or discussing the impact of the trauma to lessen their emotional intensity, to revise their meanings for life and identity.
- Working through grief about unwanted or abusive experiences and their negative effects.
- Mourning or working through grief about good experiences that was not there but that all children deserve.
Stage 3 – Moving on from trauma
The third stage of recovery focuses on reconnecting with people, meaningful activities, and other aspects of life such as spirituality, making new meanings, and moving forward with life. This can be an extremely important piece of work to do in therapy where the process can be held safely. In my experience moving on from complex trauma can be difficult if the parts that are attached to the trauma are not attended to appropriately.
My aim is to help you to achieve deep and lasting change which for some may be an improvement in your day-to-day functioning, or a greater capacity to form and keep trusting relationships, the ability to love, respect, and care for yourself, and create a deeper meaning in your life