Trauma Counselling in Surrey, BC
Trauma therapy is for everyone who feels stuck in life, whether or not they can put a finger on the cause of it. This focused therapy is more effective than the typical talk therapy or CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) because it works with deeper parts of the brain. This is because research-based trauma therapy makes use of the latest neuroscience to work with the brain instead of against it. Thus, the results are longer-lasting and have a bigger effect on the quality of life.
Let’s unpack that.
Whenever we get overwhelmed and we’re not supported, the brain says, “No problem. I got this. I know just what to do.” And then the brain proceeds to disconnect the neurons associated with that overwhelming event from the rest of the brain that moves you forward. Usually, the disconnection is just enough to allow us to put whatever happened “out of mind” (to some extent) so that we can go on with life. Occasionally, it is so disconnected that we forget about it completely! But even though this little fragment is mostly disconnected, it’s not silent. It’s still very much alive and kicking. These fragments continue to interact in our lives when something seems relevant to that part of the brain.
One of the keys here is that this happens when we get overwhelmed. We can get overwhelmed because something bad happens. Maybe a tree smashes through the roof of our house. Maybe mom throws her dinner plate at dad. Perhaps the kids at school call us names. What’s much harder to see is that we can just as easily get overwhelmed because we needed something to happen, but it didn’t. You were the only one not invited to the party. You were home alone too young and no one seemed to notice that this bothered you. You weren’t comforted when you felt sad. This invisible type of overwhelm happens in families that have clear dysfunction, but it also happens all the time in families that look perfect. Parents are busy. Our culture in Surrey teaches that kids should be self-reliant early on. Many parents just don’t know what to do with emotion or how to connect, even though they want to.
The other key here is support. If we do get the support we need when we’re overwhelmed, the disconnection doesn’t happen. I’ve had some beautiful sessions with clients to work on some yucky events, only to find the client smiling like crazy. “I got so much support when that happened! It was wonderful!”
Here are some examples of an overwhelming event from the past having an affect later on.
A 4-year-old is playing on the steps of a swimming pool and no adult is watching her. She slips and has trouble getting back up above the water. She tells her parents, but they don’t seem to understand her distress and they send her back to the pool by herself. Later, when she’s 7 and in swimming lessons, she can’t get herself to put her head underwater and no one knows why. She grows to be a super cautious kid, and becomes an adult who struggles to let loose and just have fun.
A 6-year-old has a tender heart and often thinks of others. On Christmas, he draws special art for his older siblings who make fun of him for it. As he grows, he continues to do thoughtful things for others which are often ignored in his family. By the time he’s a teenager, he has tons of social anxiety. His friends are usually younger than him, and he assumes that other people won’t like him. As an adult, he gives roses to a girlfriend and then immediately ghosts her without understanding why.
Throughout childhood, Jane watched her mother erupt with explosive anger, but only every once in a while. She could never fully predict when it was coming. She would try to behave as well as she possibly could to keep her mom happy, which seemed to work occasionally. Now an adult, Jane has a calm and happy husband and a cooperative workplace. Yet, she finds that she can’t speak up for herself and honestly doesn’t even know what she wants half the time anyway. This doesn’t make sense to her because everyone around her is so nice and genuinely wants to hear what she thinks. She’s getting frustrated with herself and feels like she must be doing something wrong.
When I write these stories out this way, the connections between past and present can look very clear, but when you are living these stories, it doesn’t look clear at all. When you are living a story like this, that past piece of learning (near drowning, being shamed, or fearful of someone else’s anger) is buried deeper in the brain. For people who do see their own connections between past and present, it’s still nearly impossible to change that connection on their own.
The brain is actually intelligent to do this thing where it disconnects neurons, buries them so they can be harder to find, and then refuses to change and update them. In the present, it can cause us so much anguish, anxiety, depression, PTSD, and so on. But the brain does this because it doesn’t want to waste that really important learning you did. Those were super hard lessons to learn and the brain wants to save us from having to learn it again. The girl with the near-drowning? She learned that no one is watching out for her, so she’d better stay alert to keep herself safe. The boy learned that no one will appreciate his love, so he’d best keep it hidden. The woman learned as a child that it’s safer to keep herself hidden. There is nothing broken about the brain learning these lessons and figuring out how to get through. That was the reality in these examples. It was necessary to learn this to get through. The trouble now is that the past learning is no longer appropriate in the present.
All of this disconnection is a product of trauma. Trauma causes disconnection. It disconnects neurons in the brain. It disconnects us from knowing ourselves and living a joy-filled life. It disconnects us from the people around us. Today, nearly everyone is living with some amount of disconnection.
The antidote to trauma is connection.
Thus, the key to effective trauma therapy is to help the brain reconnect all of these disconnected pieces. With trauma therapy, we help the parts of the brain that carry this deep learning to get the updates that life is different now.
Therefore, trauma therapy must include tools that get to deeper levels of the brain in order to be helpful. This group of tools is often called “somatic therapy”. They include Lifespan Integration (LI), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Somatic Experiencing (SE), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP), and Observed and Experiential Integration (OEI). Regardless of their psycho-babble sounding names, they all do somewhat similar things in different ways. They are all capable of getting to deeper levels of the brain to “reprocess” trauma and calm the nervous system.
How much better can life be?
When the brain has connected the past fragments to the present, it becomes so much easier to respond to today in a way that’s appropriate instead of reacting as if you still live in the past. That helps people to feel so much more like adults who are in control of themselves, their decisions, and their responses. Emotions are present, available to give information about opinions and values, and generally stay at manageable levels. Anxiety and depression might still be present at reasonable levels, and they make sense according to what’s happening in the moment instead of seeming to come out of nowhere. Boundaries become clear and possible to speak up for. Relationships become more intimate, vulnerable, honest, stable, and enjoyable.
What happens in a trauma therapy session?
A whole bunch of this answer will depend on which therapist you choose and which tool they use. Overall, trauma therapy is not simply recounting all the bad things that have ever happened to you. The focus is much more on noticing what is getting in the way of living your best life today and then working from there. There will certainly be strategies that you can use to “ground”, which is a counsellor way of saying calm the bleep down, but your therapy will not be limited to a bunch of strategies that you use on your own. The overall goal is connection, but the more practical goal is up to you. Do you want to work on boundaries? Knowing yourself better? Building better relationships? Reducing depression or anxiety? Your goal will direct how the time is used in session.
Further reading about trauma. . .
Trauma is becoming a popular topic, so there are more and more books to choose from if you want to learn more. Here are a few to choose from.
The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk, talks about the effects of trauma and the science behind how we know what we know.
What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Perry. This book is great at taking a compassionate view of our responses to trauma and taking the blame off of the victim. This is one of the more readable books on trauma that I’ve read. The put most of the science on standalone pages so that it’s optional if you want to dig into it. They also limit the depth to which they discuss trauma stories, so it’s not as triggering to read as some of the others.
What My Bones Know: a Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo. Stephanie writes specifically about complex PTSD, which is a newer term to describe a response to trauma that happened repeatedly over the course of years. She also includes information on generational trauma in the book. She has packed her book full of research.
The Wisdom of Your Body by Dr. Hillary McBride. This is book is written by a BC author. Using her own experience with a serious car accident and with eating disorders, Hillary brings in the science and urges us to be present in our physical bodies.
At Pacific Waters Counselling in Surrey, BC, all of our therapists are well-trained in trauma therapy. All therapists have a wealth of experience with trauma work and each one is additionally trained in a therapy tool that is appropriate for trauma therapy. The therapists stay up to date on new developments in trauma research and work together as a team to ensure that you have the best support possible. They are enthusiastic about helping people live their best lives—free from their pasts.
