How to find help with trauma and stop sabotaging yourself

Introduction

This is as much an article for parents as it is for individuals. Being a parent is hard enough and totally exhausting, without having unresolved trauma that throws you for a loop! After recent conversations with friends and clients I’m inspired to write down some observations that can make it easier for struggling people to get the help they need faster. I ask myslef how can it be that it is so hard to find help with trauma? Some people I know seem to end up in a worse and more debilitated state each time they go to a so-called specialist to get help. There is nothing worse when you are already feeling depleted, anxious, or totally unable to cope than going to see someone for help and leaving feeling even less able.

 In my view, this is a tragedy and the lack of awareness in some therapeutic fields is unforgivable. But one of the reasons for this is that good intention doesn’t cut it. You actually have to know what you are doing to work with trauma. Trauma resolution is very specific, and unless your practitioner/therapist has had to work with trauma in themselves they probably won’t be aware of the subtleties required to work with you. The problem is that when you work with a traumatised person and don’t know what you’re doing it’s very easy to make things worse, even just by touching them in the wrong way or at the wrong time. And especially by going too far into or too close to the original wound without awareness. So the more aware you can become of yourself, and of your own particular state and needs, the more you will be able to speak up for yourself. And the more possible it will be for you to get real help and grow stronger.

In this article, we will look at some of the key aspects you need to be aware of in order to be able to help yourself feel better, no matter where you find yourself right now in your personal journey.

How do I know if I am traumatised?

I will start by saying that there is nothing broken about a person with trauma, but there are things that when resolved make life a lot easier, and less fraught. Trauma is not even really an individual issue. Each living human is the product of thousands of parental generations on both the mother’s and father’s sides. All of these people had struggles and experiences they couldn’t integrate. At the pinnacle of this confluence of life directions, constraints and forces you or I are born, with all the undigested experiences or baggage of our forebears. And then we blame ourselves for the issues we have! Well, that doesn’t make much sense. In that context, the issue at hand is to find ways to help yourself resolve what doesn’t work in your life and to clear up the ancestral issues as much as you are able so you don’t pass them down to your children unconsciously.

People bandy the world “trauma” about like “flu” in non-specific ways that mean nothing. Trauma is not the same as being a bit upset or having a row with a partner or colleague. Actual trauma has very specific symptoms and consequences for the person involved. If you repeatedly find yourself freezing and unable to move or speak in certain situations you may have unresolved trauma. Other ways it can manifest is in getting emotionally triggered by everyday events in a way that sends you into a spiral or an emotional black hole that it takes you days to get out of. You may find yourself circling in anxious thoughts or deep sadness/anger/blame stories in your mind and unable to connect with the physical reality around you. Feeling unable to connect with your body, or certain body parts is often related to trauma and indicates dissociation. An easy way to check this is to breathe into your lower belly right now, and see if you can feel your lower belly, lower back, hips and sit-bones, knees, legs, and feet. If you are unable to successfully do this then you might want to find some assistance. Ideally, a healthy embodied person is always able to connect with these basic body parts at any moment without too much effort. If you have trauma this will display itself in your life most likely as failed or abusive relationships, difficulty dealing with people in a job, inability to regulate your emotions, periods of feeling very anxious, or spacey, or just entirely missing parts of your week or month and not knowing what happened.

You may also have been told by therapists, physical practitioners, and others that you are untreatable, difficult etc. If they don’t know about trauma they may well find your needs exasperating and incomprehensible but this is not your problem! As long as you don’t go back to see them again. You may have been for a simple relaxation treatment like reiki or massage and come out feeling really bad. These kinds of things happen if you have trauma that you are not aware of. This is no one’s fault – it’s one way to find out that you need some help, but it can be bewildering to understand what’s going on.

Getting out of the Seeking cycle

A friend recently told me that she had been back to her usual bodyworker and realised that she is going around in circles. Every time she goes she feels worse, and then needs time to recover. In the end, the practitioner also realised that she couldn’t help her. That was after two years. Sadly these kinds of experiences are common and they are very disheartening for the person seeking help with their issues who thinks they are going to a specialist. It’s also odd to find yourself as one of the only people that that practitioner can’t help. This is usually an indicator of you having trauma, and that practitioner not having that capacity. There needs to be a match between what a practitioner is able to deal with and hold space for, and what you have experienced. This is obvious when you read it here, but harder to clarify in real life.

Trauma is really complex. I’m trying to give a general overview here for you to orient yourself if you’re a parent or someone who resonates with the topic and is stuck. What happens for many people with trauma is that they know that there is something wrong, and they want to try to fix it. So, when they are having a therapeutic talk or physical treatment they try to get into the center of whatever emotion, memory, or experience they think is causing the problem. This wanting to fix behaviour is known as seeking, and it doesn’t work or even help. If you are lucky a practitioner will show you when you are doing this, and point out that it is not useful, even pull you away from it. Disorienting as this can feel, it is very useful.

Whenever you go into the original ball of emotions and sensations of the traumatic event you will  experience things all over again, or feel even worse, but the issue doesn’t get resolved. This is actually part of the protection mechanism to keep your body-mind safe that the original traumatic experience creates. Traumatised people often re-experience extreme distress or anger over and over again, and think they are working through the trauma when they are in fact just becoming re-traumatised and wasting precious energy. To outwit the trauma defenses you have to do something very counterintuitive, which is to drop wanting it to go away. By recognising and stopping the seeking behaviour you enable yourself to begin to recover – and it can take years to learn not to seek, even with the help of an experienced practitioner. You are not really ready or equipped to heal until you have mastered this step and are totally unattached to whether anything ever changes or not. This can be very hard to accept.

Start building up your resources

The next step is to gather energy inside yourself. Practitioners call this resourcing, or building up your resources. It’s really about learning to tolerate the difficult sensations, thoughts, and emotions during your daily activities, but carrying on anyway, and not paying them your full attention. It’s being ok with not being ok to the point that the stuff you wanted to fix can just carry on in the background. In this way, you grow beyond the need to fix the unpleasant stuff and it decreases in size, urgency, and intensity. A daily structured routine can really help with this. As can having supportive people around who encourage you and see you as whole rather than broken or deficient.

At that point, you may be ready to actually do some somatic experiencing, ancestral clearing or other integrative bodywork to help to integrate some of the emotional energy of the trauma that is held in the body. Family constellations are also helpful, and again you need to have learned to tolerate sensation and emotion without falling into them.

What is trauma?

Trauma is a survival mechanism. Someone gets traumatised after an event or experience that contains so much emotional, physical and mental energy all at once that if the person were to experience it at that moment they would blow a fuse. It would mean serious destruction of their vital systems. So instead the body stores part of that experience in the physical tissues, which can include memory, physical sensation, and emotion. It’s like a way of bracketing off or storing something for later consumption. The idea is that once the actual danger is past, you can access the experience and work your way through it. Only in practice it often feels like we have locked the door and thrown away the key.

How trauma resolution works

People don’t even know there is trauma there until something triggers an emotional response that is way out of proportion to the situation. Usually, the person themselves won’t notice this as it’s normal for them. An example of this is the terror of opening official letters to the point that you let them pile up for years and create serious problems for yourself legally. A letter is just a letter, the fear is out of proportion to the event and the action required.

This is why we usually need another human being who has experience of this themselves to help us. Trauma resolution happens through a process of pendulation. That means being in a safe, good-feeling resourced place, and approaching the difficult sensation and emotion from there, so experience a small amount of it, and then retreating to the safe place again. Through repeated cycles of exposure and safety, our tolerance grows and we can digest or face more and more of the original difficult sensation.

Dropping the mental story

One of the most difficult aspects of trauma is the mental story and pain which is often associated with the actual suffering. Telling the “story” and feeling sorry for yourself can make the actual experience so much worse. It often becomes an identity for the traumatised person that they then feel rather reluctant to let go of, even though they want to be better. This is why working with body sensations directly can help get a person out of their head and into a direct experience. Sensation is a level at which things can actually be directly resolved, whereas thinking only ever generates more thinking. Understanding really is just a waste of time when it comes to trauma. Resolving trauma has to involve the body and emotions as well, which anyone who has integrated trauma can attest to.

Why do you run into problems when you seek help?

Ignorance is the primary reason. And disembodiment or disconnection the second. These can be either yours or the practitioner’s. Any practitioner who has experienced trauma themselves will be so embodied and sensitive once they are relatively integrated that they will notice the signs in you. A “normal” person who has never known the kind of daily hardship and struggle of someone living with trauma may live a fairly surface life. They may not have as much body awareness or emotional sensitivity. There are plenty of therapists who fall into that category which is why you need to be discerning. So they may approach, treat or touch you in ways that simply don’t leave enough space to pick up on the queues you may give of lack of boundary, dissociation, discomfort, fear, and so on.

A very clear example of this is a simple massage. A massage therapist may discover knots or feel something stuck or resistant in you which they then feel challenged or motivated to fix. This is their own unconscious seeking behaviour, a bit like a competitive athlete, which they then indiscriminately act out on your body with seemingly innocent good intent. It’s not appropriate in this context. If they had slightly more awareness they would know that bodily resistance needs to be noticed and respected, not pushed through. It usually indicates held energy, emotion, and deeper issues that need to be worked through at the pace that the body indicates. If they are not in tune with your body, and not communicating with you, they may leave you with an open Pandora’s box of stored emotions that you can’t handle dealing with. Whilst this is probably more often the case if the person receiving the massage is highly sensitive, I have heard stories from people with more standard nervous systems too.

How to find a practitioner that can help with trauma

Start by asking if your practitioner knows about trauma. What is their training? What kind of body issues are they familiar in working with? Have they had to work through trauma themselves? What is their depth of understanding of the link between the body and the emotions? Can they immediately give examples? These questions are a fair request if you are trying to get real help. When they answer, listen to the words, but also see how you feel about what they are saying. Does it feel coherent? Does the way they talk make you feel safe? Or do you feel anxious, pressured or that something is not quite right?

If you are at all in doubt maybe interview at least one more person to a comparative experience.

Somebody who is not trained in trauma, and doesn’t know how to point out and pull you out of seeking behaviour, even during bodywork, will not be able to help you. You would be better off working on building up your resources in your daily life.

Traumatised people often don’t know that they do not have boundaries, that they are very vulnerable, and that they don’t or aren’t able to say no even when they want to. So they are very open to unconscious abuse, even by well-meaning practitioners. Part of the journey is to learn to speak up for yourself and redefine who you are and what you are and are not willing to experience. But if your practitioner is not able to show you how and where you are abandoning yourself because they don’t see and know, you won’t progress as fast as you could and it will be difficult, conflictual, and painful. It doesn’t need to be. They need to be able to give you more space and time and to ask questions so that you can realise and find out for yourself how to reclaim your voice and agency. They need to be in touch enough with themselves to be able to see where you are not in touch.

This is why it would serve you to be selective and discerning in your choice of what kind of help or support you allow into your space. It will avoid nasty shocks and destabilising events. Just like you wouldn’t pick an insensitive pushy child-minder for your children, take care in who you pick for yourself.

Using your intuition to guide you

Asking a therapist or practitioner what their experience is can be a first step that many traumatised people don’t even make, because they are vulnerable and desperate. In addition, I would suggest that if you have sexual trauma, you find someone who has expertise in this field. It is very specific. The depth of space your practitioner can hold determines their ability to work with you. Whatever they have had to recover from will have given them this capacity to hold space for you. Someone who can really hold space usually emanates calm, safety and warmth. You feel clearer in their presence. Animals and small children gravitate to them naturally. And you feel as if you can talk to them without being judged. They can handle it. Take a look into their eyes – can they look deeply into you and meet your gaze without flinching or turning away? Do they seem to see through you? Are they physically relaxed and solid? This is the kind of person you want to find to help you.

These practical pointers aside, no matter how lost you are, you still have your intuition. If you ring or meet a practitioner and it gives you stomach ache, would you still go to an appointment with them? I wouldn’t. If you do go, you may find out though that your intuition was telling you not to go, which is also useful. I usually give people the benefit of the doubt. However, after two bad experiences I try something else. It’s always possible to try to talk about what doesn’t work for you, and sometimes this is a way to create healthy dialogue and build relationship. Other times – which has been my experience – you get tangled up in the practitioner’s undealt with issues, which is exhausting and not fun. You don’t even want to be the recipient of your practitioner’s projections. If that is the case, and you will know, then walk away.

Your intuition will have a specific way of speaking to you personally. Some people have a knowing that something is right. Others feel a bodily sense of lightness, opening, expansion, and joy. The opposite is a clenched stomach or solar plexus, bodily contraction, pain, heaviness, and a sense of foreboding. As a general rule, a maybe is a no. Find a clear yes and you will be ok.

Conclusion

We’ve covered a number of different angles here that will help you make the next step in getting help for dealing with trauma. You will be more aware now if you had seeking behaviour that was sabotaging your progress. If your practitioner isn’t up to it, you know you need to find different support. In case you are having a very hard time, you know that it is because trauma is complex and takes time and patience to heal. At the very least I hope that you feel less alone, and encouraged to keep going. Life is never perfect, no matter what hand you are dealt. But you are alive if you are reading this, and if you sincerely yearn for it, help will come. There are many more resources available now to support and help you than there were forty years ago for example. I wish you blessings and self-compassion on the journey and please feel free to connect and ask any questions you have.