Trauma — Origins and Impacts
Many people come to therapy due to overwhelming feelings of depression and/or anxiety. They experience destructive patterns of thoughts and behaviours that they struggle to shift, and feel quite helpless about the prospect of change. In most cases, through the in-depth and exploratory process of analytic psychotherapy, people come to discover past trauma as the underlying origin to their current struggles.
Childhood abuse takes many different forms, whether that be physical, sexual, verbal or emotional, and has lasting impacts on the quality of life of the person, even decades after the event. Trauma can also be a product of continual neglect during childhood. Regardless of the form of abuse experienced, the common issue is the interference to the sense of safety and trust required to move through the world in a healthy way.
Feeling unsafe in life and unable to trust others disables the capacity to form stable and secure attachments, leaving a person isolated and disconnected, not only from others but also from themselves. This is often associated with feelings of shame, guilt, and self-loathing, which further isolate.
Trauma-informed psychotherapy and counselling is often slow work, but is more effective and longer-lasting than aiming for a quick fix. To access the buried pain from the past, a person primarily needs to feel they are safe enough to do so. Cultivating trust and safety in the therapy space takes time, and rarely is there a short-cut to this process. The upside of processing trauma is the emotional relief and renewed energy it provides. The life force taken to suppress the trauma can be released and used to live life in a way that is more meaningful and authentic.