THREE WAYS A THERAPIST CAN HELP YOU COPE WITH REAL LIFE TRAUMA
by Fonya Lord Helm, Ph.D., ABPP
There are three ways therapist can help you cope with trauma in your present day life. First, you can talk directly about the details of the problem and any feelings of embarrassment, shame, sadness or anger, and a therapist is bound by confidentiality not to discuss it with anyone else. Problems in family relationships can be especially difficult to discuss with a friend, because people often gossip and tell other people about what has been said. Even if they don’t, after the trauma has been assimilated to some extent, you may wish you had never told them. Gradually you may realize that people are very interested in the private details of another person’s life—what is usually not discussed—and you may realize that interest is not always helpful.
Second, a therapist will listen thoughtfully and discuss possible solutions without overreacting or giving unwanted advice. You and the helpful part of your unconscious will know what is best for you, and the therapist’s job is to help you figure that out without getting stuck, lost in confusion or overwhelmed by disturbing emotions. A therapist will help keep you moving to continue to assimilate the trauma without giving in to feelings of helplessness. The therapist will listen receptively to wishes to withdraw and give up but will help keep you focused on better solutions that may be more uncomfortable in the short run but much more useful for your life in the long run. The therapist also will have ideas that will help you assimilate whatever unkindness and injustice you have experienced and will help you figure out how to use it to learn more and even use it in your life to help other people. You can definitely gain in understanding yourself and human nature better. You can become a wiser human being, without becoming bitter and disillusioned.
Three, and most important, a therapist will help you see your situation from a different perspective, once you get over the shock of what has happened. You will become able to reorganize your thinking in a positive way. As human beings, we have the capacity to reorganize at different developmental stages as children, and we can learn more insightful ways of understanding emotions and life problems as adults. Some of our experiences of greater understanding occur when we are children and we realize earlier experiences have traumatic aspects. This capacity was originally called nachtraglichkeit by Freud, who emphasized the traumatic part of the child’s growing understanding of sexuality. Something similar, but not identical, can happen when adults experience real life trauma: the new trauma can resonate with other, earlier experiences that were not understood as traumatic at the earlier time. An example would be an adult woman’s growing realization, after the trauma of losses in her adult life, that she was unprotected by her mother as a child; this realization caused her to change her attitude toward her deceased mother from a feeling of love to bitterness, making it necessary to work toward a more balanced perspective.
Psychologists and psychoanalysts now have realized that reorganization of thinking can also heal trauma. More recently, psychoanalysts have begun to call the concept après coup, and they broaden it to include interpreting present fear as a form of the memory of fear from the past and also to emphasize the idea that après-coup can work going forward–not just going backward–and also can include healing the trauma. Moreover, the new experiences and relationships of the child or adult also are part of the developing new perspective. Developing a new perspective in the context of a healing relationship is even one way of describing how therapy works. Therapy is a continuous, largely unconscious, slow process of learning new ways of thinking and feeling.
Having a therapist has the potential to give you a relationship with a person who is knowledgeable about more complex ways to understand emotions and psychological motivation that can provide a new, more powerful perspective to integrate both the real life trauma and whatever ideas are connected to that trauma.
To conclude, the three ways a therapist can help with real life trauma are: conversations that will be confidential, conversations that will include discussion of possible solutions for healing the trauma, but not direct advice, and conversations that will work toward a new, more thoughtful perspective can develop over time as part of the relationship with a therapist. It can help to have another person in your corner who has your best interest at heart.
THREE WAYS A THERAPIST CAN HELP YOU COPE WITH REAL LIFE TRAUMA
by Fonya Lord Helm, Ph.D., ABPP
There are three ways therapist can help you cope with trauma in your present day life. First, you can talk directly about the details of the problem and any feelings of embarrassment, shame, sadness or anger, and a therapist is bound by confidentiality not to discuss it with anyone else. Problems in family relationships can be especially difficult to discuss with a friend, because people often gossip and tell other people about what has been said. Even if they don’t, after the trauma has been assimilated to some extent, you may wish you had never told them. Gradually you may realize that people are very interested in the private details of another person’s life—what is usually not discussed—and you may realize that interest is not always helpful.
Second, a therapist will listen thoughtfully and discuss possible solutions without overreacting or giving unwanted advice. You and the helpful part of your unconscious will know what is best for you, and the therapist’s job is to help you figure that out without getting stuck, lost in confusion or overwhelmed by disturbing emotions. A therapist will help keep you moving to continue to assimilate the trauma without giving in to feelings of helplessness. The therapist will listen receptively to wishes to withdraw and give up but will help keep you focused on better solutions that may be more uncomfortable in the short run but much more useful for your life in the long run. The therapist also will have ideas that will help you assimilate whatever unkindness and injustice you have experienced and will help you figure out how to use it to learn more and even use it in your life to help other people. You can definitely gain in understanding yourself and human nature better. You can become a wiser human being, without becoming bitter and disillusioned.
Three, and most important, a therapist will help you see your situation from a different perspective, once you get over the shock of what has happened. You will become able to reorganize your thinking in a positive way. As human beings, we have the capacity to reorganize at different developmental stages as children, and we can learn more insightful ways of understanding emotions and life problems as adults. Some of our experiences of greater understanding occur when we are children and we realize earlier experiences have traumatic aspects. This capacity was originally called nachtraglichkeit by Freud, who emphasized the traumatic part of the child’s growing understanding of sexuality. Something similar, but not identical, can happen when adults experience real life trauma: the new trauma can resonate with other, earlier experiences that were not understood as traumatic at the earlier time. An example would be an adult woman’s growing realization, after the trauma of losses in her adult life, that she was unprotected by her mother as a child; this realization caused her to change her attitude toward her deceased mother from a feeling of love to bitterness, making it necessary to work toward a more balanced perspective.
Psychologists and psychoanalysts now have realized that reorganization of thinking can also heal trauma. More recently, psychoanalysts have begun to call the concept après coup, and they broaden it to include interpreting present fear as a form of the memory of fear from the past and also to emphasize the idea that après-coup can work going forward–not just going backward–and also can include healing the trauma. Moreover, the new experiences and relationships of the child or adult also are part of the developing new perspective. Developing a new perspective in the context of a healing relationship is even one way of describing how therapy works. Therapy is a continuous, largely unconscious, slow process of learning new ways of thinking and feeling.
Having a therapist has the potential to give you a relationship with a person who is knowledgeable about more complex ways to understand emotions and psychological motivation that can provide a new, more powerful perspective to integrate both the real life trauma and whatever ideas are connected to that trauma.
To conclude, the three ways a therapist can help with real life trauma are: conversations that will be confidential, conversations that will include discussion of possible solutions for healing the trauma, but not direct advice, and conversations that will work toward a new, more thoughtful perspective can develop over time as part of the relationship with a therapist. It can help to have another person in your corner who has your best interest at heart.
