Trauma therapy in Byron Bay

What is trauma?

Trauma means injury

When you cut your finger with a kitchen knife, the ER doctor calls the cut a trauma.

When something bad happens to you, it can cause a trauma to your nervous system.

The signs and symptoms of nervous-system trauma

The signs and symptoms of a knife-cut trauma are broken skin, blood clotting, pain, and swelling.

What are the signs and symptoms of nervous-system trauma?

Everyone thinks intrusive memories. But intrusive memories play only a small part, if any, in nervous-system trauma. Much more common signs and symptoms are a sense of unreality or disconnect. Vaguing out. Or lashing out. Numbness. Or radioactive heat.

These signs and symptoms served a useful purpose

These signs and symptoms make sense in the context of what happened to you. They were your nervous system’s way of keeping you alive in an overwhelming situation.

For example, if someone overwhelmed you physically, your nervous system might have prevented you from fighting back by making you go numb. That was smart. Had your nervous system allowed you to fight back in rage and indignation, the attacker might have inflicted even greater harm on you, or killed you.

Your nervous system isn’t broken

Your nervous system is working just fine, it just hasn’t yet received the support it needs to experience that you are now safe.

The power socket example

I once got a mild electric shock when I plugged an extension cord into a power socket. My friend and I worked out the cause. The extension cord had an exposed wire. We fixed the wire, and when I went to plug the cord into the socket, I couldn’t. I felt a physical force repelling me, and when I tried to push through that force, an awful rubbery feeling took hold in my arm.

Now, I knew the socket was safe. My friend even showed me. He put the socket in, and pulled it out. Put it in, and pulled it out. But my nervous system was having none of it.

I was patient with my nervous system. I went away, let my nervous system settle, then came back and tried again. I got a bit closer to the socket before the repelling force appeared. Instead of trying to push through the force, I hung out a bit at the edge of it. That felt only mildly unpleasant, and nothing bad happened. I went away again, came back again, hung out again. And so on, till I was able to plug the cord into the socket without my arm turning to electrified rubber.

Trauma treatment is like that. We hang out for short periods of time at the edge of the discomfort so that our nervous system can experience that nothing bad is happening. And gradually, gradually, the unpleasant sensations weaken, until they are altogether gone.

The name for this process is gradual exposure and desensitisation.

How therapy helps

Doing gradual exposure to strange sensations in your arm after a mild electric shock is pretty easy and straightforward.

The process is much more difficult and complex with nervous-system trauma caused by, say, years of childhood neglect and abuse, or years of domestic violence from a partner, or a sexual assault in your formative years that everyone blamed you for, and so on.

Therapy helps by giving you a skilled, attuned therapist to guide and support you through the process.

Will I have to rehash the details of what happened?

No.

The poisoned arrow metaphor

The Buddha told the story of a man who’d been shot by a poisoned arrow. A doctor was at hand, but instead of removing the arrow and teaching the man how to care for the wound, she stood back and acted like a detective. “Who shot the arrow?” she wanted to know. “Where were they standing when they shot it?”

You’ve been shot by a poisoned arrow. The wound hurts. The protruding arrow gets between you and others. The last thing you need a detective-therapist asking a bunch of questions about the shooting. You need a doctor-therapist who can remove the arrow and teach you how to care for the wound. You need to tend to the pain sensations that you’re feeling now, in this moment.

Poison wounds can cause derangement. They’re painful, and when the pain flares up, we can hallucinate that people are shooting arrows at us right now.

Because of this, we do need to remind ourselves that we were shot back when. We don’t need to rehash all the details of shooting, we simply remind ourselves that we were shot. We do this so that we can attribute our pain to its proper cause in the past. Instead of defending ourselves against a hallucination, we can now tend to the wound.

As the wound heals, we discover that we can talk about the details of the shooting. But that’s a result of healing, it’s not the treatment.

What therapy looks like

My style

We chat. If you need help to talk, I help. When you’re talking, I listen. Along the way, I might make an observation. Or ask a question. I invite you to try things out in the session. If you feel up to it, you try them out.

Trauma therapy involves hanging out with uncomfortable sensations, including fear. My job is to make sure that you never feel too uncomfortable and that any fear feelings remain at a tolerable level. My job is to make sure that alongside the discomfort and fear, there is a larger sense of feeling safe and in control.

Your body sets the pace. You and I observe, listen, and support.

My general orientation is Gestalt psychotherapy, and I teach the ACT model.

How long are sessions?

50 minutes.

Where?

In person at my Byron Bay practice or by video link.

How many sessions will I need? How often will I need to go?

The short answer
Here’s a rule of thumb. Plan for eight sessions. Once a week for four weeks, then fortnightly for two months. After that, review if you need or would like to do more.

The long answer
There are a lot of unethical claims out there in the marketplace about how this and that therapy can cure trauma quickly.

The reality is that some of us recover more quickly than others, for a range of reasons. A series of traumatic events causes more injury than a single event. When we’re well-supported prior to a traumatic event and immediately afterwards, it causes less injury. Depending on these factors, we might not need any therapy after a traumatic event. Or we might just need a handful of sessions. Or we might need years of therapy.

A helpful metaphor is the fitness trainer metaphor, which I discuss here.