I once had a therapist insist that I enjoyed my sexual abuse. That because I had been raped and sexually assaulted hundreds of times over a 10 year period that covered my adolescence, my body must have found sexual pleasure in it during many, if not all, of the experiences.
Truthfully, he was actually just a church minister who was moonlighting as a therapist after he’d done a weekend counseling course. Apparently others always felt he’d had a knack for listening and solving people’s problems, and that, in his mind, was all the endorsement needed to promote himself as a therapist to traumatised people.
This was decades ago, right at the peak of the global hype in the psychological theory that some sexual abuse victims experienced their body feeling physical pleasure as a natural reaction to the stimulation, despite the situation being abusive and outside of their consent. I’d been sent to see this minister-therapist because although I had just turned 21 and should have been living with young, wild abandon, I was in the midst of having a significant C-PTSD episode of depression and suicidal ideation. It wasn't something I understood at the time, but in retrospect I see it clearly.
Before my session with him, I’d spent the previous 3 months intensely speering my life off the rails. I’d cheated on my boyfriend, quit my nursing degree in an impulsive snap decision, and soon after, quit my job working for the church. I was refusing to play the role of the good Christian girl any longer, which was remarkably unsettling for most people in my life. I was down to very few friends, one of whom had cut contact with me when I shared I was suicidal and she told me I was being emotionally manipulative. I’d thought I was just asking for help, but I was quickly learning that being suicidal was not acceptable in my social circles.
My mentor at the time, a 28 year old woman so riddled with her own unresolved childhood trauma that she had never had a relationship because she was terrified of being kissed, insisted that my inability to get my life back together when social comfort demanded it, was due to my stubborn desire to hold onto my ‘Daddy issues’. Apparently that was the answer to everything I’d ever done that wasn’t pure of heart.
Close enough, I figured. My father was one of the major players in my trauma timeline, so it couldn’t hurt to look at it.
That’s how I wound up sitting in a worn out grey armchair, picking at the yellowing fluff poking out of a rip in the fabric, as I talked to this minister-therapist. He’d been unequivocally recommended as the answer to why I was having panic attacks, why I was withdrawing from all life, why I was overwhelmed with flashbacks of my abuse, and why I’d become terrified to even have a bath after I’d found myself in the bathtub one night strongly considering sliding down to hold my face under the water until I quietly drowned.
His ‘office’ was a couple of old armchairs sitting facing each other, tightly squeezed onto a very small landing at the top of a narrow set of stairs. I was abstractly wondering if this room was actually meant to be a storage closet when he cleared his throat, overly casually leaned back and crossed his ankle over his knee, trying to appear relaxed when he was obviously anything but that.
“So Holly, when did you realise that you were finding sexual pleasure from your brother’s visits to your room each night?” He had smiled a little to himself as he scribbled in his notebook, waiting for me to answer. It was clear he felt he’d cornered me into the ‘real issue’ here.
“Never,” I replied tightly, arms folding across my chest.
“You must have,” he continued. “You wouldn’t have continued to allow the uh, well the nocturnal activity to keep occuring if you didn’t enjoy it.”
Psychobabble bullshit. I said nothing.
“Oh, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. All victims of sexual abuse enjoy it.”
“Not. Me.” I forced the words out.
“Well, we won’t get anywhere if you won’t admit the truth.” He said smugly.
“Excellent. I’ll be on my way then.” I replied, standing quickly and moving my shaking legs back down the narrow staircase as fast as they would take me.
I didn’t seek out any other trauma therapy for 7 years after that. It was 7 years of possible recovery that his misconceptions took from me, 7 years of debilitating trauma triggers while I eventually married, then gave birth to and raised my children, and 7 years of working my brain into overwhelm as I tried (and failed) to suppress my trauma into the darkest corners of my unconscious.
I’d like to say that trauma care has come a long way since that session 20 years ago, but I think it’s more like the trauma misconceptions have simply changed shape. We think we are dealing with new trauma ignorance, but it’s all the same. Only its language has changed.
More recently, trauma isn’t a taboo word. Trauma isn’t shameful anymore, thankfully.
It’s somehow become the opposite.
Trauma is the buzzword, regularly being co-opted by industries globally.
And the biggest culprits are the spirituality and coaching industries.
Here’s the thing that pisses me off the most about how trauma gets spoken about in these spaces – it gets casually thrown in alongside terminology like ‘wounds’, ‘emotional baggage’, ‘shadow work’ and basically any historical memory of having a bad day. Coaches are promoting themselves as trauma-informed when they’ve done nothing more than read The Body Keeps Score or Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic. Even worse are those who have done a 6 week course on understanding trauma and then start up their platform as trauma healers promising to remove the trauma of their clients.
This is a dangerous game being played.
A very, very dangerous game where those who suffer are once again, the already traumatised people.
I was once told by a business coach that the way I referred to my significant previous business trauma from a multimillion dollar business failure as ‘Napalm to my life’, was continuing to manifest that story into my life and would guarantee another business failure. Using that language was, in her trauma-informed opinion, the real reason I wasn’t succeeding as fast as I should. Her advice was to refer to it in positive terms and then my current business would succeed. I still call it Napalm, because that is the true representation of the trauma experience. And mysteriously, my business is thriving.
I’ve also been told that all I need to release my trauma is 30 days of microdosing mushrooms, or that if I set an intention before being guided into a hypnosis that my trauma memories would no longer exist and I’d be entirely free of my past for good.
I’ve been told to think positively, to manifest my way out of trauma and to simply do exactly as I’m told and my trauma would heal. I’ve even been told that my history of sexual, physical, emotional and financial trauma is only real because I let it be.
Spiritual bypassing of trauma is very real. And it is very damaging.
But rather than building resentment about those who are clearly uninformed about trauma and their impact on me (and others), I choose to look at this as a bigger challenge.
Somewhere along the way, we have lost the true definition of what trauma is, and along with it our understanding of how to treat it. Or maybe we never really understood the truth of what trauma is and now we are realising just how badly we need to know it.
Either way, I think it’s time for a change.
What Trauma Actually Is (And What Trauma Isn’t)
What does ‘trauma’ actually mean? In short, it is something too much, too fast, too soon.
There is no world-recognised definition of trauma, but this is the measuring stick that the psychology industry agrees on. A trauma is an injury to the nervous system that is created by any event (or series of events) that was too much to process in the moment, happened too fast to be managed or felt too soon for the current capacity of the nervous system to process healthily. This is why childhood trauma is so common. The nervous system of a child is underdeveloped and lacks capacity. This opens a child to experience an array of events as ‘trauma’, and thus sustain an injury to their young nervous system that can go undetected and untreated for decades, if not the remainder of their lives.
But it goes deeper.
Trauma is not an event. There is no universal categorisation of trauma events because trauma is not an external experience, but an internal response to an experience. Trauma is the word we use for the injury that occurred, not for the action that caused the injury.
As trauma is the way your nervous system processes an event, this means trauma can be caused by any event at all, providing it is perceived by your nervous system as too much, too fast or too soon.
Once your nervous system perceives something as a potential trauma injury in the making, the brain steps in to help. Now, the brain is a remarkable organ. Alongside the central nervous system, it operates as the main control center for the whole body. If the nervous system is the computer of the body, the brain is the motherboard. It has incredible plasticity, can regenerate after injury and functions across multiple zones within itself that all work in tandem. You are constantly using a different part of your brain at different points throughout the day, regularly using multiple parts at once, and all without knowing that it is even happening. It is nothing more than a quiet hum in the background of your life. And yet without it, you wouldn’t be alive.
In trauma, the brain adjusts quickly in a bid to understand the experience, pulling on its primal base instinct - survival. At its core, your brain only cares about survival, and it is extraordinary at creating very illogical, sometimes messy, but nevertheless genius adaptations to ensure that you do just that. Although it might seem that some of the conclusions the brain draws are nothing more than self sabotage, they always have an origin that makes sense when you view them from the lens of what the brain needed to survive in the moment it created the change. For example, when my multi-million dollar business began failing and every unethical person with a nose for bleeding money from a desperate person came sniffing around and creating situations I was entirely incapable of handling, my brain concluded that this situation must be occurring because I had reached over $2 million in revenue. If I just avoided making that much money ever again, I would be safe. Seven years later, I am still working on undoing this mental narrative and I have anxiety attacks when my business revenue nears the million dollar mark annually. The story was created for survival, but it ultimately limits me, so it needs to be resolved and a new, healthy story rewritten.
Although trauma feels emotional, it is actually quite mechanical in its neural functioning. In a trauma event, the central nervous system perceives the event as being too much, too fast or too soon. This can be emotions, but also physical or mental. In other words, your nervous system cannot process the event in real time and it then goes into a stress response. That stress response changes how your brain function is happening. Left untreated and unresolved, these changes become somewhat permanent. So all those stories your brain told you in the moment to ensure survival, become belief systems that you travel over and over again. When you are in situations that threaten that belief, the brain triggers back into a stress response and the whole loop deepens.
Trauma is so much more than a feeling, a memory or a wound.
And it requires so much more to resolve it than positive words or a weekend retreat of looking at your beliefs.
You are dealing with a brain injury. One that impacts your emotions, your beliefs, your body and even your personality.
This means the resolution to trauma isn’t in just talking it out, nor is it in just a healthy dose of self-reflection and emotional release. The resolution is in treating the nervous system, the brain, the body and your emotions, all at the same time.
The Necessary Multi-Modality Approach
I have a divisive view on trauma healing. But it’s one I think that my 20+ years of devoted trauma healing gives me the street cred to stand on a digital soapbox and talk about.
I believe that trauma cannot be resolved through psychological therapies alone. You can’t talk or EMDR your way out of trauma.
And I believe that trauma cannot be healed through body-based modalities alone. You can’t plant medicine or breathwork your way out of trauma either.
You need both.
How much of both is entirely up to you, but you do need both.
The delicate balance is as individual as our DNA strands.
Perhaps you resonate more with somatic practices and you feel deep release using tools like breathwork, reiki, plant medicine, acupuncture, etc. This may be your baseline, and you’ll still need to work on your neural functioning to tackle the trauma triggers, your trauma stress responses and the level of cortisol your body holds onto in preparation for the next potential threat. Psychology-based therapies will help with that.
Perhaps you resonate more with CBT, EMDR, talk therapy, Internal Family Systems, hypnosis, etc. This may be your baseline, and you’ll still need to work on where your body systems have stored dysfunction and unresolved emotion from the original trauma. Body-based modalities will help with that.
I personally lean into about a 70-30 approach. I use 70% of body-based modalities (because I have a proclivity for the woo-woo, obviously), and 30% of psychology-based therapies. I see both a trauma psychotherapist and a trauma somatic practitioner.
After two decades traversing this space as a C-PTSD sufferer, there is not a single therapy or modality that I haven’t tried. I can say with at least some level of authority that regardless of your viewpoint on either psychology or somatics, if you have trauma you will need to utilise both fields.
You won’t think your way out of your trauma, and you won’t feel your way out of it either.
If you can think and feel your way through it to resolution, it’s probably not trauma that you’re dealing with, but more likely an unresolved thought or feeling from a past memory.
Truthfully, I believe you’ll need to think, feel, talk, move, breath, cry, dance, rewire, sleep and restructure your way to trauma recovery.
It’s a worthy journey, and depending on the extent of your trauma, it might be a journey that you take every day for the rest of your life.
But if you’ve spent years like I did, thinking that you must be missing the mark somehow because you can’t seem to just positively think your way to your trauma being gone, you’re not alone.
Trauma is so much more than a wound. When you got traumatised, your nervous system and your brain got injured, then your body came along for the ride. If you’ve been injured for many years, it may take you just as many, if not more, years to recover from that injury.
You aren’t behind on any trajectory.
If you’re reading this, you’re exactly where you need to be.
Take it one day at a time, and give yourself a boatload of patient compassion as you do.