“Do You Really Think I Have Trauma?” Therapy Clients Often Ask Me This. Here’s My Response.

If I had a nickel for every time a prospective client asked me that question, I’d be a millionaire.

I get it, though. When most of us think of “trauma”, we think of things like the PTSD of war. Or rape, or witnessing or experiencing a threat to our lives, or someone else’s.

Or having suffered a parent like the parents in Precious, or like in Mommie Dearest, who had a “style” of abusive relating to their children.

And they also think of a person with PTSD as being incapacitated to where they can’t function at all, so paralyzed are they by their trauma.

These are obvious examples of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. (They are also treatable. More on that later.)

“I’m not that”, many people think. “I have a job, a family, and I’m doing pretty well despite the stressor going on. No way do I have trauma.”

To them, “trauma” means broken. And they aren’t that.

The term also implies that they had a monster of a parent/teacher/caregiver if what they did left us with upset. And we may love or care for these people who did, and still do, their best, and we don’t want to label them or anything they did as having caused us trauma. People can be caring and still do things that were distressing. Maybe we already felt charged about something — like, our grades or our weight — and a parent, a teacher, a classmate did something that touched on that sensitivity. It’s an upset. If it is still bothering you, we can work on that distress.

And people wanting therapy have been working hard at coping for quite awhile.

Usually, it takes a fair amount of strength to walk into a therapist’s office and be ready to lay all your stuff out. You have to be honest that something in your life isn’t going well, you are unhappy with it, and you want it to get better. You want a combination of support and understanding - a place that feels safe. But always, you want to feel heard.

And slapping a label on you, like PTSD or ADHD, if that’s all that is done, doesn’t make you feel heard.

So  when people ask me if so think they really had “trauma”, they are trying to say, “ I’m still trying to unload this upset and make sense of it. I don’t want to presume that it’s a
’10” on the upset scale. I don’t want to sound like a drama addict, calling it such a big thing when people in the world have it way worse. And calling it “trauma” makes it feel like that.

Or, “I don’t want to pull this crap from 5 years ago up again. What’s the point? I want to move forward. How does this help me do that? I need to get on with life and focus on what I can do.” That’s what I need. Strategies. I NEED TO FIX IT, SO I CAN FEEL BETTER.

For me to work from a person-centered perspective, I do need to start with where you are and what is keeping you stuck. And, what you what to get out of seeing me.

Even if you do identify an incident or experience as having shaken you up, or been traumatic, if that’s not where your attention or willingness is, that’s not where we will go in a session. We go where your attention and interest is. That’s what I mean by being “person-centered” - we go where you need to. Sometimes that may mean you want strategies for a particular situation. You may want to be able to calm yourself if you start feeling your symptoms outside of sessions.

Strategies can help with symptoms, but if they are not enough, it can mean that you need something more. Often that is the case with charged issues. If an incident or experience was an upset to where it is triggering repeated unwanted images, strong negative feelings, nightmares, or constant tension - like a “bad tape” that you just want to get out of your head, them at some point in our work, you will likely benefit from a TIR session and related work. You may find that you will then reprocess what happened. You won’t keep re-experiencing that bad memory the same way. You remember it, but it won’t hit you nearly as strong. You can find resolution and be more centered in your present life.

So rather than ask, “Is it really trauma?” we can ask a more useful question: “will this help me feel better?”

And often, the answer is, yes.

I view at PTSD the way I view most diagnoses: As a compass. The label doesn’t explain. It describes. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that PTSD is a meaningless label. Far from it. It is important to get some kind of handle or focus on a cluster of symptoms so that we might have some guidance on treatment.

My point is, if you are feeling charged or bothered by a distressing memory or incident, it’s worth doing the work to lessen the distress.

So it’s not what we call it. It’s how we change how you are experiencing it that I’m mainly concerned about when you work with me.

I hope that answers your question.