I can’t say what happened, it’s too painful.
Traditional talking therapies have worked on the principle that retelling what happened, to someone who feels safe, who can listen well with compassion, understanding and without judgement, can help a person move through their trauma. However, modern schools of therapy, leave this notion questionable - especially when it comes to working with trauma.
Practices such as Brainspotting, Internal Family Systems and Sensory Motor work with our neurobiology (the interconnections of our mind and body) and lean into, for example, studies of brain scan imagery to understand how talking about what happened can actually leave people frozen speechless. Such studies can help clinicians to understand the impact of implicit memory (memory in the body rather that which can be recalled by our brain) and how talking about a traumatic incident, without understanding it’s symptoms in the body, can leave the client retraumatised and unable to take any benefit from the good listening, safe other, sat in front of them.
I believe this can be a huge barrier to some people finding therapeutic support for their experiences, so here are some helpful points for you, or perhaps someone you know.
Words are not the only things to be witnessed - most of us rely heavily on being able to communicate verbally/with language, but often the story to tell is held in the body and is communicated without words. It is communicated to the person in symptoms i.e. anxiety and migraines and it is the story of the body that is so helpful to therapy, when witnessed, and understood
Working with neurobiology means understanding your nervous system - our nervous systems are ultra complex but fundamentally are there to serve us by maximising our survival. There are instincts and systems that can be activated when the need to be safe is real and these systems have a memory like that of the brain. Just as we don’t assess how to open the door each time we want to go through one, our nervous system doesn’t assess that raised voice or smell either - they both just remember. What this means is that our nervous system can be activated for survival, based on it’s previous experiences of danger, even when our brain knows it’s not in the here and now. You can learn this and as our brains can change with neuroplasticity, so can our nervous system!
Learning to feel safe in the moment - when our nervous system has been activated for a long period of time, we can live life in a state of high energy, or flight or fight, as our normal every day experience. This has health implications which I won’t go into here, but it’s important to learn what it feels like to feel safe and regulated. How do you get your body to feel a sense of calm, when do you notice that it goes/you feel activated again, and how do you navigate back to regulation again?
Are you noticing that non of these mean you HAVE to say the explicit details of happened?
Images, sounds and colours - are some of the ways we can make sense of our body’s experience and stories. This is great as sometimes what happened meant that the parts of our brain that are needed for language and perception, kind of go off-line during traumatic events. It can be really difficult then, to have a strong physical sensation of something and not be able to articulate it in the way we generally rely on. Giving it texture, size and colour for example, allow you and your therapist to develop a shared sense of what you’re noticing in your body and a dialogue to explore it.
Your body knows the score - that’s actually a book title about trauma in the body by Bessel van del Kolk and what that means to me is, that whilst the body knows what happened and holds it with you, it also knows what it needs. As a clinician I trust your knowledge of you more than mine - I listen and learn from you and I follow whilst you show me the way and that’s because our body has an intuitive capacity to heal when it’s facilitated not told. Think about neuroplasticity and the brain’s ability to move neural networks to different brain locations when the body experiences severe injury (that is actually true!) and the body’s ability to self heal if infection doesn’t interrupt.
By reading this blog I hope you feel soothed that you don’t need to go back there with your words. Your body is communicating with you in it’s own way and together, with professional support, you can learn to understand and heal is safely - the magic is within you.