Trauma counselling for helping professionals
Hello, Frederikke here, Throughline Counselling offers therapy for trauma in Bendigo and online for people who are trying to understand how difficult life experiences may be influencing their professional and personal lives. Sometimes traumatic experiences are recent and have happened at work, and sometimes they have happened in your personal life. Before you make contact, you can read more about therapy with me and about me and my experience in the human services sector.
How do you work with trauma when I am a helping professional?
Every person that I see for counselling is different. I am offering therapy for the whole of you—not just therapy for specific symptoms of trauma, or therapy for the part of you that is a doctor, nurse, teacher or social worker.
Trauma therapy that encompasses all facets of you is more likely to help you live, work and love more fully. This is because our struggles are usually woven into the fabric of who we are as a person, what we have experienced in our early life, the culture we grew up in or events that have happened to us.
I am worried about divulging that I have experienced trauma and it being seen as a professional failure
A lot of people experience trauma in their lives. Although this may sound obvious, having intellectual knowledge about trauma, or helping others who have experienced it, is not an automatic protection against it.
If you see me for therapy, it is my job to facilitate our time and space together, so we can make room for you to immerse yourself in the process of therapy and feel safe enough to be yourself. This may take some time, and being able to “be yourself” and bring the whole gamut of human feelings, such as fear, rage, despair, joy and envy, may be an important part of therapy for trauma. There are many reasons why helping professionals may benefit from their own therapy, which I have written about in a blog post.
How do we start therapy for trauma?
I don’t just jump straight into working with trauma, but that does not mean that I won’t listen to your experiences if something comes up in our initial conversations when we are getting to know each other. In the beginning, I am more structured in our first four conversations, as I am working to help us both understand what brought you to therapy and how I can help you.
Generally, we work with trauma as it emerges naturally in sessions. You might sometimes speak about explicit traumatic experiences, or trauma may emerge more subtly through dreams, nightmares, feelings, or bodily sensations.
Do you work somatically with trauma?
I do talk therapy, but that does not mean I ignore how you feel in your body, sometimes incorporating somatic techniques. I may also ask you to tell me how and where feelings and sensations live. However, not everyone resonates with being asked about how their body feels, and we may need to pay attention to that.
What if I get overwhelmed in therapy when trauma comes up?
I help you gently turn towards the thoughts, feelings and sensations that come up when we touch on tender spots in your psyche. Turning towards does not mean bluntly barging through the door into an “encapsulated room” where something painful has been banished.
, we pendulate, going near what is overwhelming, and then moving away again. We come back and look at it more closely, and over time, the intensity lessens.
Why can it be difficult to recognise trauma in ourselves?
As a helping professional, such as a nurse, social worker, doctor, or therapist, it can be difficult to grasp that our own trauma is equally as painful and worthy of tender care.
It can be easier to soothe the pain in others compared to going closer to the pain or fear we have in ourselves. Once we have discovered we are good at helping others, it can become harder to pay attention to those feelings in ourselves.
Mourning and resilience after trauma
Trauma is often connected with grief and loss in some way. Resilience to life’s difficulties, including a greater capacity to bear life's difficulties, may not develop until you have mourned your losses. I help people get to a place where trauma and pain can be spoken about, be felt and eventually mourned. It is different what people mourn in relation to trauma and loss:
Some people may mourn lost time not being able to live life fully for years;
Others may mourn the traumatic loss of a loved one or friend to suicide or an accident;
Some people may mourn not having received the understanding, protection, or care they needed when difficult experiences occurred.
“Together, we explore the stories and experiences shaping your life, with curiosity and care.”