How Do You Know That Your Injury Has Been Worked Out?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

As a psychologist, I work a lot with PTSD and client trauma, including abuse trauma and childhood trauma. I am interested in this topic and sometimes I come across the question in discussions: how to understand that the injury has already been worked out?

And today I thought about this, about what criteria can be used to conclude that the trauma has been worked out, completed, that the client has healed.

The easiest way to see this is when the physical symptom goes away, for example, the client's sleep was disturbed and in the process of psychotherapy she began to sleep more and better, it is easier to fall asleep.

But there are other client stories when trauma manifests itself through limitations in life, for example, some area of life turns out to be unnecessary, blocked, forgotten, and, it seems, the person lives on, and longing and emptiness inside remind that something is in the world lacks this person.

In this case, the successful overcoming of the trauma through therapy manifests itself as the disappearance of the limitation.

For example, the client has ceased to be afraid to leave the house, or there is enough courage and curiosity to start a new relationship, or it has turned out to understand what he wants, to find his own business, to hear the call of his dream and move towards it (find where to learn a new profession, enter a university, move to another country or city, etc.).

When the trauma lets go, flexibility appears, a choice where it was not there before, so where there was previously limitedness, constraint and hopelessness, a person begins to see opportunities, curiosity overcomes fear, and interest becomes more than doubt. Then the client has new desires and, most importantly, the strength to realize them.

In working with trauma, it seems to me important to consider such an aspect of psychotherapy as time or duration.

Often, clients who come to therapy for the first time want to get a result as quickly as possible, and this is normal, at the same time, it is useful to clarify some points.

The fact is that it is impossible to say in advance how long the therapy will take when dealing with trauma, since it depends on the client's previous life experience, and on the previous experience of therapy (if any), and on external events occurring in the client's life during therapy. outside the psychologist's office (meetings, partings, nutrition, addictions, diseases). In my practice, I have come across the fact that some injuries were resolved after one session (with experienced clients), and some managed to "get close" only after three, four or more years of regular therapy.

It depends both on the individual characteristics of the clients, the speed of their changes, and on the characteristics of the contact between the client and the therapist (whether the psychologist will be able to form a therapeutic alliance with the client or not and how quickly this will happen), and on the personality of the therapist himself (his life experience and the amount of personal therapy, supervision).

In conclusion, I would also like to say how important support is for a client who boldly plunges into the therapy of his trauma, and not only the support of a psychologist. The support of the environment is also very important: friends, relatives. Sometimes the client's environment is destructive rather than supportive, and then the client has to create a secure environment from scratch. To do this, you can meet new people, for example, you can do this in the safe space of the therapy group, where you can also try to communicate and manifest in new ways.