Behind the Scenes: 4 Ways I Help Clients Heal Their Childhood Trauma
This one goes out to all my fellow anxious, analytical trauma survivors out there who (like me) want to understand what we’re doing and why! Mystical therapy? We don’t know her here! As a therapist (and human), I’m all about demystifying the process of therapy so that my clients can feel safe knowing what to expect.
While my approach to therapy tends to be ecelctic and tailored to your specific needs, my work with clients generally tends to incorporate 4 major components:
Parts work (or inner child work) to help you reconnect to your authentic self
Nervous system based work (aka polyvagal theory) to help you learn to re-regulate your nervous system and find safety in your body
Somatic, body based work, helping you to get reconnected to your body and it’s needs
Relational work, to help you strengthen your ability to connect with others in an authentic way
In this blog, I’m going to dive into a brief overview of each of these modalities and how I use them to help clients heal from their childhood trauma.
Parts Work
In parts work, we are accomplishing a few major things:
Reconnecting to and building a stronger relationship with ourselves
Learning to demonstrate care, compassion, and love towards ourselves
Learning how to meet our needs (and how to hear what those needs are)
Reparenting ourselves to give ourselves what we needed but didn’t get growing up
This modality works beautifully with the others mentioned above because, in my opinion, it provides a vehicle and concrete tools for our healing. Of the work we do in trauma therapy, this is a pretty significant part - though it’s one we often don’t dive into lightly. We go at your own pace and start working on parts work when it makes sense for you.
Not sure what parts work is? Click here to read my blog post all about parts work.
Nervous System Based Work
Trauma isn’t just what happens to us: it’s how it affects your brain, body, and nervous system too. Trauma has real physiological effects on our body, many of which we aren’t aware of until we start this work. Do you tend to have an intense startle response? Do you sometimes cry or get really upset without understanding why you’re so upset about that thing? Do you ever feel like you just can’t relax enough to fall asleep at night, or toss and turn all night long? All of these (and more) are ways in which physiological processes in our body can be impacted by the things we’ve been through. I use polyvagal theory with clients to help them understand the role their nervous system plays in these responses and teach them tools they can use to find safety in their body again. Some of these tools might look like intentionally using breathwork, physical movement, curiosity, and sensory based activities to decrease the amount of physical activation in their body following a trigger. A lot of the tools we use in polyvagal overlap with somatic, body based work too!
Somatic, Body Based Work
Somatic, body based work is work that’s focused on the body. In practice, this looks like noticing feelings and sensations in your body, and strengthening your sense of interoception (aka your internal sensory input - tension, hunger, thirst, sleepiness, heaviness/lightness, tingles, dizziness, etc.). Strengthening our interoception helps us to both reconnect with ourselves and also reconnect with our needs. When we have a need, our body and brain will let us know - we just have to know how to listen, and what to listen for! However, this type of work requires there to be safety for us to physically reconnect with our bodies - and for trauma survivors, that’s not always something that may have been safe. Just like all elements of this work, we ease into it and take it slow.
Relational Work
In my opinion, this one is the dark horse of trauma therapy - it’s happening in the background, so subtly that you mostly don’t notice it until one day it ends up being the focus of a therapy session. Relational work is work that’s focused on the relationship between the therapist and the client. When we’re in therapy, oftentimes dynamics that show up there mimic dynamics that show up in other areas of our lives. We also can end up getting triggered by our therapist back to our family of origin - which surprisingly, isn’t a bad thing, as long as it’s addressed in therapy. Relational work can allow us to create safety around relationship dynamics - including conflict, rupture & repair, feedback, and showing up more authentically with our whole selves.
While I love all of these aspects of my work with clients, relational work is my absolute favorite because of how powerful it can be in creating safety and shifting what our body experiences in interpersonal interactions.
Ready to dive deeper into the work with a licensed therapist? Click here to learn more about the work I do with clients and see if we could be a fit to work together!