TRANSCRIPT
I’m of the opinion that there are certain prerequisites that often help people make optimal progress and healing from childhood trauma. The first most important prerequisite that I see is before people open up their trauma in a deeper, bigger, more intense way, it’s important that they have achieved safety and stability in their lives. An environment that can hold emotionally, maybe even physically, the intensity of what they are about to go through.
I think of an analogy of cars. It’s like going out and getting ready to drive a really nice car that has no shock absorbers in it. The car’s gonna bottom out, and there’s going to be sparks everywhere, and it might just crash. I’ve seen people do that. I’ve seen people open up their traumas way too fast. They open it up before they have a really good environment of safety, stability, self-love in their life.
I see that, unfortunately, sometimes when people do that in therapy. They go to therapy, and they just rip stuff open. Sometimes the therapists are very much on board with that. “Let’s just jump into that trauma and open it up.” And people get flooded. They get overwhelmed, and they don’t have a home to go back to, a life that they’ve built up, a relationship with themself built up with enough self-love to be able to handle the intensity of what comes up: the rage, the pain, the feelings of intense overwhelming sadness, grief, frustration, betrayal, abandonment, fury.
Sometimes people cannot function for short or long periods of time after they begin to open up their traumas, remember what happened, reconnect with the feelings. And sometimes therapists have no clue about this. They don’t know anything about what goes on in a person’s life on the outside. All they see is this person’s coming in and facing reality, facing their feelings, opening it up.
Therapists, I think, sometimes can get bored sitting and listening to people just talk about their lives without being connected to emotion. Sometimes the therapist can be like an emotional junkie. “Come on, let’s get to the feelings, let’s get to the feelings.” And they haven’t actually thought too much ahead about what’s gonna happen when these feelings open up.
I’ve also seen this, unfortunately, with some of the psychedelic drugs that people try and theia genic plant medicines that people try. Not infrequently, I’ve heard stories. I’ve even seen it with people. They try ayahuasca, they try other of these plant medicines, sometimes chemical medicines that are created in the lab, things like that. And it opens them up, and it brings them into their traumas. And it can feel so great to finally connect with the truth of what really happened in their life and to know their feelings and to know the real horror. Yet there’s no aftercare, there’s no pre-care. They haven’t actually set the stage for their life, for their emotions, for their own sense of self to be able to handle that intensity. It can be overwhelming.
I’ve seen people end up in the hospital because of it, psychiatric hospitals. I’ve seen people not be able to return to work afterward because they have too many overwhelming thoughts and feelings and memories in their mind. I’ve seen people lose their romantic relationships over it. And I’ve seen people have to go back and live with their parents again, no longer be able to earn money and just have to be taken care of like children in their family home because they did not do enough of the preliminary work.
And what is that preliminary work? To me, it’s creating an island of safety, really developing our self-love with ourselves, really developing good, good, good routines, healthy exercise, having nice friends, having people with whom we can talk about these things. People who really love us, who care about us, who don’t have a vested interest in us doing something or not doing something. People who are good listeners around us, having enough money in case we just can’t work for a while, having a nice safe place to live, having a nice bed to sleep in every night.
And I think this is so important: having that routine of being able to go to sleep every night, or pretty much every night, and wake up at a reasonable time in the morning. I think sometimes healing trauma, for what I’ve seen in myself and with others, can really, really screw up our sleep. I think in that way also, if we can be confident that we can go to sleep without medications, if we can be without medications in our life—if, and I’m talking psychiatric medications, medications for sleep, medications for waking up—if we can function internally with a sense of stability, of equanimity, without needing all sorts of external things to make us feel better, or to make us feel calmer, to make us sleep, to make us relaxed, to make us pep up.
I think a lot of people use a lot of these external substances, different drugs even, to regulate their feelings. It’s a sign that they haven’t put in enough preparatory work to be able to do that internally in their relationship with themselves. And then what happens is if they haven’t done that work beforehand, again, it can be overwhelming when life gets more intense, when the car starts going faster and faster.
So that’s part one. That’s the first prerequisite: making that island of safety in our lives before we open up the traumas that we’ve experienced, before we open up the intensity of all those feelings.
Now there’s part two. From what I’ve seen, we actually need to do a huge amount of really looking at what happened to us, all the bad things that happened to us, the traumas that happened to us. And we have to make a lot of progress at grieving those traumas, grieving our losses, grieving the horrible things that have happened to us before we take the step at looking at the bad things that we have done in the world, the traumas that we may have perpetrated on others, our personality flaws that are a result of what happened to us.
What I have seen sometimes, not infrequently actually, is that people feel so terrible about some of the bad things that they have done in their lives—bad things often to other people—that that’s where they want to start the process. They want to delve into, “Why did I do this?” And they open it up, and they start getting flooded with the memories of some of the bad things that they have done. And the problem is if they really open up looking at the horrible things that they have done before they have looked at what happened to them, the result is that they are often left with little option other than to see themselves as being evil. They can look at themselves as being inherently flawed, inherently broken, inherently bad, that they were born with a screw loose, that they were born as a sociopath, that kind of thing, before they’ve ever actually had a chance to see that their traumas set them up to do the bad things that they did to others in the world.
So from what I’ve seen, the way to really, in a very loving way, be able to put in context the bad things that we have done in the world, the bad things that we have done in our own history, the way to do that, the way to set it up to do it so it’s most healthy, most productive, and really actually has the best outcome in terms of healing, is to really put in a huge amount of work first in understanding what happened to us, making sense of our own history of trauma and healing from it.
I also think the world often doesn’t see it that way. I think just like when they said when therapists want to just open people up, “Let’s just get to those feelings, let’s open it up right now,” and the person gets flooded and maybe even might kill themself as the result of being so flooded by their feelings that have come up because they haven’t set that island of safety in their life, they haven’t set up enough healthy patterns in their life, healthy patterns of self-love. It’s the same thing sometimes therapists say, “Oh, here’s someone who wants to talk about all the bad things that they have done. Let’s do it! Let’s jump in!” And yet if they haven’t done the prerequisites, the consequences can be really horrible, and also the healing process gets bypassed. The healing process ends up in the ditch.
So that’s what I would say: really look at the prerequisites. It’s the safest way to really do a…
Long-term investment in one’s own healing process.
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