While every therapist has their own style and approach to working with psychological pain caused by trauma, I find there are two common objectives that both clients and therapists share regardless of theoretical orientation.
These objectives are:
(1) Increase a person’s ability to tolerate distress, and
(2) become desensitized to the traumatic event.
Tolerating Distress
Everyone deals with adversity and unexpected crises in life.
But while stress, anxiety, confusion, fear, anger, sadness are all examples of different reactions to a traumatic event, the degree to which a person can tolerate the distress these emotions create varies from person to person.
Some people can tolerate a lot of distress, while others can take little.
And before a person can begin to process and heal from trauma, they need to learn some skills that will allow them to increase their tolerance for managing the distress associated with thinking and talking about painful events.
Being able to bear psychological pain is what tolerating distress is all about. It’s about recognizing that although you dislike the pain, you can still tolerate it.
Becoming Desensitized
While all of us can heal from trauma, there are something humans cannot do: We cannot intentionally erase a memory. So while the more minor details of a traumatic event become blurred over time, the essence of the memory will remain.
However, just because you will remember a painful event doesn’t mean you need to suffer every time you think of it.
Being able to talk about your trauma is the other goal of psychotherapy: to help you become desensitized to a painful memory so that you can talk about it, think about it, and no longer be affected by it.
Becoming desensitized to a traumatic event doesn’t mean that you will stop remembering what happened. Instead, it means that the psychological (or even physiological) pain will no longer affect you every time you recall the painful event in your mind.
Healing From Pain Doesn’t Mean Forgetting.
Being desensitized doesn’t mean you’ll ever forget the memory of what happened to you. But it does mean that the memory will no longer bother you in the same way.
If there is a painful memory that you would like to work through, working with a therapist can help you develop the skills to tolerate the distress associated with that pain, as well as becoming desensitized to the pain.
When healing from trauma, the objective is to reach a point where you are no longer controlled by what’s happened to you but instead control how much it affects you.
That’s what this week’s video is all about.
I hope this knowledge helps in your pursuit of healing and growth.
Richard