* With the previous one, paying attention to your needs.
* Boundaries
* Changing self-talk
* Foster the opposite of resiliency. Traumatized people have had to be strong and resilient their whole lives. What they need is softness, to be heard, to be seen and feel understood. To be vulnerable, to rest.
In my life what you suggested below generally led to profound depression.
Being resilient isn’t white knuckling through things. It’s building a threshold of mood and perspective that allows the trauma to be examined without creating a feedback cycle. Meditation and CBT allowed me to create an internal reference system that wasn’t wrapped up in the emotion of trauma and allowed me to modify my perception of the trauma. Doing so allowed me to see pathologies in my various feedback cycles and work on breaking them at the weakest part.
I would ask that you give your own advice without invalidating the experiences of others. Humans are complex and there is no magic incantation you’ll provide. I’m glad these worked for you.
Internal reference system that wasn't wrapped up in the emotion of trauma? When I read that, it sounds like someone who became further desensitized to what happened.
I'm sure you're more functional now, but know that being more functional doesn't equate to actually having healed anything. It can just mean the person learned to cope better.
In fact, the initial stages of healing from childhood trauma are expected to be less functional, less productive, and yes, more depressive, because for the first time in the person's life, they're feeling, in a compassionate way, what they've been pushing down all their lives, because they had no one safe to go to, and often there's a lot to unpack. It definitely is tiring and often just exhausting.
But it's the only way. Because without feeling you can't heal.
Also, childhood trauma doesn't create "pathologies" it creates coping mechanisms which any healthy person would develop in the same circumstances, which need to be understood, and which will subside on their own without the need for behavioral approaches (aka symptom fixing) like CBT.
We are all humans, so we can't keep saying "what works for me may not work for others", at the core we do have many things in common, we all have feelings, we all have similar needs. And we all get traumatized in similar ways. So while there might be some differences, at the end of the day, some things will work for everyone, and those things are the ones that relate to the things we ALL have in common.
The reason it became so ingrained in psychology the mentality of "what works for you may not work for others" is because we've been in the equivalent of the middle ages of psychology for trauma treatment.
This is incredibly condescending. It’s the equivalent of telling a friend: “no, your arm is still broken” when they get their cast off.
I’m genuinely wondering how you can be so confident. You’re telling someone to follow your universal prescription, and insulting their suggestion taken from person experience.
Let alone the fact that you’re arguing against “resiliency” being a positive trait to foster in any human being, regardless of past traumas.
Do you at least acknowledge your confidence? You’re telling somebody off for sharing a reasonable mental health approach.
And what if I said I completely agreed with GP, on account of my person experience and reconciliation? Not everybody breaks in the same way; why do you then think that putting a person back together must follow your prescription?
I could not disagree more that there’s singular universally effective psychological or psychiatric treatments. It’s overly reductionist and ignores some basic facts such as two people experiencing the same trauma can be impacted by it in wildly different ways. Some people are for all intents and purposes unaffected in the long term and some are profoundly disabled. If we don’t respond the same to the cause, why do you assume we all respond the same to a treatment? I’d also say that trauma manifests in many different psychological pathologies that aren’t universally experienced, that’s why classifications in psychology have inventories and criteria that aren’t measurable objectively but are assessed. I’m sure you’re a great programmer though.
You are making an assumption that all of our brains work the same way. From my own (neurodivergent) experience, IFT doesn't always work the way it's "supposed to."
Instead:
* Internal Family Systems
* Books: Body Keeps the Score, CPTSD: From surviving to thriving, Whole Again.
* Get validation of the abuse/neglect you suffered.
* EMDR
* Yoga with a focus on emotions stored in your body
* Emotional mindfulness, emotional vocabulary (alexythimia).
* With the previous one, paying attention to your needs.
* Boundaries
* Changing self-talk
* Foster the opposite of resiliency. Traumatized people have had to be strong and resilient their whole lives. What they need is softness, to be heard, to be seen and feel understood. To be vulnerable, to rest.
* (...)