"This is what I made, I don't care if it's a symptom or not." A different take on trauma healing.
I've been reading a lot of trauma material recently. I'm not a therapist, but I take a strong interest for myself and for my work. And, while I really appreciate the work both for myself and as an important part of many people’s healing journey, I noticed I was starting to feel worse the more I read. It wasn’t just resistance. There was an ‘icky’ feeling building up I had to stop and listen to.
If you’ve ever done any kind of therapy, or read Pete Walker, Peter Levine, Gabor Mate, Laurence Heller, or Bessel van de Kolk’s work, for example, this may resonate. It may help to settle a similar discomfort you may have felt but not named. It’s not to put you off. Just to back you up in a way you might not have realised you neeeded. Here’s where I landed.
Shame
My discomfort was with the underlying premise of the work, not so much the work itself. Trauma therapy, however much it may claim to be non-pathologizing and honouring of our trauma as a sensible adaptive strategy to our difficult childhoods, still approaches healing from the perspective of ‘fixing the problem’. At its best it says, ‘how you are now – with your pain, your personality, your life – isn't wrong, but it's a product of often necessary adaptations you had to make when you were a kid. It's not optimal. You can be happier without it. Your personality can be less characterized by those wounds and that's a good thing. Your life would be better if you "healed”.’
And as you heal you will become more like the happy 'normal' people who grew up with supportive, loving, or even just 'good enough' parents – a term that's often favoured by therapists based on Winnicott's work. How a traumatized person understandably hears that is: ‘Your parents weren't ‘good enough’. That’s why you’re in this mess. And you're not either.' I get that recognising our upbringing wasn’t our fault, and that redirecting anger towards our parents may well be an important part of healing. But the comparison to the ‘happy people with happy families’ frame sets up a shaming dynamic, when dismantling underlying shame is the very thing it's looking to address.
As part of my work, I come across a lot of people who have suffered developmental trauma. They haven't necessarily been in a car crash or a war, that kind of shock trauma comes up too, and it needn't necessarily be as dramatic as that. Being laughed at in the school play can be just as impactful on a child's psyche. Rather, they've had to grow up under circumstances where their basic relational and emotional needs weren't met. Day after day. Year after year. That moulds a person in a different kind of way.
We all actually have a version of this to some extent. I know I have. None of us had 'perfect parents' or 'perfect childhoods', whatever that even means. Now here's where things start to get slippery, and where I want to explore some of the traditional assumptions of therapy – especially contemporary trauma therapy – which, as wonderful and helpful as it is, still feels like it's inadvertently aggravating the wound it's trying to heal.
The baseline fallacy
In these models, they tend to represent an idealised 'normal' group of people walking around out there that supposedly make up the bulk of humanity that are well adapted. Joe Bloggs and his 2.4 children who go off to Sunday school and see the grandparents at the weekend without any ‘shadow’ in their lives. This is a world where Joe doesn't have a secret porn addiction, Mary isn't thinking of running off with the guy at work, and the kids aren't unconsciously playing out some kind of family systems dynamics. I don't know who actually lives there or where you buy a ticket to go, but I've certainly never met anyone from that world.
In fact, the ‘healthy human’ at the very core and heart of the trauma healing narrative doesn't exist. Even Joe, with his cookie-dough upbringing, is still subject to other influences that close him down – social and religious conditioning and old, defensive and tribal structures that impoverish and limit his life. Trauma simply adds a specific layer of complexity on top of a general one. The literature treats the general layer as ‘healthy’ and the specific layer as ‘wound’, which is a category error.
The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is a really powerful system for working with trauma that brings a lot of benefit. And yet it's a case in point. The terms they use for what it's like to be a normal well-adapted person with healthy non-trauma-ness are:
"We feel that we belong in the world." (connection)
"We recognize, reach out for, and take in the abundance that life offers." (attunement)
"We feel safe enough to allow a healthy interdependence with others." (trust)
"We speak our mind without guilt or fear." (autonomy)
"Our heart is open." (love-sexuality)
Nice words. But I've been a reader and in the healing space long enough to recognise that these are ideals we can all sometimes access elements of, rather than descriptions of how anyone truly is all day long – save, perhaps, a few spiritual masters who've really done the work. We're all on a continuum with these, and I appreciate that it's good and necessary for the model to have some kind of yardstick, but to place these at the center of the work as something to try to attain is setting people who are already vulnerable to feelings of incompetence and low self-worth with another thing they've failed at and can't achieve. I know the met needs are meant as a regulatory target, not a personality spec. But the way they're taught and framed — as the thing you're moving toward — still lands as a destination. No amount of tactfulness on the part of the therapist to avoid it seeming that way is going to get around that basic premise.
I don't wish to put anyone off trauma work. Quite the opposite, I think it's probably the most helpful thing many of us can do for ourselves and others. It can genuinely shift what's at the root of many of our problems and it can help us find a way of being in the world that gives back our agency, respect and freedom. If I had, or wanted to have, any say in it, I'd prioritise it over yoga as part of most people's healing and spiritual journey, at least in the earlier stages. I'm not arguing against the work. I'm arguing that the finish line the literature draws is a fantasy, and that the fantasy is doing real damage to the people doing the work. Even the ‘lifelong healing journey’ frame it provides subtly discounts the present moment reality of who we are and how we are as something to be improved.
For approaches that emphasise other aspects such as supporting a healthy ego structure, self-compassion, an ability to build intimate connections etc., these goals all still share a vernacular of ‘making progress’, ‘remediation’, and other such language which still implies a shiny destination to aim for rather than acceptance of what is.
And this isn't just a problem inside therapy rooms. There's a whole bunch of people reading these books as self-help, where there's no one to pick up the self-shaming fallout as it's happening.
Adding depth
Other fields in therapy don't draw the same finish line. Depth psychology resonates more with my own orientation in that it's less about fixing than it is about recontextualizing. Where trauma therapy will take you as far as 'a lot of the healing comes from understanding what happened in your childhood and how it's shaped your life in both positive and negative ways' – an inside-out approach – depth psychology starts from the outside and works in, in a similar manner to shamanic work.
The trauma field asks ‘what's wrong and how do we fix it?’ — it needs a treatment goal, a before and after, an outcome measure. Hillman, a highly-regarded depth psychologist, explicitly rejects that question. His position is that ‘the psyche is never cured’ — the goal isn't removal of pathology but ‘the development of cultural and imaginal containers adequate to hold it’. You can't reconcile a framework that requires a finish line with one that says there isn't one.
"Because symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul, get rid of just what is beginning to show, at first tortured and crying for help, comfort, and love, but which is the soul in the neurosis trying to make itself heard… The right reaction to a symptom may as well be a welcoming rather than laments and demands for remedies, for the symptom is the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse."
— James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (1975)
The work isn't to get past it. The work is to stay with it.
From a spiritual perspective and from my own work, I resonate with that. I constantly see how in the lives we lead, the wounds, the troubles, all of it, there's a wisdom in it, even if we don't see what it is and judge it as 'weird' or 'wrong'. Although people don't realize they're doing it, their soul chooses the problems they choose for a very deliberate reason, and I think on some level we all know exactly what we're doing. That's why you can't force an addict into recovery before their soul is ready.
Read the life forwards and it's trauma: event → wound → adaptation. Read it as a whole and the causal arrow flips: the form was there first, the event is what made it legible. The usual story goes: something terrible happened, it broke me, I built coping mechanisms around it, now I'm working through it. The other story goes: I was always going to become this specific, weird, textured person, the thing that happened was the thing that made it visible. What I built isn't a coping mechanism, it's what I was becoming all along. Both stories are true. But only the second one lets you be you.
Embracing uniqueness
I had a client recently who was abused by their mother in childhood, who wore a specific kind of outfit while doing it to distance herself from the horror of what she was doing to her child. This person now plays out wearing that kind of outfit sexually as a way of processing the trauma. They'd found a way to work with it for themselves without therapy, by building their own fetish world. A lot might judge that. And yeah, they were looking for help, and I referred them to a therapist. But I sensed that there was something important that they needed which wasn't fixing. It was permission for it to be okay. Someone who could just meet them as another person and be curious rather than push them away. I'm sure decent therapist understands that as well, but there are structural dynamics inherent in what it means to ‘work with a therapist’ that you can't gloss over.
What they needed wasn't ‘you should get better’. It was ‘your specific, textured, painful, meaningful response isn't a problem to be solved, and the solution isn't to become less specific or less you’. That's not healing, that's assimilation with a wellness aesthetic. And that's actually the sad thing. The people who've built something out of their trauma rather than just passed it are the ones most likely to be told they're ‘not quite there yet’ because they're still too much. Sure, true healing will make us ‘more us’ – the wounds aren’t necessarily our ‘true’ character, but to try and stamp them out is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. When we can integrate what we’ve built with more of our ‘fundamental’ nature we’re paying respect to our lives rather than viewing them as a mistake, and letting the two fuse in new and even more creative ways.
Where in NARM and other trauma frameworks the adaptation is a detour, in a deeper sense it's the curriculum. And the integration doesn't look like ‘I no longer have this survival style’. It looks like ‘I have built a life around this survival style in a way that's more me, not less’. The teaching doesn't get resolved. It gets incorporated. And the incorporation is the outfits, the fetish community, the work – that's their unique form of spiritual practice, as unconventional as it may be. To reduce it to an unresolved survival style that they should be outgrowing strips it of meaning and emphasises the failure, not the success.
I don't want to romanticise trauma. As a survivor myself I know how hard it can be to live from that place. But you can build something significant out of it without needing it. It naturally becomes integrated into who you are, without it being an identity. My client wasn't saying ‘I need the trauma to be who I am’. They're saying ‘this is what I made, I don’t care if it’s a symptom or not.’ They’re not necessarily the prime example of a healed human being, but they taught me something.
Nor do I want to judge a lot of people who are comfortable in Joe Bloggs territory right now. Again, their soul has chosen to experience that for valid reasons that I'm in no position to speculate on, unless they come to me for a reading or a healing. Also, the ‘specific’ path towards individuation is a luxury that not everyone can access, and the ‘become Joe Bloggs’ path exists partly because it's the only one that's legible to a mainstream culture that doesn't have space for the other option.
I'm not someone who reads the latest therapeutic papers, just some books, so I don't know what's going on out there, but I haven't seen much of the two fields cross-pollinating. I think the reconciliation hasn't happened because the two fields are answering different questions, and the answer to each one invalidates the other's premise. The trauma field needs to be able to say ‘here's what the person looks like before and after’. While Hillman's lot says there is no ‘after’. The soul doesn't arrive. It deepens.
If you’re a therapist and have a different point of view I’d love to hear it. I also can imagine that a lot of the constraints therapists operate under are structural, not intentional. The ‘fixing’ language is no doubt partly a clinical convention, partly a requirement of the system therapists operate within. But those conventions can land on the client as verdicts, when really what they came for was validation.
I look forward to seeing a framework that builds on the excellent trauma research but that grounds it in an orientation that celebrates our quirks and edges as the center of its focus, not as an unfortunate byproduct to be smoothed over. In the meantime, if you feel like you could benefit in any way from trauma work, it’s probably a great investment. Just don’t get caught up in thinking you’re ‘less than’ because you’re not Joe.
