What can I expect from trauma counselling sessions?
Making the decision to heal your trauma is a difficult one, filled with hope for a better future along with fear of the process. This article will help you better understand what to expect from the trauma counselling process and hopefully empower you to make the best decision for your mental health.
Telling Your Story
When attending the first session, some people almost feel compelled to share what has happened to them. The trauma retelling may come with emotions or feelings of numbness, and the narrative may jump around or be relayed in order. However it comes out, my goal is to help you feel heard, validated, and safe. This initial process may give you a sense of relief but can also be draining so good self-care afterwards is critical.
However, many clients feel intimidated by having to share such personal details with a near stranger and often fear re-experiencing their traumatic history. That’s a natural response and you should never feel pressured to share if you are not ready. If this is you, just let me know. Our first session will be guided by what you feel comfortable with sharing, we can mutually get to know each other and discuss goals and strategies on how to get there.
First goals of therapy
Every presentation is different and part of the first few sessions is to mutually agree on how we will work together. For almost all individuals who have experienced trauma, the first goals usually involve “stabilisation”. Even for high functioning individuals, trauma changes how our nervous system interacts with our environment (think racing thoughts, hypervigilance, tense body, difficulty sleeping or endless fatigue, brain fog, spacing out).
We need to understand how your traumatic experiences are affecting you and develop skills and strategies to manage this. Without these skills, any attempt to process your trauma risks re-traumatising you further.
You have already been through enough; you deserve your therapy sessions to be safe.
Processing the Trauma
Everyone progresses through therapy at different rates. While you may be impatient to start processing it and have it over and done with, rushing it just won’t work. And it is rarely a linear process, sometimes we need to move back and forth, depending on what comes up.
Once again, how you process your trauma is very unique and tailored to you. Usually, this involves a range of different activities or tasks. Such as:
- Being able to access and process the emotions relating to the trauma, often trapped in the body.
- Making sense of your experience and what it means for you using deep reflection in and outside of sessions.
- Resolving the subsequent thoughts, emotions, and patterns of behaviour you have developed in order to cope with the trauma.
- The experience of a safe, emotionally available, and supportive environment to share and be empathised with, such as the therapeutic relationship, can also help heal trauma.
Final Stage of Therapy
As we notice the progression you have made, we can incorporate the final stages of therapy, which is consolidating what you have learned, and build on your confidence in engaging in the world in a healthy way. Real life examples of this is when I notice my clients excitedly attending a session, sharing a new skill or ability they have been able to do, for example, “normally I would have had a panic attack in that situation, but somehow I stayed calm and dealt with it!”. Once again, it is very normal to move back and forth between stages and that should never been seen as going backwards; we are making big changes here, it needs time!
As you spend more and more time in this final stage, it is a signal that we can start spacing out our sessions to have larger gaps, and eventually finish out time together. That being said, I will always be available if you experience a setback, or life throws you a new curve ball to deal with.
I hope this has given you a bit more of an understanding of what trauma therapy may look like. If you have more questions, please feel free to reach out and we can discuss them further or you can make a booking for counselling sessions here. I offer in person counselling services from my offices in Edithvale and Somerville as well as Australia wide online.
For information about mental health, relationships, trauma, and many other topics I am passionate about, see below other blogs I have written:
Available for counselling appointments online or face to face at Somerville or Murrumbeena.