Hi Brown Owl,

If therapy feels traumatic to you, it indicates to me that your t may be trying to process too much with you too quickly. If you are a fairly sensitive person who gets triggered easily, and/or if your nervous system is pretty reactive to stress or overstimulation, it might not take very much for you to feel overwhelmed in therapy, even just talking about traumatic events.

I'm one of those people, and my t and I had to learn the hard way that we needed to SLOW DOWN when it came to talking about and processing traumatic events. I don't know how many times we would work on a traumatic issue, I would think that I was handling it OK at the time, but then after therapy (usually anywhere from a couple of hours to the next day), I would be hit with strong anxiety that made it difficult to even carry out my workday. Sometimes the anxiety would last 2-3 days before subsiding. This happened over and over until we realized that I wasn't getting anywhere when it came to processing trauma. All it was feeling like for me was being retraumatized over and over again.

Now that we have started taking things slower, and stopping the painful discussions earlier, I am handling it a lot better. I am able to contain any extra distress at the end of the session easier. Sometimes it feels silly that we have to work on things in such small pieces, but that is the only way I am capable of working through the traumas. So even though we are taking it so slowly, I am making more progress now than when we tried to do too much all the time. All that did was keep setting me back! In fact, when we were talking about the trauma stuff too much, and then I would end up feeling overwhelmed the following week, it made me want to quit therapy altogether because it always made me feel less stable.

Could this be why your therapy feels too traumatic? Or is it something else?

Peaches