Trauma and retraumatization

Hello.

I like my therapist very much. I have been seeing him for over two years. It took me a long time to be able to trust him because I have trouble trusting anyone, but he overcame that barrier.

He helped me trace my problems to early traumatization by my parents, and he went from one methodology to another to try to deliver his promise that we could work through the traumas and I could heal from them and thereby help move toward better mental health.

However, none of his methods worked and he finally suggested that we “forget” them and try positive thinking techniques.

The problem is that I am now constantly reliving these traumas and feel terribly depressed. I can’t stop thinking about them and I have developed hatred and anger toward everyone, especially my parents.

I have read that one can be retraumatized (if that is the right word). Is that what has happened to me? I have lost confidence in my therapist, but still feel emotionally attached to him. However, I feel worse off in many ways than I was when I started working with him.

Can anyone suggest what I can do to overcome these issues, especially these long-forgotten traumas that now are dominating my thoughts in very negative ways?

It is definitely possible to be re-traumatized in therapy if the therapist is not skilled in dealing with trauma issues. My therapist was rather adamant about what should and should not be done in relation to exploring past trauma so that a client does not suffer re-traumatization.

Is your therapist skilled in handling these flooding memories? If not, perhaps you may need to seek out a therapist with different experience. Telling you to "forget" the memories and "try positive thinking techniques" doesn't sound like much of a plan. It sounds like avoidance.

Agree. He's helped you this far on your journey and that's a great thing but perhaps you now need someone else with different or more niche skills to process the memories.

Talk therapy often doesn't heal the implicit wounds of early traumatization. Especially when trauma occurs in the first few years of life. It's encoded in our neurology, a part of our being.
It definitely sounds like you are still experiencing PTSD type symptoms of reexperiencing.
Have you tried somatic therapy or EMDR? Therapy to heal early trauma is quite different to talk therapy. Talk therapy reactivates past trauma but doesn't really change it. Somatic and EMDR therapies are more able to transform the physiological responses to traumatic rexperiencing, so they may be more helpful to you.
Trauma therapy has come a long way in the last few years of research and not all therapists are trained in the techniques that are now found to be most useful in the treatment of trauma.

There is some research suggesting that this kind of catharsis is downright dangerous and only deepens wounds.

All talk therapy is improvised, as evidenced by your therapist jumping from method to method. So it's russian roulette, even though they talk a good game about evidence-based methods. There is absolutely no way any therapist can predict how you will respond to drilling down on painful experiences over and over, and just because they have done this with other people does not necessarily mean anything whatsoever for a given client, since we are not machines. Again, russian roulette is the game, in my experience.

I was traumatized in various ways as well. What helped me was to get away from therapy, and network with others who were made worse by therapy. I had to escape the incessant drumbeat of "more therapy, more therapy" and get some psychological distance, so I could unravel things, and hear from people who were not in the grip of it.

I agree with BudFox. Trauma tx has to be done right or it can be damaging.

This is how I was taught to differentiate between PTSD and other anxiety disorders: With PTSD, the story is deep in the gut and doesn't want to come out. Tx involves grounding techniques because there is some painful s**t in there. It may take a long, long time before the body is ready to tell the story, and you don't want to tell it until it's safe. The story is a painful secret that wakes you up in a cold sweat.

With other anxiety disorders, the story is in the chest and spills out whether you want it to come out or not. The pain is always there, in your face and in every breath. Tx involves keeping that story from taking over your whole life. The story defines you, unless you learn how to not let it.

So, FWIW, if you are working with a trauma-trained T, there may be a reason why they are trying to hold you back from catharsis.

I remember being very pissed off at my T when she would not let me tell my story until my body was ready; in retrospect, she was right.

Hope that helps.

Firstly. 2yrs. For that type of work is nothing.
I didn't even really begin for the 1st year and by the 2nd year I was just as "in it" as the 1st year.
Sounds like your T really doesn't understand it. Doesn't have that inner knowledge that is vital. Thst would lead to you being retraumatized. But how can someone know this if they've had no better experience of a T that is skilled, does understand the work. Does have that inner knowledge. They can't. But from what you've wrote I'm telling you he cant help you and someone else can.

I had something similar happen to me about a year ago.

I had just really started opening up to my T and had to leave town for a few months. While out of town, I started experiencing intense flashbacks, most of my days were filled with re-experiencing all the trauma I'd ever gone through.

For me, it helped to journal, write everything down I experienced and have my T read it. That relieved the pain in the moment until I could see him more often again.
After seeing him on a normal basis again, it still happens but to a much smaller degree.

I think what's important to realize is that you shouldn't just talk about the past every time you're in session. It's not helpful to just go over your trauma again and again. That will retraumatize you and it doesn't solve anything. My T at one point said that he felt we spend too much time in the past. I got angry at first, but I get what he meant now.

Currently, I sometimes talk about trauma, maybe twice a month or so (I have 8 sessions a month). If we talk about something happening in the present and it has some connection to the trauma, my T will mention that. He helps me see how it affects me in the now, without going into detail about what happened back then. I think having this kind of balance is important.

Does your T not want to talk about the trauma anymore at all, and just gives you techniques to think positively now? And what has he done before that when you discussed the trauma?
I think it's certainly possible to be retraumatized, but there's also the part to therapy where you sometimes get worse before you get better. To decide whether you should talk to your T, find someone new altogether and whether or not the issues are really getting worse on a constant basis, I think it's important to look at how your T is working with you. Does he make connections between different things for you, does he try to encourage you to not only talk about the trauma while still being accepting of the fact that you struggle with it a lot and therefore feel the need to sometimes talk about it?

I wonder what modality your T uses? I agree with Jessica, that it can take a long time, and also with chicken noodle that it's good to talk about other stuff too. I actually think it might be possible to have very helpful therapy without talking about any of the traumatic stuff, and also without using any techniques except for conversation. It sounds to me like your T doesn't believe that simply talking can help, as you said he has tried loads of different techniques.