If you ever thought of having suffered a relational trauma, particularly in your childhood, entertaining the thought of having been a victim of abuse, or ignorant behaviour, would have come along with it. While feeling like a victim is a natural response to trauma even during the first stages of one's realisation that we have suffered trauma,...
Read MoreIn this blog we cover a therapeutic process focused on grief. The hope of these blog posts is to offer those who need therapeutic help, an opportunity to see how a therapeutic process can unfold, and by this allow some level of resonance with the process of healing. The present case concerns Inge and Erik, a Flemish couple in their 40s living in...
Read MoreTherapies for grief and loss have traditionally focused on reaching an endpoint, now popularly called closure. The word closure is therefore used to mean that a certain group of emotions or memories or thoughts have been resolved, that they have come together, and now form a coherent narrative. The fragmentation of both one's emotions and...
Read MoreThe concept of healing has been discussed for thousands of years, by cultures as varied in lifestyle and customs as varied are the shapes and colors of our flags. In this sense the recent focus on healing that is prevalent in Western societies today is nothing new, but the multidisciplinary inquiries that are being carried out on the subject lead...
Read MoreWe have seen that trauma responses vary in intensity and width, but essentially they all entail a fundamental reorganisation of psychic and physiological systems, the digestive system for instance, the respiratory, the muscular, the reproductive system, even the way our brains our
Read MoreAs absurd as this may sound, one of the most common sources of resistance to getting psychologically better that I encounter in my work, is the client's internal realisation that they have neglected themselves for at least as long as the time they were helplessly subject to abuse and attack. In other words, we resist getting better, because we...
Read MoreWhere you are in your life, no matter how diminished and small you may feel, your incompleteness is your authenticity. Just the very sense of longing in you is the voice of God speaking back to you, so start with your incompleteness, and when you feel your incompleteness, I hope you have some calluses on your hand from giving yourself a little...
Read MoreFor Rebecca Campbell, Emily Dworkin, and Giannina Cabral self-blame in victims of sexual abuse is the product of a systemic interaction between micro and macro levels of reality. The implication of their ecological model is that for curbing and/or preventing the traumatizing effects of sexual assault, the individual-level factors (e.g.,...
Read MoreIf we continue to stick with our definition of trauma as an overwhelming event that poses an existential threat to our identities and bodies, then, life on earth is the story of an ongoing trauma. I always need to keep this in mind when I counsel someone. There is history behind them, and there is environment all around, and for the most part,...
Read MoreI have looked in several posts at some typical trauma behavioural and physiological responses, such as a weak lungs, risk-taking behaviours, reoccurring flash-backs or difficulty sleeping, or survival profiles such as those of the fight, flight, or freeze response, but below I want to extend our attention to something core to trauma: memory. This...
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