You've done the therapy, read the books and can trace most of your patterns back to where they started. Some things still haven't shifted, and that's incredibly frustrating.
A lot of people would call that self-sabotage. I find the label unhelpful because it describes what's happening without explaining why. There's usually a reason part of you is holding back, and working out what that reason is matters far more than the label.
In this episode I talk through one block I see often in trauma therapy: the beliefs you might hold about what getting better would mean. I cover three common conflicts and two questions you can use to check whether any of them apply to you.
Spoiler: one of them involves an imaginary courtroom.
It won't explain every case of feeling stuck, and I say as much in the episode. It might explain yours, or part of it.
-
Welcome to The Trauma Nerd. I'm Helen Billows, a psychologist obsessed with root causes and scary committed to getting it right. A lot of trauma content gives complicated experiences very neat explanations, and I usually have some follow-up questions. I bring over 7,000 hours of clinical trauma work to the questions, concepts and rabbit holes that deserve a closer look, because you know what they told you, but I know what they missed.
Let's get into it.
Hello, and welcome to The Trauma Nerd Podcast. My name is Helen, and I'm a registered psychologist, trauma therapist and EMDR therapist. You don't need my resume. Welcome back. I'm so excited about today's episode, because it's a really good topic and I'm almost positive you haven't heard about this before. I reckon this will be the first time, and I'm really excited to be sharing something new with you. Hopefully it helps and clicks something into place.
Have you ever wondered whether you're somehow getting in the way of your own healing? Getting in your own way?
Some people call this self-sabotage, and I don't like that term. I hate oversimplification, and calling anything self-sabotage is very oversimplifying, because there's always a function. There's always a purpose. But let me get back to my point.
Let's say you're really, really trying to heal. You've been to therapy. You've read the books. You've learned about trauma. You've probably spent a lot of time analysing yourself and everybody else, and you've probably got a pretty good understanding of your childhood. Despite all that effort, you're probably still struggling with things you thought you'd have sorted out by now, which is extremely frustrating. I completely understand. That story basically summarises everybody I work with.
There are many blocks that can occur in trauma therapy. Trauma and trauma recovery are extremely complex. Today I'm honing in on one form of block that I find extremely interesting, because I see it commonly but a lot of people don't know about it. And that is that sometimes getting better can feel psychologically threatening, even if it's something you desperately want.
I realise that sounds a little contradictory. Surely if you want to get better, that's a good thing? But it's not always that simple, because sometimes the things we believe about what recovery would mean for us, and maybe for others, can make it really hard to move forward.
So today I'm going to talk you through three of the most common internal conflicts that can interfere with healing.
But first, a note on nuance, because social media has made us all forget that nuance exists. There are many reasons people get stuck in trauma therapy. This is my bread and butter. We might be treating the wrong problem, using the wrong type of therapy for the problem you're experiencing, or your current circumstances might be too chaotic, among many other things. My topic today is one of those reasons. I'm not suggesting that if you're not getting better, this is the only reason why. It could be the case, but not necessarily. If you resonate with what I talk about in this episode, I hope it gives you a better sense of things, and maybe even some more wiggle room moving forward.
Wanting something and resisting it
The topic of this episode is wanting something but also resisting it. That might sound confusing at first, but it happens to us as human beings all the time. We want something, and we also don't.
Here's a really common example: buying things. Maybe I see a dress in a shop and I really like it. Then I see the price and go, "Oh, I don't know if I like it that much." One side of me is looking at the dress going, "That's gorgeous," and another side of me is looking at the tag going, "My bank account won't like it, though."
Part of me wants it and part of me doesn't, and it creates a bit of an internal tug-of-war. My bank account usually wins, actually, because clothing is really expensive. I'm a frequent Depop and Vinted shopper. This top is from Vinted, actually. Loving it, love the colour. Partly for sustainability, partly because clothes are so expensive. But that's totally off topic, and I digress.
So that's an example of the internal tug-of-war. Applying this to trauma therapy: when you have beliefs about what getting better would mean that are maybe not so attractive, they can conflict with your desire to feel better. Tug-of-war.
Let me give you some concrete examples of how this can happen. There are many of these, and these are just three common ones. I could probably give you 20, but I won't, because that would be a really long episode.
Conflict one: if I get better, it means what happened wasn't that bad
The first conflict is: if I get better, it means what happened wasn't that bad. Or, if I get better, it means what happened wasn't important, and my suffering didn't matter and doesn't matter.
It's almost as though being traumatised, and holding on to my suffering around this experience, is my evidence that it really was that bad. I'm not overreacting. I have every right to feel this way.
That creates a complication. If I'm okay, does that mean what happened wasn't that bad? Of course not, but it's an understandable conflict. I want to feel better, but I also don't want to invalidate myself. I don't want to lose the acknowledgement that something horrible, something important, happened to me. I want to be seen. I want to be heard.
I think the people this happens for have often had childhoods where they were invalidated a lot and had their feelings dismissed a lot. So there's a protectiveness around their suffering, which makes perfect sense to me.
I think this can absolutely be worked through. We need to look at the belief and work with it, and I find it's very workable if the person is open and willing to examine it. People aren't always ready to do that, and that's okay.
The challenge I often use is this. If you knew somebody who had been through something extremely traumatic, like child abuse, and they had recovered and were doing really well, with good mental health and functioning really well, would you ever look at that person and say, "Well, you're fine now, so it can't have been that bad"?
Of course not. Some people might, just as some people leave nasty comments online, but they would be wrong. Your current symptoms, mental health and functioning don't necessarily have any bearing on how good or bad anything in the past was.
Your experience and your history are facts. The only thing that changing your current experience changes is how you live with it right now. In trauma therapy, that's what we're trying to change. I can't change the past, or history, or the facts of what happened. I'm not a time traveller. It happened to you.
Conflict two: if I move on, it means they got away with it
The second conflict is: if I move on, it means they got away with it.
This one is similar, but rather than being about the seriousness of what happened, it's as though my suffering and my trauma hold them accountable. In my experience, this tends to come up when people have experienced a lot of injustice and no accountability.
It's as though my experience, my memory, my suffering and my distress are evidence that, A, this really happened, and B, I really have been mistreated and this really is somebody's fault.
I'll be very honest here. There's a really shitty reality that a lot of the time there's no natural justice in the world, and that's a hard thing for human beings to come to terms with generally, even people without trauma histories. Especially if you've experienced a lot of injustice, there's a lot of grief in the reality that there isn't always justice in life. People can do bloody awful things and experience little to no consequences for their behaviour. I'd argue they do experience consequences, because if you live your life acting like an asshole, natural consequences tend to follow. But there are plenty of people in the world who've done terrible things and never really experienced consequences for some of them.
So the people who've been hurt by them get left, understandably, with this sense that if I'm not hurt, if I'm not suffering, there are no consequences for what happened. If I stop being angry, I'm letting them off the hook. If I get better, they've won. If I move on, it's like I'm saying what they did was okay.
You can see how that would complicate recovery. On the one hand, you want to work through your experiences, feel better and not feel so activated and intensely angry. (Or maybe you do want to feel intensely angry, but I think most people are distressed by the level of anger they sometimes feel in these situations.) On the other hand, the prospect of no longer feeling those feelings can seem not right, like it's morally wrong and unfair. It's almost as though your suffering is a way to continue protesting what happened to you.
Again, I think this is workable, although I personally find this one can be a little trickier to work through. That's not because the person has to be willing to stop being angry, because trauma therapy doesn't necessarily mean you'll feel neutral or indifferent about what happened. You're still going to have feelings about your experiences. I'd describe it as the feelings being more regulated. You can feel grounded and calm, not activated, and still go, "That was fucked up. That was really bad. I'm mad at that person for doing that to me," without being overwhelmed.
I think it can be worked through most of the time, because your recovery doesn't determine whether something was right or wrong, or whether someone is guilty or responsible. Who is responsible in a situation is a fact. Your current symptoms, your anger, your mental health and the way you've been impacted by the event are unrelated to who is responsible.
The challenge I like to use here is to imagine you're in a courtroom. A judge sees you, and you're upset, but you're not ten out of ten rageful. You have more regulated emotions about the situation you're describing and what this person did to you. The judge has all the facts in front of them. They know what happened and who did it, and they have undeniable proof. Are they going to look at the facts, then look at you and go, "Well, this happened, but you don't seem that rageful about it, so I don't think we're going to find them guilty"?
Of course not. They're going to say, "The facts are in front of me. This happened. You're guilty. You're responsible."
So remember, your history is a fact. What happened to you happened to you. They're going to look at that and go, "Guilty."
Conflict three: who am I without this problem?
Number three, the last one, and this is another sticky one: who am I without this problem? If I don't experience this, I don't know who I am.
This is an identity conflict that comes up in trauma healing, and I think it's particularly relevant for people who've been struggling with mental health issues or trauma symptoms for a long time. I find it's also particularly common in people who've struggled with a strong sense of worthlessness for a long time. When something has been part of your life for a very long time, maybe as long as you can remember, it can become very intertwined with the way you understand and view yourself.
Your symptoms and experiences become such a central part of your identity that the idea of not having them anymore feels so unfamiliar that it actually feels threatening.
Using worth as an example, people will say things like, "I don't even know who I'd be if I felt worthy. A version of me that feels worthy, I don't know who that is." Or even less than that: "A version of me who doesn't feel totally worthless, I can't even conceptualise what that would feel or look like. What would my life be? I feel like I'm turning into a different person, and that feels really scary."
That makes sense. It's fear of the unknown, and it's scary.
What I like to explore with people on this one (and this would be during active trauma therapy, where we'd be doing EMDR at the same time, and it can work very well) is to open the door on the possibility using our imagination. "Let's just pretend for a moment that you did feel worthy." It doesn't have to be a high bar. Depending on where the person is at, it might be, "Let's pretend for a moment that you felt okay with yourself. That you felt like an okay person. Let's talk that out. What might that look like? What would be different in your life? When you woke up in the morning, what would happen? How would you feel? What would your thoughts be like? What would change about your behaviour, and in your life?"
Just by talking it into existence, we start exploring the unknown a little, and it gets a bit less frightening. Because feeling good about yourself isn't a scary idea.
I also have a very strong belief, and let me preface this by saying I hold it because of my clinical work and what I've experienced through doing so much trauma work as a clinician (and as a client, but much more as a clinician, which you'd expect given it's my job). My belief is that worthiness is our natural state.
This almost verges on spiritual, because a lot of spiritual and religious traditions talk about this too. But it's also evident in the EMDR curriculum and the clinical trauma education I've done. EMDR particularly, and I think psychology in general, views human beings as fundamentally worthy.
From the work I've done in trauma, I believe worthiness is our natural state. We're not born feeling worthless. We get taught that. Children don't need to be taught that they're worthy. They'll just feel that way if they get love, which we're wired for. When everything goes the way it should, children are wired to be loved and parents are wired to love. That's the natural order. When it doesn't happen like that and things go wrong, children can learn that they're not worthy. But in my opinion, that's not a natural outcome. That's the version that's gone wrong.
So when a different identity feels fundamentally scary and unfamiliar, I'd reframe it as coming home to yourself. The scary, unnatural thing was being taken away from your true self in the beginning. Your true self being a worthy human being, somebody worthy of love, somebody fundamentally worthy. That's how I view it, and I think that's how psychology and the trauma world view it too.
How to tell if this applies to you
If you've got to this point in the episode and you're thinking, "Okay, Helen, I think this applies to me, but I'm not sure how," I want to give you some tools to work out whether it does. If you're wondering whether you have beliefs that are getting in the way of your healing, here are some questions you can ask yourself.
When you're stuck, sometimes more than one thing is happening at the same time. So even if it is this, I don't want you to walk away thinking, "Oh my God, I've found the missing piece. I've found the answer." It might be, and I'd be so happy and excited for you if that were the case, but it might be this and something else. I don't want to claim I'm solving the stuck problem today. It might be one piece of the puzzle, or maybe the whole puzzle. I don't know, and I don't want to mislead you.
When I ask these questions, I want you to focus on a very specific problem you have, or a very specific memory that bothers you. The more specific you are, the more the questions will help. The broader you are, the less helpful they'll be and the harder they'll be to answer. So pick a specific problem, like "I feel worthless" or "I can't trust other people," or a specific memory. For example, the time I ate Vegemite toast in the kitchen. Not "I like eating Vegemite toast in the kitchen." That's not a memory. Specifics.
Question one: is there anything about getting better, or not having this problem anymore, that would be bad?
Your logical, immediate answer might be no. Check what your body says. Check what feels true. Is anything niggling? Answer the question, then pause and really listen. So many people, when I ask this in therapy and can tell something's going on, will say, "No, of course not. Getting better would be great." And I say, "I know you think that. I know that's the logical answer, but I want you to listen a little more deeply. Let's slow down and see what else is there." And often there is something else there.
Question two: what do you believe not having this problem, or feeling differently about this experience, would mean? Again, slow down and really listen. Is there any negative meaning associated with it? Is anything niggling?
So those are the two questions. That's it.
Wrapping up
I want to finish by coming back to something I said at the beginning. If you've been trying really hard to heal and you haven't made the progress you want, this could be part of the picture. You'll probably experience it as feeling blocked inside. Some people describe it as a brick wall: "I feel like I can't get there. It's not letting me go there. I just feel blocked." People describe it as resistance, or a tug-of-war inside, or just feeling like something is holding them back.
Remember that this will often be quite a frustrating experience, because you're there wanting to do the thing, but you're at odds with yourself. It's a conflict.
Remember too that I quite strongly believe most of the time these blocks are workable, because people work through them most of the time. I consider these blocks to be part of the trauma problem itself, part of the issues that come up around the experiences we're working with. For example, if you've experienced a lot of injustice and you have this sense that "if I let go of my anger, it means they got away with it, they won," that's actually an extension of the injustice and the rage. It's leaking out in a way that's blocking progress.
So it's often extremely workable, but not always. Speaking very generally, and not about any specific person, I've had people say, when I've asked them outright, "Are you ready to not feel as angry about this?" (knowing that trauma therapy won't erase their anger or necessarily make them feel indifferent, it lands you wherever you need to go), "No, I'm not ready to feel any less angry about this." I can do a little work with that, but at the end of the day, if somebody draws a line there and says, "I'm not ready to feel differently about this," that's perfectly fine.
Timing is extremely important in trauma, and you don't have to be ready to let go of it. Maybe you'll be rageful forever. I don't know that that's a great outcome for you, but I also respect your autonomy to make the choices you want to make. In those situations, I basically say, "I'm here when you need me, but until you're ready to feel differently, we can't really do trauma therapy." And that's okay. There's no pressure. You do you.
But overall, these situations are extremely workable, and I don't view them as problematic. They're often just part of the process.
I hope you found this episode helpful. I'm going to be doing more episodes like this, where I give you real insider information from my clinical work in ways I think will help you.
Thank you for listening. If you found this helpful, please leave me a review or subscribe. It really helps me out with those engagement metrics. You can also subscribe to my mailing list if you want to hear from me monthly with more insights and insider info from my clinical work.
I basically try to help people who've been working on their trauma, seem to be stuck and don't know why. That's kind of my jam. So if that's you, sign up, and you'll hopefully get some good tips. Otherwise, I'll see you next time. Bye.