Here are six common pitfalls that I've seen clients get into over the years, which makes their healing process either stall out completely or it just makes their process a lot more messy or mucky than it really has to be. You know, healing childhood trauma is really already hard enough. And incidentally, even if just one of these six ideas stick in your mind, then it's a totally a win for me.
Whether you're kind of envisioning something happening down the road or just to keep yourself aware and healing is a subjective idea, uh, it's really different for everyone. But there are some key factors in it that I'll discuss towards later in the video. Um, and I think if you're watching these videos or you're already in a process, whether that process is you're already going to therapy or you're doing some self-healing work, if therapy doesn't work out for you or if it's not really available, or you might actually be getting ready to do something in the future, I think a lot of people watch these videos to start off with in kind of revving themselves up to do some work in some way that works best for you.
Um, so watching videos like this is part of a process, but it can't be the whole thing. Eventually we'd need more. Um, through my own process, I fell into many of these pitfalls, if not all of 'em. These are actually really common for childhood trauma, and the more you know, the more you can be kind of prepared to avoid some of these things.
And I want you to pause here and. And and hear what I have to say. Some of these might really challenge you when you're thinking about your own healing, or you might find yourself a little bit defensive in this video, especially with this first one. So let's just dive into it. Number one is confusing awareness for healing.
You might find yourself a little bit called out on this one, and I remember my mentor, Amanda Curtin, LICS. W my mentor in my first group with her like 20 some odd years ago, 20 plus years ago, she would tell us, awareness doesn't really change you. This is a highly common thing for those starting out and for those who haven't had access to therapy, um, that the kind of therapy that turns you into a puddle of grief on the floor, which is actually a good thing, but confusing awareness.
For actual healing might look like having major epiphanies about your family or your family life, or your parents or your abuse, and something gets unlocked. It's actually pretty cool reading self-help books that feel like they're telling your story and you finally feel like you've got a name or a grasp on why your family is like that and why you're like that or why you have messy reactions or issues.
In other words, researching and having a near PhD level in personality disorders for having spent years online in the thick of that world. In other words, like the awareness thing is social media posts that become really near and dear to you because you finally got the answer for why you might do things, you know?
But. Now what though, after you see those posts, sharing ideas is actually just a tiny, tiny portion of what therapy actually is. So awareness is actually incredible. It can clear up confusion. It can make you feel like, um, you're part of a movement of survivors. It can bring immense relief to you. But the pitfall here is walking away with all that knowledge, thinking it's all you need.
When we really need a lot more, we need someone to witness our grief. We need someone to witness our rage or hear our story out, or help us not behave from a place of trauma responses. Um. T actually the healing of being able to tell your story in front of a safe person who can take it all in childhood trauma is really relational abuse that requires relational healing.
I know that that's not gonna feel good for many of you. A really tricky part to this pitfall is that childhood trauma survivors, we can be highly independent. Uh, and we grew up in a vacuum where it was all on us. So it can feel good to just try to do your own research and get all your answers that way.
Um. You're probably a million times better off, but the psychoeducation or ideas probably won't make you trigger free. Or maybe even a better partner, the partner that you wanna be, or to stop your inner child from running your life from a place of trauma. The pitfall here is that I see people believing that because, say for example, they fully understand their toxic family or how trauma is stored in the body, then they're done.
What about how we still might project onto others, our toxic parents or our trauma story or our. Doing that, projecting onto friends, partners, and bosses, or even onto ourselves. And even the way we might either make ourselves super reactive, we don't make ourselves super reactive or we get super reactive, or we might make ourselves really small and people pleas all the, all the memes in the world about people pleasing might not get you to be able to heal and stop those behaviors.
So that's what this pitfall is all about. And when we think we're all. Set because we're aware of our issues. It's kind of a big setup when the mess comes back into our life and our trauma is again, mucking up our present lives. I'm not saying that awareness is pointless. It's actually an incredible thing, but it's just the beginning of healing.
It's not the whole thing, but I also need to address that. Because there is such a lack of resources for many people and lack of good therapy and lack of deeply changing experiences in therapy that it's kind of an, a common assumption to think that we've got it all figured out because we've read the things.
Um, for simply not having those, it's like we don't know what we don't know. Um, so I want to be kind of fair about that, but this will make more sense when you think about it this way. How many self-help books have we read? That were amazing, but didn't create lasting significant change in you. Um, many have gotten frustrated even with my social media post and the post of others and other therapist creators.
Um, when we offer psychoeducation and you kind of leave comments that are like, yeah, but now what, what do I do? How do I fix the thing? What's, what's going on? You're just telling me about stuff. Social media isn't therapy. It's education. You know, therapy is therapy and while I a thousand percent understand that it's not fully available or affordable or a lack of trained people that unfortunately doesn't negate the need of actual therapy, perhaps we all feel the frustration of like.
Knowing we need to have a surgery and all that's being done is talking about how the wound got there or the effects of the wound, or that the wound, regardless of how much we talk about it in diagnosis or whatever, we still need surgery. So I want to kind of leave you with that on that one. Moving on to number two is this concept that the abuse won't affect me anymore.
As a pitfall in therapy. Not every client that I've had had this going on, but many of them did. One client I remember. Um, years. Lovely client years into therapy. They joked with me how, in a kind of confession that they said the reason why they came into therapy is to see if they can work on themselves in order to better handle their mom, better handle their mother.
Their mother was an abusive, toxic nightmare. And sometimes our inner child can have strong fantasies about things not affecting them anymore. Yeah, that's not really a new fantasy. I think that's old from childhood. So when we start healing or working on ourselves, we might think we can go back into the fold with abusive people and not be affected after we do a bunch of work.
There's a paradox with this one. Um. The more healing that we do, it's actually the less we should be able to tolerate abuse because we're now healthier. It hits us on a deeper level. That weakened with your family if they're toxic or abusive, might be intolerable to you. After you start to unpack and work on some childhood trauma, it's a good thing.
You're becoming more real and more in your body, so it hits harder. Think you can be less affected, less triggered after a lot of time in therapy, but family toxicity usually doesn't change unless they're working on themselves, which is highly unlikely. Right. Also, I think after a lot of significant healing work is done, you're way less interested into like making yourself the sacrificial lamb and spending a week with your family just 'cause where I think after a lot of healing we're like, you know what?
I think I'll pop in for an hour for lunch. If you're in contact with your family or if that's what, where your level of it is with your family, and that is sort of like a healing mindset. You're not. Willing to kind of just make yourself the sacrificial lamb anymore. And in short, the pitfall here is healing won't make you bulletproof.
Inner children think they have the power to not have things affect them. It's an old, magical thinking. Um, that's why we'll often take on, say, extremely hard jobs or take on extremely difficult, messy partners and, and then we're surprised when it actually affects us. Oh, you'll know what I mean. If, if you have that kind of going on.
Moving on to number three. It's something that I'm calling discouragement confirmation. This one is simply about discouragement as a barrier to your healing. Please don't take this as criticism or a reflection of who you are. Again, I'm painfully aware of how terrible access to mental health services are, and I I really want to be able to change that, or the lack of trained clinicians.
I'm actually working on that, or even finding a therapist where the fit is right. I'm very much aware of that. So it's easy to get discouraged and it's actually a normal part of the process when it comes to finding the right resources for yourself. You can have a good therapist and good treatment, and you can still really get discouraged by the process.
But this pitfall is really about how your inner child interprets that messy, frustrating process. And the pitfall here is when you're trying to get an appointment, when you're trying to get into a group, signing up for something that doesn't pan out can cause a trauma reaction of wanting to give up.
It's very understandable, however. The reaction is a lot like the inner child saying, see, why do I even start with this crap? Nothing ever pans out for me. It's always like this for me. This is something we can actually reparent ourselves around as. It's kind of something that keeps us stuck. Um, in the face of huge adversary, how many times have you started to try to do trauma, have it not work out and then you don't try again for years?
Um, that's, I'm not just saying, in no way am I saying it's all you on this. I'm just saying there is a reaction to it that. Prevents us from being more persistent. I really believe that there's the right therapist or the right helper out there, and there shouldn't be this many barriers. But look for the people who are able to say, I finally found someone and we're actually doing some work.
I'm actually getting somewhere. Look for those statements from people. Try not your, let your inner child go to that place of, it's never gonna happen for me. You can be frustrated. You can be annoyed. It's annoying. You can be mad, but try not to look at it like it's confirming something about you. That's the rub here.
That's when you know your inner child is back in an old place where it wasn't worth. Keep trying, which was definitely true. Growing up to get your needs met. But the present is different. When someone asks me about how to find a therapist, my first piece of advice is try to be as tenacious and persistent because for every 10 to 15 emails or calls you make, maybe one therapist or helper would get back to you.
'cause most of them are full. It's funny, but inner children actually hate that advice, I think, because it takes them back to their family system where nothing worked for them or it was all on them. Um, it's sort of like a, a feeling of, you know, and it's, you're not wrong for feeling this. Why can't this be easy?
You know? Um, again, you're not wrong, but there's a trauma response in this. It's only our really, our inner adult, not the inner child who can say, this sucks. But F it, I'm gonna keep plugging away and finding at what I need to get my needs met. Number four is, I've seen the light. You should too. This pitfall is about being so moved, motivated, jazzed up about your healing gains, and you're just wanting more connection and more authenticity that you try to get everyone on board the healing train.
Um, and I know that none of that is super bad or super negative. But we might try to recruit others into healing long before they're ready or long before they want to. I don't know about you, but I dislike being recruited for anything. Like even if it's a good thing, I think I have a hypersensitivity to being sold something, but I can get.
I can get past it and if it's the right sort of situation, I can get my adult in place about it. So if you've heard the term newly sober, this applies, it refers to someone, um, I know this in context of being an AA or 12 star work, being so relieved and inspired about not drinking, that they're full on a thousand percent dedicated.
It becomes their whole life and they want to tell you about it. Boy, do they want to tell you about it? They might be a little intoxicated on a little bit of healing on the program. They might get a little bit preachy about it being the only way. That's the cringe park. It hearkens back to like this old term, like the, the person's got religion.
So when we start therapy, and if you're wired to get a lot out of it where you're inspired by it, you might wanna even become a therapist, which is a beautiful thing. I'm not trying to take that away from you, so, but you might be a thousand percent immersed in it and want others around you to be on board too.
But I find that most people really don't want that. They don't want the juice that you're selling. And it might be coming from a place where your wounded inner child finally wants to have like a tribe or a collective, or even a surrogate healthy family for the first time. And again, it's not bad for wanting these things, but they happen slowly with us being really discerning about who we want in that circle for ourselves.
So we might try to recruit. Which is a bit of a slippery kind of cringey slope to be honest. What isn't good about this pitfall is that it usually doesn't work out. To try to inspire people to work on their own childhood trauma. What it does is it might really rub people the wrong way and leave you more isolated and feeling more of like an odd duck in your recovery, and it's like you're back in your family again.
It's also a trigger to our family system where your efforts to get a party started. Um. Are being ignored, which is just awful. By party. I mean, let's be happy, let's be healthy together. As a side note, gradually getting through to a partner gently is different, I think, than trying to kind of sell them 'cause you're so jazzed up about it.
Um, but it's really about your energy. On this one, it's about our agenda telling your entire circle that they're probably all suffering from childhood trauma because you've gone to therapy and read all the things. Isn't is it? Isn't that great? It's actually a pitfall, but encouraging, say a partner to look at their family system in therapy because.
They don't really do great conflict or they fawn or they fight too much. That's a different thing. So I wanna be clear about that. That's more about intimacy and boundaries as opposed to selling something that's more about a direct kind of intimacy problem. So this can get a bit dangerous. Think of all the people who think they have the answer to society's woes, um, and want everyone to be on the same page.
That's kind of gets a little bit scary, right? I don't even like it when someone tells me they discovered hot yoga and I absolutely need to do it every day 'cause it'll change my life. They're probably not wrong when I'm like, oh, chill. You know what, um, I actually believe that childhood trauma is the root issue to society, if not the root issue.
But I'm not gonna force that on anyone who doesn't want to hear it or they're not interested, or they're not ready. There's enough of that going on in the world. Number five is wrong place, wrong therapy, wrong time. This pitfall is tricky. Childhood trauma work and trauma work in general, when it's good, is exhausting at times.
Not 24 7, but cathartic releases and grief work about our family systems takes up a lot of energy, a lot of head space, and a lot of rest is needed. If you're new to therapy. Or new to realizing you've gone through childhood trauma. You really don't know what to expect. You don't know what you don't know.
No one is at fault for assuming that it's gonna help immediately and feel really good immediately. But in my experience, in the beginning, you dip into more. Depression and anxiety and and stuff before you kind of level out. I would say in the first three to six months of getting acclimated to weekly therapy, I'm generalizing there.
That's the kind of like the trauma work model that I do. So it might be different for different models. So this is a common pitfall about setting yourself up. For success instead of getting freaked out and having a number three discouragement experience, or a number six is what I'm gonna get into next.
Here's what I mean. You're most likely know that you need to do some work on your childhood trauma. If you're watching this video, um, you've got the right problem in your mind. To work on, but are you in the right place? Are you in the middle of a nasty acute divorce or a legal battle with family that takes up so much of your head space and is triggering and profoundly activating?
Uh, a supportive therapist in that situation would be very helpful. But that it might not be the right place in your life to delve into the horrific relational emotional attachment abuse from your mother. Are you in the right place to do childhood trauma work or trauma work if you're still living with or really engaged with an abuser on a daily basis?
Probably not. It's hard to tell our inner child that things are gonna be different when they really aren't any different picture. Getting off a heart therapy session with a good enough trauma therapist and you turn and you walk into your kitchen and there's your toxic mother interrogating you about what you're talking about with that therapist.
What God, what are you talking about? Blah. I was listening. You know, all the while you're trying to reparent your inner child that you're not powerless. Anymore about your mother, but then your mother's in the kitchen making you go to the fawn response. It's a mess. And that's what I mean by that. So I believe people need to have some head space available and some safety in their life before kind of getting into some deep trauma work.
It's hard enough, but if you have a huge present stressor in your life, it might be too much of a setup for you and not make it work out more about the right time. If you are two weeks away from taking a nursing exam or the bar exam, or you're in the middle of a divorce, like I mentioned, it's not a good time maybe to dive into hardcore trauma and you'll need some support.
And as a side note, you know, like the beginning, it's not like you're gonna dive into the first couple weeks with a trauma therapist into some hard, really hard nitty gritty, hopefully. There's usually a slow windup, but I think that these still apply in terms of what's going on in your life. A good therapist would read that you and maybe wanna slow things down, but I think many survivors are maybe impatient to get things going.
Like they've had a therapist before who didn't want to go there. So the clients are really raring to go, but their present life is kind of on fire, and I know it's frustrating, but having too much going on in the present makes diving into our past. Super non-productive. I think the right therapy, I could go on and on about this, you know, from a place of frustration with my field and lack of resources.
Like I mentioned, the general public is not wrong to assume that any therapist should be able to help them with some level of trauma. However, most kind of can't, and they don't have an in-depth training in my experience that goes deep and is effective. And it's probably their, you know, it's, it's, the therapist isn't bad.
It's like they're, if they're a mindful therapist, they're not trained in trauma. It's not their wheelhouse. They're not bad for that. So should every therapist be a trauma therapist? That's kind of silly, you know? But there are some amazing therapists out there of all types. There's also some really bad ones out there, unfortunately.
And then there's ones who aren't truly that trained. But we assume the field is like doctors who generally can manage or refer out to what you need. That's kind of not the case with therapists. So the right therapy means if you're seeing someone you like for two years and you're just doing CBT with them.
You wanna take a deep dive, you probably aren't in the right therapy. If you're seeing someone you love who has gotten you through some really rough times and they are trauma informed, but not trauma trained and have a model, you both might be waiting for the trauma epiphanies to come up when they actually don't.
It's like a little bit of a staring game sometimes, and yes, it's crazy, but sometimes therapists are waiting for clients to figure it out, and I, I, I totally disagree with that, and I, I know that that's frustrating. On the other side of it, many survivors need a type of therapy and maybe a precursor to delving into some childhood trauma work.
No one really likes that idea, but some people need a lot of help with regulating emotions before they open up their childhood. You might need some time with CBT or DBT or mindfulness or somatic work to set you up for more success. Sometimes people just need to be comfortable with a therapist in the room for a long time because trauma is so relationally damaging.
Um, I hope that that makes sense. So I know it's frustrating, but things do need to be in alignment. Like the stars are in alignment, not perfect, but, um, to be thoughtful If this is the right time for you, if you have the right resource, the right head space, the right. Calmness in your present life to bring on something like doing that work.
As a side note, I'm not trying to scare anybody. All clients are gonna have a hard time in the beginning of, of trauma work, and they're gonna have to act. They acclimate. They acclimate really well. But I've also had clients who have had to leave prematurely because they just have way too much going on or they need something else.
Or the trauma work is too activating and we've paused and talked about it, and they might need some time in CBT or something like that, especially if they're totally new to therapy. They were earnest. They were gung-ho, but it just wasn't at the right time, the right resource, the right place for them, despite the miracle of getting someone like me on the phone to set up an appointment.
So what's the pitfall here is not being thoughtful about maybe, or aware of what you need and getting freaked out and wasting your time and resources can make us go into a shame hole. And there I go again. I can't handle anything. I'm never gonna try therapy again. I don't want anyone to have that kind of experience.
And you're back to like number three. That's not good for everyone. And most importantly, number six, the biggest one here is stomp. Once you start feeling better, this is really an inner child thing about sabotage, I believe. So a common pattern for this one is say when a client comes into therapy after hitting some kind of bottom of sorts with their trauma.
Or some horrific situation comes up in their family system that spells everything out like a wedding or whatever, and they seek out the resources to get help. They wanna start doing some therapy. They start to do some work with a therapist. They gain some insight. The upset from the beginning stressor dies down from the init, the initial mess kind of dies down and they're feeling better.
Um, therapy can be like that. It can be a place to get support in a crisis, but if you wanna work on childhood trauma and really do some deeper work, deeper changing, it takes a while. It's got a lot of ups and downs. You'll get sick of rehashing, uh, even when you're with a really good therapist doing good work, you're gonna feel a lot of deep, messy things.
So it's understandable to wanna feel better, but just like with number one, clients who now have some awareness, but the awareness doesn't change us. So, so the client does a pause in their therapy and they sort of go, eh, maybe later for that bigger stuff down the road. This was good for me for now. So, but the patterns they experience.
Don't change. And while they might feel better in the moment, a breakup down the road might tank them again, or another abusive family situation might come up again. You know, there's always the next family holiday and the next kind of s show to kind of contend with, and the client hadn't gotten to a point in their therapy to be able to not lose their truth or not lose their power, or not go into a shame hole or depression.
When these things happen, um, then there is shame about then they're criticizing themselves for leaving early. Like what, you know, and the inner child piece here is going back to an old way of dealing with our feelings as we just like we did as kids. Um, I feel better. So the issue must not be an issue anymore.
It's a really old thing. And there isn't really enough time in therapy to get a solid adult in place to kind of check that thinking. It's like when we were seven and there would be like a horrific weekend or a horrific birthday party with a toxic parent, but then three or four days down the road, by Tuesday, things have kind of died down.
We're back to the status quo. Maybe even the parent is in that rare good mood and the child lives from moment to moment and they're just like, oh, well now things are great. So it's a really an inner child kind of experience. I think with this one, there's a bit of magical thinking that the huge issues that we're so dysregulating have now gone away when they're just gonna come back later, unfortunately.
Um, and again, there are a million valid reasons for leaving therapy early. The wrong therapist, wrong treatment, money issues, not feeling ready, job stuff, relocating. But I'm not talking about those in this one. The pitfall here is you've done some footwork. You've, you've done into some, getting into some of this work.
You've landed in somebody's office, you've bought a course, you've started the course, you're having some kind of experience, and it things are kind of hitting you, but then you're leaving with it only partially complete. Um, the pitfall here is really self-sabotage. You're already there. You know, you, you're doing the kind of footwork, you've done the footwork.
Try not to kind of bomb out of it. Try to be mindful about what stories in your mind, what story does your inner child have about maybe leaving before bigger work is being done? Is it a story that's like later for that or, I don't really want to feel this bad stuff to be honest, you know? Or I'll come back to it at some point.
Or not wanting to go there about how bad it was or still is. These are all things to consider and the more you kind of talk about it, you know, like journal about it, talk about it with the therapist, talk about that resistance rather than the resistance, just kind of taking over. That's kind of like what I think about it.
So some final thoughts. Um, again, not trying to disappoint anybody or freak anybody out. I'm just trying to challenge our assumptions about what healing might look like. So a little bit about healing in the process of therapy. Healing is really a subjective idea. It's like a, it's a, but it's a process.
It's different for everybody. But I generally think of it as taking action towards reducing pain, anxiety, depression, beliefs, stuck places, uh, examining therapy roles, taking action on reclaiming a sense of self sense of identity, reclaiming the ability to be intimate with others in various ways. And I love this one about having some mastery over our triggers.
Or having things not be such a trigger anymore and taking on kind of a, a, a kind of like a, a least a not such a grim outlook on light. Not saying super positive, but like not so dark. And it would be nice to have peace to know that your abusers were wrong about you as another. Part to this and in your deepest self to know that, that you were a good kid and it wasn't about you and your deepest self.
It's really nice. Really is nice to be living in the present with those things going on. It's a long process and I think it should be long. 'cause in terms of childhood trauma, the person was usually experiencing the abuse and dysfunction all the way through their, our first 20 years of development. So it's not gonna be a weekend, it's not gonna be three months in therapy.
It's gonna take some time. It's not gonna be not forever, but it's not gonna happen in six months. It's definitely not gonna be happening in a, in a weekend retreat. So I voiced this video in context of really psychotherapy and for childhood trauma, and some of you are doing self-healing work that I want to acknowledge out of either, you know, financial reasons or lack of a skilled therapist or just out of.
Personal preference, but these will still apply if you're in that situation too. So I hope that this was helpful. I would really love to hear your thoughts if you've experienced these, if you've, if you're in the middle of experiencing some of these, if it's really kind of challenged you, and I would love to know how you kind of feel about that.
You're certainly welcome to disagree, and also you're welcome to check out my monthly healing
May you be well. May you be peaceful entities and may you be joyous and I will
