How Do I Know I'm Ready to Pursue Trauma Therapy?
The prospect of starting trauma therapy can be daunting. Once you've made the decision to pursue trauma treatment, there can be a number of questions. Who do I trust for trauma therapy? Which modality is the best one? What do I expect when I get started? While I hope to touch on some of these topics in later posts, this post will focus on helping you determine your readiness to enter trauma therapy in the first place.
You cope with strong emotions in safe ways.
The most important thing here is to ensure there are no life-threatening behaviors involved. If there are coping behaviors occurring that put you in danger, you are not ready to do trauma work yet. Examples of these behaviors would include self-harm, physical fights, suicide attempts, certain intensities of substance use and dependence). Those behaviors have to stop first, because processing the trauma can increase emotion intensity and increase severity of behaviors that would compromise your safety. However, if you are able to stay safe (even if you are coping in other potentially ineffective ways such as arguing with loved ones, engaging in avoidance, oversleeping), you may be ready to start trauma processing.
You're ready to “choose your hard.”
Have you seen the meme going around that says something like, “Marriage therapy is hard, and getting divorced is hard, choose your hard”? This mirrors how I feel about trauma work. Trauma processing can sometimes be 10 out of 10 hard, potentially with the outcome of resolving your symptoms in the long-term. At the same time, living with daily symptoms like nightmares, flashbacks, and panic attacks is also hard. Sometimes we come to a place in life where the cost-benefit analysis changes and we are ready to choose the “go to therapy” kind of hard instead of the “continuing to live with all these symptoms” kind of hard.
You're able to commit to treatment.
I mean this in terms of time as well as willingness. Trauma processing is not typically a single session experience. This is work that will occur over the course of several sessions, potentially up to six months. Additionally, as intense emotion can arise from trauma processing, trauma therapy may need to be put “on hold” at times to review coping skills and ensure safety. Although many clients report feeling better immediately after the first session with EMDR, most experience stronger emotions than they anticipated and there can be urges to avoid the second session. Willingness is what it takes to show up, again and again.
And as a bonus, here are a couple of things you don't need:
You don't need a perfectly clear memory of the traumatic event. Some people believe that if they don't remember the entirety of the event, trauma processing can't occur. This couldn't be farther from the truth, as with EMDR all we need is a felt sense of the trauma—a visual image, or an emotion, or a sensation. From there we can activate the trauma network and allow your brain to do the needed processing. Sometimes we can go with whatever material is present in a flashback or nightmare.
You don't need to relinquish control. You drive every step of trauma processing, and if you need to take a break in the middle of the session, you take a break.
You also don't need to have forgiveness. Trauma processing is shown to bring many different emotions, moving at times from helplessness to anger to sadness to peace. However, even if you are feeling a level of acceptance and peace about what happened, you don't have to forgive or approve or “be okay with” the event. There's nothing about trauma treatment that dictates the emotions you should or should not be experiencing.
With all that said, if you are ready to move forward with trauma treatment, or even if you need some support managing unhelpful coping mechanisms you've developed so you can at some point treat your trauma, click the button below to make an appointment. I offer therapy in Huntersville, NC, and online therapy in NC and SC. Thank you for the time you invested reading this.
