21/02/2024
Recovering The Self: The foundation of trauma therapy
The author and addiction therapist Gabor Mate noted that children need two basic needs that are primarily the responsibility of parents: Safe (or secure) attachment and authentic expression. When these two are consistently offered to someone in the first seven or so years of life, there is a reasonably strong chance that child will flourish in adulthood, even when faced with hardship.
This was the discovery of John Bowlby when he observed orphans after the end of WWII. Those that seemed to navigate life best had the best attachment in infancy and early childhood. In other words, secure attachment is not merely about childhood, but is the most significant factor in determining the outcomes of a person’s entire life.
The two basic needs of every child
The first need, secure attachment, allows a child to explore and discover the world and their place in it without fear. The child knows that parents are emotionally scaffolding their development through attunement – the finely developed capacity to recognise what a child needs, moment to moment, and meeting that need in a calm, grounded and loving way. This helps a child self-soothe when things go a bit pear-shaped, and gives the child confidence to repeat tasks until they have mastered them. Failure is not punished; parents instil a growth mindset in the child, using failure as encouragement to try again.
The second need, authentic expression, allows a child to think, feel and act with autonomy, based on what they are experiencing at any given moment, without being punished by a parent and without a parent breaking the security of the attachment. This helps a child express themselves with clarity and congruity, allowing them to develop into a unique and creative individual. They know who they are, they are in touch with what they think and feel and most importantly, with what is going on in their bodies. They naturally and calmly honour their own lives, and know inner security and confidence.
Houston (and everywhere else), we have a problem
However, parents – often despite their best intentions – fail at one or both of these tasks. This leads to attachment trauma (not to be confused with PTSD, but often presenting with similar life-long debilitating impact). Research conducted by Blue Knot Foundation found that over one in four adults suffered significant trauma in their childhood (four or more traumatic events). In the first ever community-based study to link self-reported Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) to documented health records found that 62% of regionally based US adults reported at least one ACE. The research confirmed previously reported associations between childhood adversity and poor outcomes throughout adulthood. More broad-reaching research has revealed the figure is over 70%.
Before any effective trauma therapy can commence, these two needs – safe attachment and authentic expression - must be met in the adult client. Both conditions must be met without causing hyper-arousal in the client’s autonomic nervous system.
Trauma-informed is not good enough
Trauma informed therapy is vital if a therapist is going to prevent a client from becoming dysregulated, or to know what to do when something has caused a client to become dissociated. However, this does little to provide what the client most needs. Therapists who are not trained in a trauma-transforming approach will skew their work towards undershooting the client’s window of tolerance. Keep the client as calm as possible, but don’t expect any significant change outside the therapy room. Change can become painfully slow, even as the therapeutic relationship develops. The client doesn’t so much feel safe us numb, untriggered, perhaps thinking but not feeling or experiencing much.
Clients on mental health plans have their insecure attachment fears amplified when subsidised therapy ends after a limited number of subsidised appointments. Further, clients can become normalised to therapy and ritually retraumatise themselves telling their story over and over to countless therapists over a lifetime, with little to no change. This way, even trauma-informed therapy can become an ongoing experience of learned helplessness.
The centre of the cosmos is within us
The ancients formed a term to describe the axis that divides the earth between its celestial poles. Imagine a line that ran from an infinite distance through the earth from the north pole to the south pole and out the other side. This was called the axis mundi.
More recently, the term has been used to describe anything that connects two worlds, e.g. heaven and earth, form and essence. This concept of the centre of everything appears in almost every ancient religion and culture. For Jews, it was called the soul. For Christians, it was called koilia, or innermost being, the deepest place within us.
Leonardo da Vinci captured this in his painting Virturvian Man, symbolizing symmetry, balance, the integration of humanity, mathematics, proportionality, science and art (albeit a little patriachially!).
Recent neuroscience has discovered that we do in fact have an axis mundi, and our navels in some profound way are the steering wheel of our reality. The ancients believed the gut is where we choose our lives, hence why the soul was thought to abide there. But what if this power to choose to know who we actually are is taken from us early in life?
The one terrible choice
Gabor Mate observed that when given the choice between attachment and authenticity, the child will always surrender their choice in order to maintain any attachment to the parent.
As a result, the child becomes responsible, at least from their own psychological perspective, for the attachment to the parent. The child has lost their power to choose to express who they are, because it was far too costly to retain that choice. They will, however, maintain some sense of agency, at great cost to themselves. The one choice they can never make is to believe they are on their own and their parents haven’t got life figured out. That would be far too terrifying for any child. Instead, they will believe they are bad, or not good enough, or simply not enough, because that belief gives them the illusion of control. That is, they believe that they can try harder to “be good” or at least “be better” and then, perhaps, mummy and daddy will stop fighting, or daddy won’t get angry with me, etc. The problem is, these beliefs are formed before we are consciously aware, so the conscious mind can’t shift them. In other words, our unconscious beliefs, not our choosing, control our lives.
If a child grows into an adult while still carrying the unconscious core belief that they are bad, or not good enough, they will be open to all manner of abuse, much of it self-inflicted. They may not care for their health through diet and exercise, they might not take a path of learning for self-development for fear of judgment for not being “perfect”, they might engage in relationships with people who abuse them. Alternatively, they might feel like imposters and constantly strive to feel like they deserve anything good, never actually enjoying any aspect of their lives and needing to meet some notion of perfection before they can believe they deserve success, respect or love.
Who is behind the wheel?
The primary juice that allows the brain to operate is the neurotransmitter serotonin. However, the gut produces most of the serotonin within us. In fact, the American Psychological Society reported that it is likely that the gut is a second brain. It is the only organ in the human body with a separate nervous system, with over 100 million neurons embedded in the gut wall. The gut bacteria within our digestive system responds to the all the same neurochemicals as the brain, not merely serotonin.
Let me illustrate with the metaphor of a car.
The conscious mind is the headlights that can perceive reality as it comes towards us (what a small part of the car it is).
The unconscious beliefs we carry from childhood are the engine that drives us forward.
The gut is the steering wheel that chooses our life.
If the engine is driving us faster and faster in a desperate attempt to find safe attachment (without which we cannot survive), and our capacity to choose is offline because the child we once were could never choose in an authentic way, no wonder our unconscious beliefs sabotage the very thing we say we want. The power of the unconscious beliefs in our “engine” creates torque steer, wrestling the steering wheel out of our control. If as a child we weren’t allowed to know who we actually are, but were told who we had to be in order to keep others happy, it’s not unlike a child driving our lives at night when they can’t even see over the dashboard. As a result, the conscious mind (the headlights) has all the evidence to confirm everything we believe: We are stupid, we keep making the same mistakes, we are imposters and so on.
Trauma-transforming foundations
Any therapy that has the power to transform a client’s trauma must be able to offer the client safe attachment with the therapist within the confines of the therapy space. This must be the responsibility of the therapist. In other words, it requires the therapist to take the lead. Few modalities offer such a clear, directive approach to allow for this scaffolding.
In addition, any effective trauma therapy must equip the client with the ability to reclaim the power to choose their lives, to know who they are, experientially. It must take into account the whole person:
1. It must be embodied, taking in the whole person through somatic movement.
2. It must be authentic, addressing the unconscious barriers each individual client has.
3. It must have emotional resonance with the client – giving them a powerful sense of how their specific pain has held them back, and to actively challenge its right to keep them there.
4. Finally, it must be grounded in the client’s actual experience of reality. This can only happen if it is active, vital, clear, directed and empowered by the practitioner.
When all these conditions are met, the client is reconnected with the truth of who they are, and only then are they ready to begin to process their trauma safely, effectively and permanently.
The Richard Trauma Process (TRTP) is designed to equip practitioners with the tools to safely, quickly and powerfully introduce clients to the truth of who they are. In the space of minutes, clients move from powerlessness and despair to energy, strength, conviction and agency with beautifully authentic resonance. Clients regain the ability and motivation to choose their own lives, no matter how much their capacity to choose their own life has been stunted by their past experiences. People are returned to their authentic selves. TRTP then resolves the trauma that plagues people’s lives, usually within in three sessions.
© 2024 Richard Fay
About the Author
Richard Fay (Dip.Min., M.Couns.) is a psychotherapist with 15 years of experience in private practice. Richard is located in Brisbane, Australia and is a trainer of The Richards Trauma Process. Richard is also ambassador of the Centre for Men and Families, a not-for-profit charity that helps men and their communities in crisis.
