Month: February 2021

What is trauma anyway?

What is trauma anyway?

Helping clients deal with and heal from their traumatic experiences is at the very heart of the work that I do.  Assisting clients to understand what trauma is and how it is impacting their lives is probably the first step for many of them because oftentimes they have accessed our mental health care system (I’m writing from an Australian perspective here, though believe this to be indicative of many other ‘western’ countries) they have had their symptoms assessed and have probably come out the other side with a clinical diagnosis.  This starts with a presumption of their being something wrong with a person.

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Living with uncertainty    

Living with uncertainty

Writing from Melbourne, Australia where we have just entered our third lockdown period early in 2021, I’ve been drawn into a reflection of what it is to live with this constant and pervasive sense of uncertainty that we are all getting unhappily used to thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.  The language us Australian’s have been getting accustomed to this year is “snap lockdown”.

SNAP.

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Therapy is a doing word

Therapy is a doing word

If I didn’t believe that all my clients were capable of change, I really couldn’t do my job!  Human behaviour change is at the core of my work.  And as a curious observer of human behaviour (kind of goes with the territory), I find the actual process of therapy absolutely fascinating.  I often catch myself reflecting on what is actually happening in the moment when I’m working with an individual or couple – I guess all therapists do it – but I think it’s an important skill that we develop over time.  I also believe it is part of a bigger reflective practice that encourages me to hone my craft and expertise as a Counsellor, and I take that very seriously.

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When you don’t have a voice

This one has been brewing for a while.

I spent a lot of my time working with clients who have experienced trauma in one form or another.  Often these brave humans that I have the privilege of sitting alongside have experienced layers of messy and deeply painful traumatic experiences, often at the hands of significant caregivers – parents, grandparents, teachers, partners – the very people that they should be able to trust over any other.  It’s what we call ‘complex trauma’ or C-PTSD.

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