6 Core Practices I do with Most of my Trauma Counselling Clients 

Despite the fact that each person’s experiences and trauma are unique, there tends to be some commonalities in the work that I do with each trauma client. Here are 6 things I often do with people who come to me for trauma counselling. 

Adaptive Maladaptive Reshaping

When the trauma(s) happened, you found smart ways to survive the bad things. Maybe that was people pleasing to keep yourself safe; maybe it was freezing and not doing anything so that you weren’t noticed and harmed; maybe it was intellectualizing things to figure out the best plan. 

Regardless of what it was, you did something to survive and your nervous system may have decided to keep doing that thing. Think of it this way: your nervous system, which only cares about survival and nothing else, said “This thing allowed me to survive. Since it has a great success rate, I’ll keep doing it over and over again.” 

From your nervous system's perspective, this is a great plan! But, while this was adaptive at the time and allowed you to survive, it may no longer be adaptive and could be harming your wellness now. 

One of the big jobs in trauma counselling is to help your nervous system learn what behaviours are no longer adaptive and learn to release them.  

Healthy Relationship Building

Especially if the trauma you experienced had to do with other people, it’s possible that you now view relationships through the lens of trauma. Maybe you now believe that others can’t be trusted, or aren’t safe. Maybe you feel like you can’t ask for help (or don’t deserve it) or that you have to do everything in your own. Maybe you can’t understand why someone would care about you. 

Trauma counselling often centres on learning something new about relationships. Learning to say if don’t like something, learning to trust again, learning to ask for what you need. All of these can begin in the counselling office with your counsellor. 

By rebuilding safety in therapy, with someone who is trained in helping build safety, you can begin to learn what works. Then, we can take those skills and begin using them in the “real world”. 

Sometimes these skills are a discussed, intentional part of the process. Other times, it’s something that’s happening while we do other things, and people find they naturally start doing this outside of the office too.

Resourcing In Trauma Counselling

We often think of trauma counselling as decreasing the bad stuff. And while this is true, another focus is increasing the good. I think of it a little like a pulley, where we need to bring down the bad but it order to do that, we also have to bring up the good. 

We call this resourcing. Giving you resources that help you feel good, inherently, and skills to use when you don’t feel so great. 

How we resource is going to be unique to your experiences of trauma and what works for you. Part of it is tangible skills like grounding and breathing, but often it’s deeper than that. 

Often, it’s about identifying the beliefs that you hold that AREN’T so good, then finding the opposite. For example, if your trauma left you thinking “I’m not safe” we might want to help bring up the belief of “I’m safe now”. Or maybe we want to bring up the belief of “I’m enough regardless” to balance out the traumatic belief of “I’m not enough”.  What we do shifts, but with almost every client, I work to help them feel good and resilient, both before and throughout the trauma processing itself. 

Dialectic Thinking

With most people who come to trauma counselling, we need to work on their dialectic thinking. This is a fancy of way of saying that I help clients see that two things, even if they are opposites, can be true at the same time. For example “I both understand why they said that and feel angry that they did”. Or maybe it’s “I both feel sadness she is gone and a sense of relief”. Or it could be “I feel a sense of shame I did that and I think it was the right thing to do”.

Trauma often leads to all or nothing thinking, so part of healing is often finding the in-between and holding two truths at once.

This work can be done directly, but I often find that as we do trauma work, this naturally happens. As the trauma shifts, there tends to be more space to hold complexity and nuance. 

Getting in touch with Emotions and Sensations 

One of the ways that we can understand trauma is “distressing events […] so extreme or intense that they overwhelm a person's ability to cope”- UK Trauma Council. 

The very fact that that trauma is so distressing means that the sensations and emotions are unbearable. This often leads to trauma survivors disconnecting from their body and their emotions so that they no longer have to experience the unmanageable. 

What can happen though, just like discussed above in the Adaptive Maladaptive Reshaping, is that we forget the things have changed and that our emotions and sensations may now be safe to access. Counselling is often the place where we learn that it’s now safe to feel our emotions and sensations. This often happens little but little, making sure that it never feels unmanageable or overwhelming like it did back then.  

Experiential Trauma Processing 

Notice how this one is at the bottom of the list; this is intentional! Most people think it’s the main thing we do in trauma counselling and while it’s important, it’s no more important than anything else listed here.

If you could think your way out of trauma, you would have. For most folks, they need to do something different, and generally speaking, that’s experiential trauma processing. We need to go back to the trauma and experience it differently, with safety, empowerment and choice. When we can do that, it helps our nervous system learn that the trauma is in the past and that we no longer need to hang on to it.

A big misconception here is that we do this once and then it’s over. For most people, we need to do this many times, especially if there were many traumas in your past. 

There are many different ways to do experiential processing; if you’re looking for more information on this one, consider checking out this blog here. 

While these core practices are often used in my counselling office, please remember that your trauma and experiences are unique; if something here doesn’t feel aligned for you, that’s so fair! Good trauma therapy is individualized to you based on your needs are experiences. 

If you are looking for a trauma counsellor in Kamloops or online, the WellMind team is here to help! Reach out today to book a session.