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Posts tagged ‘Healing trauma’

Apr 30

Facing the Storm Head-On

When I wrote “Psychotherapy Soup,” I failed to mention one thing: showing up authentically to the therapy session. This might sound like a strange statement that I just made, and it was an omission on my part. So, I’m making up for it now.

I’m finding in screening clients who call me that those being referred from a list produced by a third party might be sent to the wrong therapist, or the right therapist at the wrong time!

It is my job to understand when you are ready for me, and when there might be a step before you begin work with me. You may not know, until you talk with a therapist, the path you need to take. This is why we offer consultations, and the chance to figure out if it is the right time for the fit, and the right fit for both of us.

For example: you might want to avail yourself of the hospice chaplain before the person dies. Then you might want to give it a while to see IF you really need to do more work around your loss. In this age of the “instant” fix, waiting is a good thing, and it is becoming a lost skill. On the other hand, when you are a year out, and you or someone else notices your lack of functioning, it might be time to give yourself the opportunity to get connected with the right therapist for you. This means that you may have to vet some people.

How can you vet a therapist when your brain isn’t fully functioning? Take the time to ask friends. I say this because in this period of your grief, your concentration, sleeping, and moods may all be out of sync. It can take time to get back into a synced space. In 2026 we’re still in that place of the instant everything. People want to move on to the next relationship, but they might not want to walk the path of the journey, and it is a path that does serve a purpose. People are avoiding the work of going through it to get to the place of being raw and sitting with some super uncomfortable stuff. Some people want to get to the other shore before they’ve done the work of crossing Styx.

The catch in all of this is that you need to be able to show up authentically so that you can do the real work of healing.

Healing is really hard work. Grief is not for wimps! It takes major guts to sit in a session, and to let it all hang out, and then to claim the pain, the loss, the sorrow, and to face the truth in the relationship that has been lost. The fact is that even good or great relationships need a good sorting out! Fear is one of the reasons people may be quick to find someone new and not go through all the grieving process that they need to complete before moving forward in a healthy manner.

I recall at somewhere between year three and four, when the ugly crying was all cried out and the new tears came into being, that I realized I could finally face the sorting of this marriage I’d been in. Here I was, and then, and only then, was I able to do the work of facing the caregiving, and the fact that his bipolar disorder had put me into a place of compassion fatigue. This was close to the four-year mark of his death! He’d done the deed in 2016, and now, smack, in the middle of the pandemic, I’m coming to terms with having to face the truth about what I’d lived through, and what I’d done. 

It is known that people who have to settle complicated estates may not begin to grieve until the last meetings with lawyers and the courts are finally behind them. It is then that the real tears come, and people in their lives think to themselves, “Why are they falling apart now? They’ve been so strong.” NO, they were in survival mode. Now, two or three years out, they can finally let loose with the grief.

Grief takes the form it needs to take until the body and the mind can let it all out.

And so, showing up to a therapist’s office in an authentic way might take time because while you know you may need to do the work of healing, you aren’t ready to do the work because the time isn’t right.

Therapists lack crystal balls. While some of us might possess a gut sense for things because we’ve hung out in this space for some time, our knowing is limited.

I’m pretty good at sensing in a call or a first session if this is a good fit. I’m also not afraid to tell you I’m not the right person for you. I think that some people view finding a therapist as a shopping excursion. You go into the shop and see something you like. You figure that it will do just fine. Then, you get it home, and you find that it is all wrong. Now, can you take it back? Maybe, and maybe not.

What would the experience of shopping be like if you did some research before you purchased something? In March I was looking for a new dress, and my usual online sources were not working for me, and so, like the intelligent soul I was, I put out feelers on Facebook. Two friends responded, and they told me about an online source I didn’t know about. It solved my desire for dots, and it allowed me to discover a place that had dresses I like. It also answered the question of how I will rebuild my wardrobe for the spring and summer.

The fact is that it is OK to research until the right person is found. That being said, don’t be so selective that you pass over a good therapist.

I’ve spoken about my own journey of healing with grief and trauma. It took me about four months of meeting therapists and screening them out to know that I needed to see if a therapist I knew would be willing to work with me. I knew after shopping around that I’d found the person. The question for me was: Am I willing to give up one relationship to benefit the relationship of healing? Was I also ready to do some intense work, and take the time it would take to do that work? I realized that there would be no perfect time to do what needed to be done. I wrote a mail, and we met. I told him that I expected him to treat me as a client/patient and not like a therapist who knew about therapy. I would show up as myself, do the work in an authentic manner, and I was enabled to clear the battlement and the iceberg out in the ocean. The deal was that I had to be willing to show up and not mess around.

The other part of the deal was that I had to be willing to go through some scary stuff, and do it alone. I say that because the stuff I cleared isn’t stuff you really should put on friends.

Doing the work of healing is all about courage. Facing the work in the moment it happens takes guts, and it isn’t for wimps. It’s about facing the storm head-on and believing that you can get past it by going through it, because on the other side there is a better way of being. Well, in 2026 the storm has blown out.

Oct 30

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Icebergs and Admirals, Part 2: Reshaping the Self

This is Part 2 in a series about trauma. Please read Part 1 here.

The admiral, in her boat, realizes that this gatekeeping for trauma must be shut down. Her text goes something like this: “Look, I get that there is trouble landside. If this destructive protection continues, I can no longer guarantee that the iceberg will remain stable. We need to shut this down, and do it in a controlled fashion. Let’s get the loyal soldiers of the mind sent out to retirement!”

What happens when the soldiers find out they will be let go is a joyous celebration. The soldiers didn’t want to have to serve as warriors. Who does? Trauma happens, and they get the job.

The process of releasing all trauma stored in the mind is a slow and careful one. With willing participants, it will be hard: it will also be worth the pain of it all. Going through the process is not a pleasant experience.

I mentioned in Part 1 that many people avoid the work of releasing the trauma because they fear that if they do so, they will fall apart, and dysfunction will ensue. Here’s a news bulletin: they are already in that dysfunctional zone! It is sensed by those who are avoidant to the work, and by those who are not able to see what is really going on underneath it all. Those in the second group feel that something is “off,” and while they don’t say anything due to a social contract, they do know that, deep down, things aren’t right.

This can set up clients to embark on a healing journey alone. Sometimes the client gets lucky and has one or two friends who get it. The friends agree to stand with the client in the journey.

Way back in “postland,” I wrote about being in the room with someone going through hard things. This is what good friends will do. I had two such people in my life, and while I knew there would be times when I had to sit with things all alone, I vaguely got where the boundaries and the limits were in that support. Trauma can mess that up for people, and relationships. I came to find out that I didn’t have the full understanding I needed with limits and friendship.

With all things in place, I went into the hard work of getting things repaired.

One by one, the land soldiers were called to the front of a battlement where, for the first time ever, their hard work was acknowledged, and they were excused with honor. Each time this process happened, the iceberg that was out at sea would shrink in its burden and grow in its beauty to become its full and true self.

The therapist allowed my words to stand, and honored them as I did. It was safe to claim my words. Sometimes the sessions left me in deep and dark places, and at other times the session was liberating. All of it worked to create the ability to come to terms with the awful, and to give thanks that I had done what I needed to do to heal the pain of the past.

The healing enabled me to understand that it wasn’t my fault. For some things that I had to let go of, I had been a child at the time. For other things, I had to come to terms with things that happened in my adult life. There were reframings and realizations that I had to revisit loyalties in relationships. All of it was hard and painful and sometimes lonely.

Each time I was able to release a soldier from the burden they had so loyally defended, I felt something float away from that iceberg, and the reason for the solider being there to defend things was no longer present. Over a period of months, things changed—until one day everyone had cleared out of the fortress that had stood for so long.

Now, the work of rebuilding could take place.

Rebuilding means that you can reach for the sun. We grieve the past and begin to celebrate a new future. What healing looks like is a slow discovery of a new life: a life where warriors are no longer needed, and they are sending text messages to admirals guarding icebergs. Now the admiral sends out messages to reject an attempt to ugly up the iceberg, and to get to work on addressing the present issue so that the iceberg will not become something unwanted and sent out to sea.

Healing means accepting the responsibility of facing the stuff head on. Where we once stuffed our trauma and sent it out to sea—to the iceberg—we are now able to assign ourselves to the greater task of dealing in the present. This is functional, and at first it will seem strange. Learning to know when to seek help is a new skill that we now come to face willingly.

It is strange because, for so many years, you did things that led you to feel yourself that you could cope—just like others. You went to school or work, the bills got paid, you did normal life stuff—and you did it stuffing everything away. You fooled yourself into believing it was all OK. It is the ultimate lie.

The ultimate truth is that humans are not made to live in a state of trauma for their entire lives. Trauma can cause illness, the inability to function at our highest capacity, and shattered relationships. Trauma will lead us to believe that all is really well when, in reality, all is not well at all: it is the ultimate lie masquerading as truth, and the ultimate truth is that it must all stop. And so, the delusion of safety shatters. The real sobbing is the signal that, at last, the soldiers of the mind can be released to go sip drinks on the warm beaches and relax from their labours.

Healing is all about doing the right things for the right reasons. Healing is about grieving what once was, and celebrating the light of discovering that there are better ways to do life.

Healing also means that the admiral guarding the iceberg is given permission to send what was once hidden beneath the surface back to land. The admiral now protects the iceberg in new ways. She tells the land folk that they are strong enough to handle what comes up in life.

As we strengthen muscles that have been dormant for some time, we learn what we missed out on. We celebrate the new life before us.

We have WOW moments, and we learn that we can move ahead. For the first time, the carnage of the life we lead is seen clearly. Healing is a series of incidents that lead us to new self-discovery. The work of healing from trauma is about being willing to say WOW as much as we need to. It is about finding the courage to do something real: heal ourselves.

Oct 23

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Icebergs and Admirals, Part 1: Melting

This post is going to attempt to explain how the mess of trauma operates in the mind. There are players in this post: the iceberg, which serves as a safe place to store the trauma, and the loyal soldiers who are assigned to defend the fortress on land, or the mind. The soldiers send the trauma to the admiral, who is in a boat by the iceberg. The admiral is a gatekeeper who lets trauma in to be stored inside of the iceberg and can alert the players to the situation as needed. The therapist is a neutral facilitator of the healing.

Walking out of trauma is tricky. We believe that trauma is completely “land based,” guarded in our personal land fortress, as we explored in “Soldiers of the Mind.” But that isn’t the whole story.

While our “soldiers” have been busy protecting the “battlements” of our minds, the real action has been going on out in the blue ocean waters, where “icebergs,” the storage centers of our trauma, have been building over time. On the surface, they look steadfast and serene. The trouble lies beneath the surface, where they grow and expand, slowly but menacingly. The beauty of the iceberg is deceptive, and each time more growth occurs, it is at the expense of its beauty. Underneath is where the ugly resides. Below the surface, jagged edges form, and they pierce anything that touches them. It is bloody and painful.

On constant surveillance of our iceberg is our “admiral.” Sitting on her ship, she tries to forestall the inevitable: the heat wave that will cause the iceberg to melt in an uncontrolled manner. Melting happens, and it happened to me.

Melting, or the discovery of how significant the trauma below the surface is, caused me to sit in my living room on my sofa and sob. Sobbing was the awakening of how ugly the underside of my iceberg was. It took three more months to commit to a step that led me to do the work of healing what was below the surface. The jagged edges had to go.

I’m all about rubber-meets-the-road solutions, so I’m going to tell you how to find what you need to heal the iceberg.

I had to talk to a great many therapists to sift out the right therapist from wrong fits. This is where my journey began.

I wanted someone who was reliable and intelligent, someone who had done their own deep soul work, and who understood trauma. I wanted someone who would call me out if I tried to raise walls and distract myself from the process of the work. I quickly established the places where I would not find this person. I finally found the right person, wrote an email, and had something set up when, kerplop! I broke my left femur and I had to delay the onset of treatment.

Who and what I found was someone who was qualified, had done their own work, would be able to treat me like the client in the relationship, and hold me to this role. While I am a therapist, this is about me doing some hard work. I didn’t need someone who could not hold that boundary. Adam (not his real name) could do all of this. Gender wasn’t an issue for me with finding the right person. Qualifications were the top priority. And so, with the admiral guarding the iceberg both above and below the surface, the work of reconfiguring the iceberg began.

The admiral’s role in all of this is to serve as a safety while the real work beneath the surface occurs. The therapist is going to take things apart in a safe manner and move cautiously to rebuild what soldiers on the iceberg’s mass have defended, while the soldier’s job is to defend on land what is actually occurring beneath the iceberg and out at sea.

The best way of explaining it is that while the trauma happens on land, it sends out messengers who can deliver the needed information to be stored in the iceberg. Trauma is a two-front war.

How this all happens with things getting sent to the iceberg is not our fault. If we did not send things to the iceberg, we’d be in an even larger mess.

Healing from trauma is going to destabilize the iceberg. It is a good thing, this shrinking of the iceberg. Lots of stuff that has been sent out to sea to be protected is going to get knocked free, and with the freedom, a healthy, pretty iceberg will float proudly on the surface of the water.

So, with the admiral controlling the iceberg, the job is to alert the mind to when critical mass has been reached. Once again, and this time in reverse fashion, the admiral contacts the land forces, alerting them to the fact that the iceberg is in a dangerous situation, and that destruction is certain should things go any further.

In a very real way, this is what caused me to sob on the sofa, and to finally, after decades of filling my iceberg to dangerous capacity below the surface, let the admiral know that it was time to clean the mess out.

I think what most people do is bargain with their subconscious and strike a deal to coexist and believe that they can stuff things away. The crazy of it all is that we are not at fault for trying to survive. There comes a time when stuffing away no longer works. If we look at the iceberg as a container for what we are not willing to take apart, then it will all eventually blow apart on us.

The reason people don’t seek treatment is that they have come to believe that they can get by without addressing the pain. They keep telling themselves, “I’ll just do what I normally do with my inner pain and let it sit below in my iceberg.” The thing is, the iceberg just wants to be a beautiful part of the ocean landscape, and it didn’t ask to be made a most ugly thing: it got assigned to that role. Not our fault, in so many ways.

Oct 21

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Healing and Icebergs

I stand in an empty place. The battlement and castle that once stood as a fortress have been carried off to a place of full discharge. There are no loyal soldiers here anymore. They’ve been honorably discharged, and they served well.

It is a peaceful feeling to have said goodbye to all of them; they were tired and in need of the rest of the valiant warriors they were.

At the beginning of the discharge process, I was sent something by my therapist, and it made me cry. It felt safe, and as if the process I was about to undergo was one of healing. It describes the therapy process well, and it fits my way of thinking. I’ve fallen into a mad crush with the iceberg, and I have my own whimsical vision of what she looks like. I want you to know about this gem of a description of therapy, and so, I’ll share it here.

THE ICEBERG

A tale of therapy

Author unknown

Once upon a time, in a place at the end of the earth, there lived an iceberg. The iceberg was quite a small one, part of a much larger one from which she had broken away and floated free in the cold water.

Sometimes she found herself brushing up against other icebergs, but she learned to steer clear after a particularly painful bump during a patch of stormy weather. On the whole, she managed to stay out of trouble, watching the weather carefully and adjusting her course to suit the conditions. She was weary and lonely and wanted to find a place where she could be with other icebergs who wouldn’t hurt her and where she could relax a bit.

Now we all know about icebergs and how that part that shows above the water is only a very small part of the whole. This particular iceberg was bright on the surface, and when the sun shone on her, she sparkled and twinkled and danced about on the water, bobbing up and down as if she didn’t have a care in the world.  This was the part that showed above the water, but below there was a great weight of ice into which lots of debris had become frozen. All the flotsam and jetsam of her own and other people’s lives had become entangled and was firmly lodged into this heavy submerged part; it was slowly dragging the tiny tip of the iceberg right under the water. Steering herself had become more and more difficult and dangerous.

Then one day the iceberg found a small sheltered bay on the edge of the land and she floated into it without even realizing where she was going. She just felt she was safe at last and able to stop worrying about bumping into other icebergs for a while. She rested herself and basked in the warmth of the sun that shone on her. When night came, she thought that she would find that she had floated out again into the dangerous waters, and every new day, when the sun came out again, she marvelled at it and wondered if it could possibly last. And it did.

After some time, she really began to trust the constancy of the sun and found that she didn’t need to worry about it anymore. Sometimes a cloud passed in front of the sun, but it soon passed and afterwards the sun seemed all the warmer by comparison.

The longer she stayed in the sheltered bay, the warmer the water became, and then a strange thing began to happen. The edge of the ice beneath the water began to melt, freeing some of the debris trapped in it. Every day the sun shone, and the ice melted a little more. The iceberg watched in amazement as bits floated to the surface; she realized that these were bits of herself that had been submerged for a long time, causing her to feel so heavy, dragging her down. She began to understand why things had been so difficult for her, and she was glad to watch the rubbish drifting away into the wider waters.

The sun’s warmth had also changed the bit of iceberg that showed above the water. The great deep, jagged clefts etched down her sides had been smoothed away by the great rivers of water that streamed down her as she watched the debris floating to the surface. The tip of the iceberg, instead of becoming smaller, had actually become larger as more of herself showed above the water, freed of entanglements.

This affected the iceberg in different ways. At first she found it hard to recognize herself and she wondered if the other icebergs would know her, or if they would notice a change in her. She wondered if her new size would cause her problems when she went back into the wider waters, and if she would be able to steer clear of the other icebergs in quite the same way. But then she realised that, now that she was bigger, she would not need to be so fearful of being bumped or hurt. And, being free of the debris, she would be able to steer more easily and have more choice about the directions in which she moved. She was less likely to be dragged down or tipped over, even if she did occasionally bump into other icebergs. She began to feel more whole, as though the part below the water was less separate from her.

Although there were still some bits of rubbish frozen into her submerged parts, at least she knew they were there and how they might affect her, and that, in time, they, too, might work free and float away. Now, it may seem that all this happened a little too easily, but it was not so. Whilst the iceberg basked in the sun after first finding the sheltered bay, there was a lot of turbulence beneath the surface, and the iceberg was very anxious, not knowing exactly what was going on down below. At times she was frightened of the degree of agitation in the waters and wondered if she would be able to maintain her balance. But all the time the sun kept shining, and that reassured and comforted her and made her feel that, whatever was going on beneath the waters, all was still well above.

When the iceberg had melted enough to free the debris, the disturbed particles began to hurt as they broke free, and the pain was worse as the icy numbness dissolved away. The iceberg was dismayed when she recognized some of the debris that had floated to the surface: bits she didn’t want to see; bits she had forgotten she had picked up on dark and stormy nights; bits she was frightened about and with which she wished she had never come into contact. But she had to admit, they were all parts of her, whether she liked them or not. And the sun still shone.

The sun shone on the good bits and the sun shone on the bad bits; somehow that made the iceberg feel as though things couldn’t be so bad after all. Some of the bad bits didn’t belong to her at all, but were parts of the larger iceberg from which she had broken away. As the debris floated in the water around the iceberg and the sun shone on them, she was able to look at them more closely and see how they had been harming her. She allowed herself to feel angry about the bits that had been attached to her by others and that she had thought were hers. She had always realised something was there, weighing her down, but she had not known what to do about it. Some of the rubbish might even be quite useful, like lots of flotsam washed up on the shore, useful at another time, in another place. It had made her the shape she was and now her shape had changed to something that was much more her own.

The iceberg looked out towards the wider waters and wondered if it was time to risk herself out there. She knew the sun that warmed her would still be shining down on her, and that it did not only shine on the sheltered bay. She still needed the sun and the wind and the rain in order to be fully aware of living, experiencing, and growing.

She felt the breeze stirring around her, tugging gently at her, and she let herself go, with new hope and courage, out into the wider waters.