Unpacking the Truth About Trauma
A Common Inquiry
“What exactly do you do again?” Footnotes specializes in complex trauma and sexual abuse, as well as marital discord while working with high level professionals whose mental health impacts the community of Mankato. That is a long answer!
A common response is “Wow, that sounds really hard.” Trauma work IS hard. And it can be complex. However, when someone understands the depths of trauma and knows that everyone is ultimately in God’s hands, it’s not as hard as one might think.
The Role of a Trauma Therapist
Traumatology is a young and growing field. There is so much yet to learn about how people release trauma and where and why people get stuck in their efforts. This work is a journey through the wilderness that we vaguely call ‘healing.’
As therapists, we need to recognize and be humble enough to know that whoever is taking the risk to let someone into these parts of themselves are the experts. They are experts on themselves and they do what they do for reasons that they may not understand - but make perfect sense to how and what they survived. These conversations are hard, sacred, and tender. Not knowing the answer to everything is okay. Be humble.
Unpacking the Truth About Trauma
While trauma is predictable, it is also nuanced. Every single person is unique, which makes unpacking the truth complicated. If mental health providers stop at skill development, stabilization, and safety work, or if they think that trauma will work itself out if the client simply tells the details of what happened, a giant piece of the puzzle is missing. There is a place for skills and stability, and accurate safety planning, however that is just the beginning.
We need providers who are willing and knowledgeable in working with the sensations that feel like death in the skin. If people cannot talk to their therapist about the desire to die and why they feel that way, who can they talk to? More than safety planning, most people need to know that it’s not crazy to feel what they feel. They are not crazy to know what they know. Trauma therapy should be a safe space for people to explore the parts of themselves that hold the sensations that feel like death. Those internal parts that whisper or shout: “If it gets to be too much…I can make it all stop. At any cost. Through any means.” Though through destructive means, those parts can and will make the pain stop. And that’s not crazy. Those are the effects of trauma. It’s crazy making but that doesn’t mean it is crazy.
Healing is Very Real
Amanda initially came into the field of trauma centric mental health therapy as a skeptic. Thinking that maybe one can have a good life and not mess up your kids and family too badly if you work at it hard enough. However, nothing can actually take away the pain that is inside. For those who embody active PTSD symptomology the belief can easily be that “Real healing doesn’t actually exist”. Footnotes is here to say that’s simply untrue and Amanda loves telling the story about how wrong she was! Healing is very real.
The clients who serve as leaders, business owners, pastors, doctors, therapists, and executives often will say: “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life.” While doing the work may be the hardest thing one can face, the option to be free really does exist.
As therapists, we have the most amazing job on the planet. We get to help incredible, ordinary people who begin trapped with a brain, body, and spirit which don’t know how to work well together. They are to varying degrees cut off, separated; shattered and scattered. This is what trauma does to people. Trauma therapists get to help people feel seen and heard while standing against the status quo of what they believed their limitations are. This work allows people to take back and fully reenter living in their lives.
Survivors work to reclaim living in the light of God’s true design in humans; stepping out one foot at a time from being physiologically enmeshed in the terror of the past. People end up to be owned or partially owned by the beliefs formed in the survival of the darkness of what trauma has taught them to believe to be true about themselves, the Lord, and their world.
We are not intended to STAY in the terror of the trauma once the event is passed. However, it is very difficult for the body and brain to be allowed to release the terror of then in the now. If we can give now what we needed then, we can heal then from the position of now.
Cheers to you!
-Amanda Gerdts & Amelia Pfund
“But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” - 1 Peter 2:9
To learn more about trauma and its effects, visit Mind.org.uk
