In trauma-focused therapy, understanding and managing trauma symptoms is paramount. However, explaining trauma often feels like trying to illustrate the concept of colour to someone who has never seen it.
To demystify this, let’s picture our mind as a garden and our emotional state as the ever-changing weather that affects this garden.
Trauma’s Mark: The Altered Terrain of Our Mind-Garden
Visualizing the mind as a garden provides an enlightening perspective on trauma’s lasting effect. Ideally, every plant in our garden would flourish harmoniously, creating an enchanting landscape. However, when trauma, particularly childhood trauma, occurs, it is like certain garden sections become overgrown, thorny, and tangled with weeds. These unattended patches harbour distressing memories and emotions, echoing through our daily life, often surfacing as symptoms of depression, anxiety, or a lingering sense of danger.
These overgrown areas may initially seem distant and disconnected from our usual mental pathways, but their presence is subtly felt. Like the eerie rustling of wild foliage in the wind, their influence is an unidentifiable unease that stirs within us, a haunting whisper of their existence.
The Split Self: A Survival Mechanism in the Face of Trauma
Childhood trauma often triggers a psychological mechanism known as the ‘Split Self‘. Our mind-garden divides itself into a well-maintained, presentable section that the world sees, while the tangled, thorny patches—the ‘Hidden Self’—remain out of sight.
This division initially serves as a protective adaptation but can become a chronic stress source. The ‘Everyday Self’ continues with life, while the ‘Hidden Self’ remains tethered to the past, always on high alert. Even after the trauma is over, this division persists, with the ‘Hidden Self’ responding to triggers as if the trauma were still happening.
Emotional Turmoil: Trauma and Our Inner Weather
Now, let’s consider our emotional state as a weather system influencing our mind-garden. Bright, sunny days reflect feelings of happiness and peace, while stormy conditions symbolize anxiety, sadness, or anger.
Trauma can trigger abrupt, unpredictable storms—emotional upheavals that throw us off balance. Part of our healing journey involves understanding these storms and learning to weather them. It’s crucial to remember that storms, disruptive as they are, are a natural part of any weather system, including our emotional one. They are not signs of a broken system but signals of past traumas lingering in our present.
Restoring Balance: The Role of Therapy
Healing from trauma doesn’t mean forcefully removing the tangled patches in our garden or trying to hide them. It involves acknowledging, understanding, and tending to these often neglected areas. These parts of our inner garden, although wild, are pieces of ourselves carrying our painful memories and emotions. Their integration is essential to our journey towards feeling complete and safe again.
Therapy plays a pivotal role in this healing process. It provides a safe space to explore and acknowledge these tangled manifestations of our trauma. Through therapy, we learn to interpret our responses to trauma not as threats, but as messages from parts of us affected by past traumas.
In essence, therapy helps rebalance our mind-garden, ensuring each aspect of our experience has its rightful place. It’s not about eliminating the thorns and weeds but about learning to live with them, understanding their roots, and nurturing the entire garden back to health.
Furthermore, therapy encourages a transformative shift in our relationship with ourselves. By fostering curiosity about our responses to trauma and understanding our mind-garden’s complexities, we can transition from self-judgment to self-compassion. This journey of acceptance helps restore balance in our inner garden, aiding our progress towards healing, growth, and inner peace.
Until next time,
Zahra
