Trauma comes into our office in a variety of ways.  Clients sometimes state this as their presenting issue – either a recent or past trauma that is impacting their lives.  It may have been physical, sexual, emotional, or verbal.  It also comes from family dynamics and attitudes.  It may be overt or covert and subtle.  More often than not, I have seen trauma appear from underneath the presenting issues – the Self of the client (or parts) may have brought the client to therapy, while other parts work hard to keep the exiles buried.

We explore their story.  Gather the context of their upbringing and work with the presenting issue and parts related to the here-and-now struggles.  We (and our clients) will uncover the layers to get to the root of their struggles – the trauma.

Anything brought into therapy may be a trailhead – we follow the lead of our client’s system.

It helps some clients to have some psychoeducation about trauma and its impact on their inner sense of well-being, sense of safety, relationships, and ability to perform normal activities of daily living.  Many clients may say – that’s just how it was, or others had it worse.  I then introduce the possibility of minimizing parts.

An important tip:  Don’t use triggering words – follow their lead and gently lead them.  It may be impactful to hear the validation.  But it takes time to get used to words like addiction, abuse, rape, etc.  Janina Fisher shares in  Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors:  Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation, “When we start to understand traumatic memory from a neurobiological perspective, client memories do not have to be avoided or discharged. 

We simply have to help clients develop a different relationship with their explicit and implicit memories. Acknowledging the trauma or implicit triggered memories is never unsafe, especially when we allude to the ‘bad things that happened’ in a more general way without vivifying the details of them or using triggering language, such as ‘rape,’ ‘incest,’ or ‘penetration’…This matter-of-fact acknowledgment of the past often calms the traumatized nervous system rather than activating it:  it conveys, ‘Someone knows how it was.’”

If you want to dive deeper into treating trauma with IFS, join us for Understanding and Treating Trauma with IFS at Bareiter Counseling Center in Charlotte, NC.

By Carol J. Hollandsworth

MA, LCMHCS, LMFT, AAMFT Approved Supervisor

Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Supervisor (NC, SC)

Licensed Marriage and Family Therapy (NC, SC), Level III Certified IFS Therapist