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Working with a Psychiatrist
It’s important for people to realize that not every mental health professional knows what we are talking about here and that the system, the mainstream system of psychiatry or psychology, is that there is something wrong with you and I need to fix you. And if you go to a doctor who labels you with one of these DSM diagnoses, I joke about it and I say, the basic premise of mental health is that I’m a perfectly normal person, you’re screwed up, and by the time you get through with treatment with me, you’re gonna be just as normal as me. That’s a very different attitude than dealing with trauma.
Dealing with trauma is that all of us have very bad experiences. Most of us are survivors of one thing or another, some much worse than others. And so we have done what we can do to deal with this stuff and that’s as far as we have come. And so we may need help to get to know ourselves better and to move further. But nobody is the expert outside of ourselves other than the person who can serve as our guide, who can help us to discover what works for us. But there are no prescriptions.
Experimenting with Treatment
I wrote my book to give people hope and to say, yes, you feel terrible and you feel defective, but if you do that or that or that or that, you will feel better. So I see it very much as my job to really find out all the different ways that people can move out of their traumatic states. And what’s important here is that one size doesn’t fit all — different people need very different things.
What you need to get unstuck depends to some degree on when the trauma occurred and how old you were when it happened. If you are a grown up person who has had a relatively predictable and stable life and you get raped or assaulted, then you have this single incident trauma. And single incident trauma responds extraordinarily well to something like EMDR, appropriate brainspotting, and some of these other sort of energy-based techniques. In our study that we did on EMDR, 82% of people who had no prior trauma who were adults when they got traumatized were cured by the end of the study — a fantastically effective study.
What complicates matters is if you grew up in a violent or alcoholic household. Then your whole identity is sort of adjusted to dealing with that trauma and you probably need much deeper work on affect regulation. And in that case, probably just dealing with the memory is not good enough — you really need to deal with a body that you can feel safe in. It’s very important to really be aware that these reactions emanate from your body and that in order to deal with it, you need to do something to help your body to feel safe and calm. And then there’s a number of different options, depending on where you live and what’s available to you. For example, we study yoga and we practice yoga, and I’m very active in the yoga community. I meet people all the time who can’t stand yoga and yoga doesn’t do them any good. I go, “Okay, it doesn’t work for you. Maybe for you to get in touch with your body that feels safe, maybe boxing lessons might be more helpful to you or martial arts or capoeira or maybe even getting body work with a very good cranial sacral person who can help your body to relax and to be calm.” I would oftentimes say that maybe just getting really good massage therapy might be a very good beginning so you can begin to get a sense of, “oh, this is what my body feels like when I feel safe.” I always say everything is an experiment in life, and healing from trauma is an experiment. And so what worked for my last patient very well may not work for you.