You likely have had times in therapy where you feel resistant or ambivalent about working on a particular part of your story, or about moving into deeper work in general. Maybe you’re facing that now.
And you think something along the lines of, “I just need to make myself do it.”
Healing from childhood trauma should never feel forced. Whether that sense of force is internal or external.
When it’s forced, that usually comes with a push through kind of energy. But healing isn’t about pushing through. You’ve done that already.
When you were exhausted from hearing your parents fight all night but still needed to go to school the next day, you pushed through. When you were in so much emotional pain on the inside but couldn’t let anyone know it, you pushed through. Every time you help manage your mother’s emotions even though it was overwhelming, you pushed through.
You know how to push through. But healing from the effects of your childhood trauma isn’t about that.
When we take a push through approach, that’s essentially a trauma repetition. I want to pause here and say that if you’re doing that now or have done it in the past, that doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong.
I certainly had times in therapy where that’s what made sense to me to do. I’d think, I need to just do it and get it over with. I need to just make myself do this. That’s sometimes the instinct. And it’s not a bad instinct. It just doesn’t serve us well in recovery.
Are there times where it feels like you’re diving off a cliff as you say to your therapist, “There’s a part of my story that keeps coming up…”, and you have to just get the words out of your mouth? 100% yes. But I think there’s a way to move into that healing work rather than just push through.
So, what’s the difference? Let’s start by looking at the push through energy.
When you push through, you just put your head down and do it. It often will have an energy of intensity. And that usually is accompanied by some level of being shut down. Just like when you were a child.
When you push through, there’s usually some level of disconnection from yourself. You aren’t available to connect to your body and your emotions. Just like when you were a child.
As a child, you likely pushed through in isolation – no one really knew what was happening inside of you. That’s usually what happens when you apply the push through energy in therapy too. You may talk about what happened to you, but not in a way that invites others into the experience with you.
The push through energy often has a kind of agenda. Maybe the agenda is to get it overwith, or to never have to talk about it again, or to fix a problem. But the energy around it is constricted.
There’s a different energy when we approach deeper healing as moving into rather than pushing through. It’s intentional, slower and there’s a sense of steadiness to it.
The energy of moving into opens you up for connection, both with yourself and others. You’re present to what’s happening for you and for what you need. You’re available to give the younger parts of you what you didn’t get as a child.
And it opens you up to inviting someone to witness your experience and hold it alongside you. Your therapist will likely be the first person to do this, but it often opens you up to letting other safe people support you. That alone can be healing because you have experiences that you didn’t have as a child.
Moving into deeper healing allows space for your felt experience. You’re available to know, in an embodied way, what it was like for you as a child. Rather than only acknowledging the information about what happened, moving into leaves room for you to feel what’s happening for you emotionally and in your body. You then can deeply connect with what your experience was like as a child.
Rather than having an agenda, moving into leaves room for things to unfold. You don’t try to control the outcome but stay with the process as it unfolds. It may not go as fast as you want, you may get clarity that you weren’t expecting which can be unsettling. Letting things unfold can be hard to do when your survival instinct is to have as much control as possible. But it’s also what makes room for healing.
Moving into facilitates being present. When you experienced trauma as a child, it wasn’t safe to be present. You needed to be separated from your experience. You’re an adult now, in recovery, with internal and external resources you didn’t have as a child. That means you no longer need to be separated from your experience. You can be fully present in the here and now, which is part of what makes it possible to be with your past experience so fully.
Connecting with your trauma in an intentional, connected way reminds you of what’s true today. That you’re no longer back in time in an awful situation. That you’re in a context now where it’s safe to talk through and connect with your experiences.
This distinction between moving into and pushing through isn’t black and white. There’s no line of demarcation that says, now I’m entering the moving into part of things.
It’s more about paying attention to your energy as you move into deeper healing. So, next time you’re in one of those I feel like I’m jumping off a cliff moments, pause. Do you feel the intense energy of pushing through, or the more steady energy of moving into?
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash