I see myself sitting in my therapist’s office. Arms crossed over my chest. Baseball cap pulled down almost all the way over my eyes. I was 13 years old. Except I wasn’t—I was in my 30s. But that’s how I showed up for a period of time, week after week. Angry. I even stormed out early a time or two. And almost every week, I drove home listening to angry Alanis Morrisette music really loudly.
I don’t remember what I worked on in those sessions, but I don’t think the content of the work was nearly as important as how I showed up. I showed up as an angry teenager.
You know why that was important? Because I never did that as a kid. I was good and perfect, or strove to be. I remember one time (I think I was actually 13) telling my mother to go away, and she looked so despondent and crestfallen that I never did that kind of thing again. Not once. Because I knew by then that my job was to take care of her and make sure she was OK.
So, when I was able to be angry with my therapist (who happened to be old enough to be my mother, though I think it would’ve been equally as powerful even if she wasn’t), it was so healing for me. I never went through the developmental teenage experience of being my own person, having my feelings, and expressing them freely.
Being able to show up as that angry teenager—to work out what I needed to in the way that I needed to—was a crucial part of my healing. And I think the same is true for most people.
Most children from unhealthy family systems don’t have the opportunity to fully develop emotionally. Pia Mellody referred to this as Developmental Immaturity. When there isn’t a solid foundation of safe attunement and connection, there isn’t a context in which to explore and become who we are. We don’t have the opportunity to figure things out, discover our wants, experience having our needs met—or learn how to ask for them. We don’t learn boundaries or how to own our reality appropriately. There’s no safe place from which to launch—to become a separate individual person with a core sense of value and worth from which we can explore the world, ourselves, and relationships.
This means recovery isn’t about fixing something that broke. It’s about experiencing something that was never started in the first place. Being seen and understood. Having someone help you name your emotions and hold them safely. Feeling felt by another person. The experience of being guided. Of allowing yourself to need someone who is genuinely caring for you.
In long-term therapy, you have the opportunity to have those developmental experiences—to offer that to your younger self and experience it in your relationship with your therapist. A safe therapeutic connection is very, very healing and provides a scaffolding of sorts as you do the difficult work of healing.
This scaffolding is the safe, secure attachment with your therapist—and other trusted people—that you didn’t have as a child. Through secure attachment, children learn that they have an inherent sense of worth and value, that they’re worth protecting, and that they can ask for what they need and want. They learn that it’s OK to have and express emotions. They learn that it’s OK to be a fallible human.
That scaffolding provides a sense of grounded safety—a sense of being guided and held. You’re no longer floating along, unanchored, trying to figure out life and relationships on your own. It becomes a home base from which to explore, connect with your pain, do your healing work, and show up in the world differently.
Built into that scaffolding is trust—with yourself, your therapist, and the healing process itself—and it develops simultaneously across all three. There’s also a growing comfort with connecting with the reality of your story. Not “mom was a heavy sleeper” but “mom was passed out on the sofa.” You build a growing capacity to feel and express emotions that maybe never had a safe place to land before.
What I’ve noticed—in myself and in clients—is that trust doesn’t arrive all at once. It accumulates. And even once it’s established, it gets stretched again as you go deeper into different parts of the work: parts work, new boundaries, harder pieces of your story. That’s not a sign something is wrong. That’s the process working.
Part of what that trust makes room for is attachment—allowing yourself to actually need your therapist. I remember having an unspoken rule that I would only reach out to my therapist between sessions occasionally (and it took time before I’d even let myself consider that option!). And then one day she said, “I got your messages” (messages, plural). I hadn’t remembered reaching out twice and it freaked me out. But eventually I settled into the fact that I was appropriately attached to her, and that was really healing for me.
You may worry at some point that you’re becoming too dependent on therapy or your therapist. A skilled clinician holds space for healthy attachment without fostering unhealthy dependence. There’s a difference, and a good therapist knows it.
As you stay steady in your work, you start to notice things shifting—not all at once, but over time. There’s a slogan in 12-step programs: “It works if you work it.” You stay consistent in your healing and start to notice things like:
- You no longer snap at your kids as much as you used to
- When you hit a shame spiral, you don’t stay in it as long
- You have a growing awareness of when you’re activated, what’s going on, and what might be helpful in that moment
- You start setting and holding boundaries
- You’re able to say no
- Your critical voice may get a little quieter
None of these changes happen simply because you figured something out intellectually. They happen because something in you is shifting and growing.
As a client, I felt truly loved by my therapist. Her boundaries were always appropriate, but the care was real. I felt like I mattered to her—all of me, not just my trauma story. She was safe to be at my most vulnerable with, whether that was the deepest shame, heart-breaking grief, or being really pissed off at her.
And that’s how I show up as a therapist. I want my clients to feel felt by me. I want them to know that they truly matter to me—that our relationship is real and my care for them is real. I show up as myself. I’m the same person in my office as I am in the rest of my life, with appropriate boundaries in place.
That experience of leaning into connection and attunement with trusted people has been life-changing. It allowed me the freedom to experience not only emotional healing, but emotional development as well. This kind of healing—relational, deep, and developmental—is available to you. And that is my hope for you as you step into deeper work around the impact of childhood trauma.
Photo by Evy Prentice on Unsplash